Lily 0:06

Today we're talking about something that I feel like is everywhere right now. Wellness culture. And the best question we're asking is, is that the right response to the pandemic? Did COVID basically purple charge the school plan? Or was wellness already becoming less enormous cultural force and COVID disposed? Let's get into all of that and more.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Welcome to the Gen XD Exchange. I'm Chris Perkins, Gen X Parent, now 50 something empty next up.

Lily 0:33

And I'm Lily Perkins, Gen Z Career Explorer. We swap insights on career choices, work, and life in general. So whether you're a Gen X parent trying to figure out midlife challenges, or a Gen Z young professional or student figuring out adulthood, you're in the right place. Okay, so I want to start off this episode with something basic because I think people use wellness to mean really different things nowadays. Dad, when you hear wellness culture, what comes to mind? What does it mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 1:02

The first thing that comes to mind is retreats. I think of wellness culture as being different to fitness and health. So it's meditation, breathing, exercises, walking barefoot on the grass, all of that kind of stuff. Uh I think as different to health and fitness. Um what comes to mind for you?

Lily 1:29

I think it seems to be an ever-changing kind of concept and it exists on a bit of a spectrum. So you see a lot online about the more extreme end of things where you've got, you know, the green juices, the 5 a.m. runs, but also the culture I grew up with, like you've talked about there, with mindfulness, apps, therapy being normalized, talking about mental health openly. And that was just a part of my teenage years, which I think is pretty fortunate. And I even had a mindfulness class in school at one point. Really? Yeah. Wow. So that was good. Just a little period. I think it was like a lunchtime club, or maybe it was like a period a week or something. But that was set up by one of my lovely maths teachers.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Right. Which is a really significant shift because when I was at school, like therapy certainly wasn't as mainstream as it is now. It was only really something if you were seriously ill. And obviously the whole mental health conversation has really only come to the fore, probably with your generation primarily, or or maybe the millennials to a certain extent, but it wasn't really a a thing when I was certainly when I was in my teenage years and as a young adult.

Lily 2:34

Yeah, which we're gonna talk about a lot more later on, but before we go any further, it's worth just putting some numbers out there about how big this actually is. We like some stats on here. So the global wellness industry, and this is across everything fitness, mental health, nutrition, sleep technology, spa, and beauty was valued at around $5.6 trillion in 2022. Wow. And projections have it hitting close to $8.5 trillion by 2027.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Next year, $8.5 trillion. But I guess if you're including fitness, beauty, spa industry stuff, yeah, that but that's huge. Wow. So yeah, wellness contour isn't just one thing anymore. It's huge. It sounds like it's this kind of umbrella term. So physical wellness, mental wellness, spiritual wellness, financial wellness, social wellness, your wellness in in everything. Basically a lens for looking at your entire life by the sounds of it, and making an improvement wherever you can. I'd argue that expansion of what wellness covers is relatively new. Because when I was in my twenties, wellness, I'm not even sure, was uh a a thing. I mean, fitness certainly was. It meant going to the gym, maybe taking vitamins or supplements.

Lily 3:54

I think the psychological in a bunker retreats and things.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah, the psychological and emotional dimension weren't really part of the mainstream conversation.

Lily 4:02

Yeah, so then let's talk about where all of this started shifting because I think that's important before we get into the effects of COVID. So I put a real turning point around the mid-2010s. So, you know, social media starts connecting wellness content to a mass audience. And around that time, I was just coming onto social media, and I remember already being bombarded with fitness content. You would see these healthy quote unquote versions of dessert recipes, which let's be real, were minging, all these home workouts that you could do. What do you remember from that kind of time? Is that when you maybe saw the spikes in the whole yoga retreat, wellness retreat thing?

SPEAKER_01 4:41

So pre-COVID, yeah. I guess so I've never really been a big social media user. I I wasn't at that time, but I think certainly health and fitness was more prominent. Probably at the time I started doing triathlons when I was 39. Triathlon was like the new marathon. So people have been doing marathons sort of since the 70s, and then it was all of that kind of stuff. But I think, I mean, I could remember grandma doing yoga in the 70s, but yoga became much more mainstream, and it probably was social media that played a big role in that, making it more accessible, maybe making it more aspirational. Pilates, all of that kind of stuff. I don't remember that growing up. So all these different forms of health, fitness, well-being, reiki, acupuncture, smoothies, yeah, I guess all of that's coming in, certainly from post-millennium and yeah, I guess into the 2010s.

Lily 5:40

And it was all very aestheticised. It was about how good that you look doing your yoga and making your smoothies and how nice your smoothies looked and all the rest of it. And then even if you think about that introduction of like your Garmin and Apple Watch and Fitbit devices, all that kind of thing. Yep. And then on the Gen Z side, I'd say the mental health conversation really started entering the mainstream culture for us like 2015, 2016, maybe I remember. That's when I think the conversation started happening in schools too, which was good. Yeah. And that maps onto the rise of smartphones and social media, which is when we saw increasing rates of anxiety and depression in young people. So by the time COVID hit, we were already in a world that was at least starting to talk about mental health as being a part of wellness. And then that leads us into the COVID effect. So going back in time to March 2020, the world locks down. How was that experience for you, Dad? Because like so many people out there, we obviously had a bit of a rubbish time in 2020. I want to know how all of that changed, how you were thinking about your own health.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Yeah, I think everyone had a rubbish time from March 2020, but you're you're right about the downward trend around mental health prior to that. I remember reading uh Anxiety Generation, Jonathan Hayes' book. I think we talked about that in the social media episode. Yep. And he has all these graphs where you can see that downward trend in health and well-being and mental health from kind of 2010 as soon as sort of smartphones and social media arrived. I remember immediately before lockdown, I was still going to work. I was still commuting to London, and mum was saying, We're going to lock down. I'm like, no, we're not. You know, it's just like a flu bug.

Lily 7:21

Yeah. I actually Little Deginore.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Well, I actually resigned from my job then, and that date's kind of imprinted on my mind, 6th of March, 2020, thinking I'm going to start my own business as an employer brand consultant. And then two weeks later we locked down, and that was possibly the worst time in history to think about starting a recruitment-related business. So I had, I I didn't have a job. I had lots of time to think. And because I had been doing that long-distance commute for eight years at that point, that first month or two, I realized how exhausted I had been. You know, I had just been like running on fumes for ages, kind of tired and wired. And yeah, that was a real wake-up cause. I really need to be looking after myself a bit better. And obviously, there was all the sort of COVID stuff and the health risks going on at the time.

Lily 8:11

Yeah, definitely. And I think for Gen Z as well, the pandemic had a very specific and inconvenient life stage. Because a lot of us were teenagers or in our early 20s. Exams, yeah. You know, exams, school, uni, whatever. So the crisis for us wasn't as much about physical vulnerability, or you know, I don't think as many of us were as scared of getting ill necessarily, but it was more the fear of being isolated and losing out on formative experiences. Like if you were going into your first year of uni, freshers was off the table. You were worried about having your development as a young person being disrupted. So I think the wellness response for a lot of us was much more psychological and based on the kind of fear of missing out rather than the health side. Obviously, that doesn't go for people my age who were maybe dealing with you know chronic illness or whatever, but for the for the vast majority, I think that was the fear. Yeah. And the data backs us up. So during the pandemic, downloads of mental health apps increased by 200% globally in 2019.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

It could have been more, actually. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was more.

Lily 9:19

So Cam and Headspace, the Mindfulness Meditation apps both reported their biggest ever growth years, but also searches for things like how to build immunity, vitamin D, zinc supplements, that all absolutely skyrocketed.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Yeah, a 2021 survey found that 42% of adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, up from about 11% before the pandemic.

Lily 9:45

Yeah. So this is, you know, where the cultural conversation was really beginning and affecting everyone. And there was a real cultural shift that happened. But what I want to know is whether that shift, that conversation was genuinely helpful for people now, looking back on the pandemic, or whether it's gotten to the point where it's now been so commercialised and it's gotten maybe toxic.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Yeah, I think that could well be the case. Uh, you know, if we fast forward to present day, we're seeing the effects of this cultural shift present ac across the different generations.

Lily 10:19

Yeah, and as usual, social media hasn't helped anything. So coming back to the present day, if we're talking about Gen Z, I think I don't know if this was directly uh caused by the pandemic, but I feel like there's maybe some link somewhere when we think about therapy talk being really normalized. So boundaries, triggers, emotional regulation, nervous system regulation. This is genuinely part of how a lot of my peers talk about themselves. And I think there's a version of Gen Z wellness culture that can become quite internal, like everything is about your feelings, your traumas, your nervous system, your triggers. And for me, sometimes it feels like that level of self-focus and analysis is almost narcissistic, and like this approach doesn't necessarily make you more functional as a human being, it doesn't improve your health necessarily or make you more connected to other people. Whereas I think the Gen X approach did involve just getting on with things, which has its own value. I don't know how that rings true today. I don't know if that rings true today or not.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Yeah, I think you know, as a conditioning, just get on with it. We were brought up by the post-war generation, so the whole stiff up stiff upper lip thing. I think that's where a lot of the snowflake stuff came from. It was maybe Gen X's thinking young people should just pull themselves together. But I can remember my grandparents talking to me like that when I was a teenager, you know. I slouching around, doing nothing, get a proper job, all of that stuff. But there wasn't the focus on health. I I think the other big factor here is around body image, and we know that has been driven by social media. So perhaps the desire to be seen to be exercising, eating a good diet. I mean, it kind of started in the 80s with aerobics, but really, really came into its own, I think, with social media. Yeah. So as I said, you know, grandma was doing yoga in the 70s, but it became a big thing sort of late 90s into the 2000s, and it's just accelerated as a result of everything we've seen on the social channels.

Lily 12:26

Yeah, I think for Gen Z, we can experience the body issues, but then there's the mental health aspect of it as well, where it's like for grandma's generation, for example, body and body image and how you appear to others, kind of everything. And if there's mental health issues going on, there's less of a dialogue around that, and that like you say it's more pushing it down kind of thing. So then if we're looking at more recent years, thinking about Gen Z and mental health, uh 2023 survey found that Gen Z is the most likely generation to report having received mental health treatment, with around 37% saying they'd seen a therapist or counsellor compared to about 22% of boomers, and then Gen X sits somewhere in the middle of those two. So similar to CAM and all the meditation mindfulness apps, BetterHelp, which is an online therapy app, absolutely blew up during COVID, and therapy became something you could access from your bedroom, which in a lot of ways was stigma reducing for different generations, and you had a lot of new people accessing those tools.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Yeah, and I think in in some sense it was really amazing that that became available at scale at the time when we all needed it because everyone was going a bit stir crazy in in lockdown. Yeah.

Lily 13:42

It was like an entryway into it without having to actually enter a therapist's office and you know, deal with that stigma. And then you also have the TikTok and social media as a wellness base. And I find that the self-diagnosis culture on those platforms is quite concerning, um, especially in recent years, and I think that's kind of blew up during COVID too, people diagnosing themselves with ADHD, autism, BPD, complex trauma problems based on all these 30-second videos that they were seeing. And that can go two ways because of course sometimes it leads to someone getting real help, but then sometimes it leads to people my age maybe building an identity around a diagnosis that may or not be accurate or may or may not be something that they have.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Yeah, I was on a call yesterday actually, where uh someone shared that they had been diagnosed with ADHD, and there was probably like about eight people on the call. Two other people then jumped in and was like, Oh, I think I've got ADHD. I I'm not diagnosed, but I think I've got it too. And it's just because it is more it is better understood, there's more information out there, but that self-diagnosis thing, you know, it could be a bit of a concern.

Lily 14:50

A lot of the videos you see are literally just signs that you have ADHD, and it's like you don't like doing work, you feel tired, like very generalized assumptions.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Yeah, take this online quiz and it will tell you rather than getting a clinical diagnosis. And I think the other thing to factor in is that puts a huge strain on the healthcare system with people that want appointments for diagnosis, and if they get diagnosed, they need the support. And we know the NHS is kind of creaking at the seams, it can't handle these kind of volumes. And I think that the signs that people feel let down by the you know, whatever kind of support they got during the pandemic, they want to take matters into their own hands, maybe. So some people are able to access private healthcare, but for everyone else, it's kind of DIY, which is a bit dangerous.

Lily 15:39

If all you have access to is the online quiz and you are having doubts about your mental health or conditions that you may have, like you know, you're gonna take the online quiz. Yeah. And that leads me into the next thing that I wanted to talk about, which is, you know, the dark side of wellness and wellness culture. So starting off with the elephant in the room, money, as we've established, the wellness industry is worth trillions. And actually, a disproportionate amount of that is sold to and consumed by people who are already relatively privileged. So the people who need the most support actually, people living in poverty, people working multiple jobs, people without access to healthcare in some places, they're largely excluded from the wellness conversation.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Yeah, it's ironic, isn't it? You know, the people that that need it the most have the least access to it because almost all of the wellness culture things that you've mentioned are private or commercial enterprises. It's not something that's available on the NHS, or there aren't necessarily these kind of well-being programs provided for through local authorities or not-for-profit bodies. I think I think the thing that is um the things that genuinely improve well-being, so stable housing, food security, access to healthcare, safe working conditions, time to rest, those are all kind of systemic. If you look at kind of what's happening in the country at the moment, uh, we're not delivering on a lot of those things.

Lily 17:05

No.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

But wellness culture packages well-being as a personal choice, as a consumer product, you know, buy this and feel better. And the people that really need it aren't in a position to be able to do that. So I don't think we can say like a meditation app is useless. It serves a purpose, and I think a lot of people find them really helpful. But if someone's anxiety is caused by not being able to pay the rent, no amount of mindfulness is gonna fix that.

Lily 17:31

Yeah, you can't, you know, meditate your way out of these issues. And there's actually a term for this called wellness washing. So I'm glad you brought this up. And this is essentially where corporations will, you know, put a yoga room in the office and call that their new mental health initiative, or maybe they provide you with a free subscription to a mindfulness app, things like that, while the actual working conditions are still high stress, exploitative, people are still burnt out.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

I do see a lot of that. I have worked for some big organizations uh in recent years, certainly before and after the pandemic, and corporate wellness is definitely a thing. And I think the more cynical employees in the workforce would say that's being laid on to try and help us, you know, feel better so they can get more out of us. We can still work long hours, we can deal with the stress that we're under in terms of what um deliverables are. And certainly post-COVID, you know, HR in particular had to do a lot to support people's well-being and the move to working remotely and the isolation and everything that was caused by that. But in some cases, I think companies are thinking this is a cheaper alternative to actually addressing the workload issues or paying people more so they've got more money in their pockets to be able to choose how they look after their their well-being and their health and fitness.

Lily 18:58

And then you can also think about the whole wellness to pseudoscience pipeline, which I think is something that both of our generations have seen, although maybe in different forms.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yeah, absolutely. I think for Gen X, things like homeopathy, detox diets, the idea you could cleanse your liver with a juice fast. Uh a lot of that was harmless, but scientifically, like nothing to back it up. Some of it was actively harming people. You know, you could get into the whole anti-vax stuff, for example. Uh, there's some serious consequences if people follow some of the advice that's at the uh more extreme end of what's out there.

Lily 19:40

Yeah, and for Gen Z, a lot of stuff I've seen recently is like this whole gut health thing, people freaking out about seed oils and people online on TikTok shop or whatever selling supplements that they honestly have no idea what is actually in them or what they're selling. Selling or what they're selling, telling their followers to sack all these, you know, eight different pills and you'll feel so much better. And I think COVID made that worse because all of a sudden people were genuinely terrified. And the official messaging that we were getting was slow or inconsistent, and then all the wellness grifters online definitely got into that space and exploited people's fears and vulnerabilities. I think the booster immunity industry during COVID was crazy. You know, all these products making claims about COVID prevention that had no evidence, and then these were sold to people who were scared and had limited access to accurate information. Even I think there's like a anti-parasitic drug that people were buying in massive, massive stocks because they were, you know, they read online that that was gonna help stop them getting COVID. So it was all a bit nuts.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah, it it was, and it's crazy to think that was six years ago, the start of the pandemic. I think with hindsight, it revealed the way we were all living, regardless of which generation you're in. You know, it just wasn't sustainable. It was a massive global reset.

Lily 21:05

And you know, even when you got to that point in 2020 where you realize I'm absolutely shattered. Exhausted, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

You know, but I would don't think I was fully burnt out, but I was certainly on the way. So in a way, it prevented that burnout rates, mental health crisis, the the the cracks in the mental health system, it uh yeah, the cracks in the healthcare system, you know, it was at breaking point because of the strains uh placed upon it from COVID. And we were all kind of disconnected from community, from family, COVID exacerbated and exposed those pre-existing issues. And I think we are still recovering from that.

Lily 21:42

I think we've spoken about this before on some other kind of health related episodes, but pre pandemic there's definitely been this glorification of busyness and always having something on the go and having a project on all the time and having all these hobbies and all the rest of it. And the lockdowns for All their horror and all of the trauma and horrible stuff that we all endured, it did really force a lot of people to stop and ask themselves, is this actually how I want to live? Like, what have I been doing with my life up until this point? What's going on with my health? And I think that's where the wellness craze could has kind of come from. Because in its most genuine form, it was a real collective awakening for everyone. We had to literally stop and pause what we were doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

And I think for both Gen Z and Gen Gen X, the two generations have something to offer in terms of their differing approaches. Openness and self-awareness of Gen Z is a really good thing. I think it's advanced the discussion around mental health generally. Even some Gen X's will open up to those kind of conversations now, which previously never would have happened. And the pragmatism and some of the skepticism of Gen X in terms of like this can't be right, and if it looks too good to be through all of that kind of stuff. Yeah, to be sceptical uh about this. Um that's also good. So we're probably moving closer to what a genuinely healthy relationship with wellness looks like. But it does seem like very, very commercialised at the moment. You know, the willingness to ask for help, but pair it with does this actually work is a really sensible approach to take. But also, like, how am I getting on with my life rather than making wellness itself a full-time project or an obsession, or thinking some of those quick fixes will deal with the underlying issues that you might be experiencing.

Lily 23:38

Yeah, and I think one of the most important things COVID has highlighted has been community because one of the most consistent findings from all the post-COVID research, again, like what we spoke about in our Third Spaces episode, I think, is that social connections are one of the biggest predictors of well-being. And I think all the apps and supplements and all the workouts and all the things you can subscribe to and buy are probably just a nice add-on to that, you know, if they're well researched. But if you have a genuine community around you and people looking out for you, that can do a lot more for you than for your well-being than almost anything that you can buy. During the pandemic, that was, you know, obviously completely wrecked. And then I think the wellness obsession has partly been an attempt to fill that gap while trying to take control back and prepare for if we ever get ourselves in a situation like that again. God forbid, people want to feel like they're more, you know, ready for the next big health issue, which obviously isn't going to happen anytime soon because we're all at the end of our tether.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Oh, but you're absolutely right about community. And I think we might have mentioned this before. The biggest finding from the longest-running study on adult development identified that the greatest risk to someone's health is loneliness. Yeah. And people experiencing loneliness, uh, they identified the impact that had on their health was the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Yeah. So uh you know, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes all play uh a role, but not having strong relationships round about you is absolutely fundamental to being healthy. Um, and it was a big reset. So so we need to kind of get back to that.

Lily 25:22

That's kind of another reason why it's so important to not get so wrapped into the toxicity of wellness culture online as well, because in a weird way, that is very isolating. And I think being so focused on what other people are doing with their lives and that comparison trap of oh, I don't have, you know, the the most glowy skin ever, I need to take this supplement, I don't have washboard abs, I need to get myself into the gym. Getting into that kind of self-analysis and self-focus that I was talking on earlier, talking about earlier on, that is really isolating. So is actually potentially having the opposite effect of what we want.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Yeah, I think one of the things that comes to mind for me is the kind of enduring theme across all of this is that as human beings, we're inherently lazy. We will rather take a quick fix than actually do the work. Because even when I was I was growing up, there were ads in the Sunday supplements of like electrical things you could stick on your stomach and all of a sudden you'd have a six-pack and all sorts of things.

Lily 26:26

Oh, those are still going around on it.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

All all sorts of of gimmicks that we promise you the perfect body. But actually, there's some basic physics around you know how to get in good shape, but we would all rather take the shortcut than than do the work. I think what this has created is more awareness about generally what good health is like, and it's given people some more options, but the commercial element doesn't work for everyone. Uh I think as a society we need to think about how we can help people be healthier because there's a massive benefit there in terms of preventative medicine, which means there's less demand on the health service to fix things when things do go wrong, if people have got really chronic long-running health issues that they could have fixed if they just looked after themselves a bit better. So, yeah, you're absolutely right that things have dramatically moved on and COVID probably was a catalyst. But by and large, I think we're heading in the right direction, but you just need to take everything with a pinch of salt.

Lily 27:33

Yeah, I need to swing the pendulum the other way now from what we've seen online with all the Ozempic and all the madness. But we are getting there. I think the conversation is happening. So to wrap up, I would love to know one thing that you have taken away from this conversation or one thing that you've learned.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

I think the thing that has stood out for me is that this affects all of us. We have different approaches as I'm getting older. I'm thinking more about my health in terms of heading into old age. Yeah. And my sense for your generation is there is a bit more focus on maintaining your health in the midst of all of these cultural, social, political forces. You know, the world is a crazy place right now. And you're thinking, how am I going to get through the next like 70, 80 years? Because you could well live to 100, but you've got to deal with all of this stuff that's going on. So yeah, I think we do have more options and we have more information, but we need to apply it sensibly.

Lily 28:37

Yeah. I think for me it's been good to be reminded that strapping it back to basics is good. Like you mentioned, it's good to have options for how we can promote health and well-being. Like you know me, I love taking different kinds of classes and things to get my exercise. But sometimes having that all or nothing mindset of like, I either need to be doing a class every single day and taking eight different vitamins at a time and having this smoothie and this, you know, protein powder, whatever, that can be really unhelpful. The flip side of that is why don't I just focus on getting some steps in today and getting a good night's rest and not being so obsessed with doing the absolute most all the time, or also giving all these corporations my money when I could just go outside and touch some grass. So that's been good to go over.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

Good. For our next episode, we are building on this theme by looking at longevity. So Gen X are maybe a bit more focused on what old age is going to be like as we see some of the things that our parents are going through, and Gen Z a bit more focused on dealing with everything that's going on in the world and some of the longer-term health implications of some of the trends we're seeing at the moment. So we will dig into that. Thanks.

Lily 29:48

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and leave a review what's your thoughts. We love to hear them. And thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Gen XD Exchange.