Wellness + Gathering: Wellness Comes for the Loneliness Epidemic
Beth McGroarty
Our social relationships are critical to our wellness and happiness, products for ‘me-time’ and digital wellness are giving way to engagement opportunities. “We are moving from solo to social…”, membership models where programming for group bonding is the focus. Lonely, remote work is not helping, people need places to be and the younger generation is ditching bars and booze. The psychedelics market is about to explode, friendship apps are replacing dating apps, creating curated dinner parties and group walks, etc. Social interaction is also impacting medicine, allowing patients with the same conditions to compare symptoms and outcomes. Social connection is the biggest missing pillar of health.
Remedy Place, a social wellness club, is launching five new locations in addition to offering their tech solutions for ‘Remedy Rooms’ in people’s homes.
Wellness + Travel: From Global Smorgasbord to Hyper-Indigenous
Elaine Glusac
Wellness travel will move on from cultural appropriation to culturally appropriate practices. Travel must become a force for good, authenticity, and learning from indigenous people how to care for and manage the land. This restores community pride in cultural practices.
Wellness + Work: Workplace Wellness Finally Starts to Mean Something
Cecelia Girr & Skyler Hubler
Employers are looking at a 4-day work week and extended vacation time in addition to limiting or banning engaging with work after hours, so workers can truly disconnect. Companies can choose to hold meetings in social wellness clubs, in saunas or in ice baths. Fostering truly meaningful wellness will be essential to the success of businesses.
Wellness + Beauty: From Clean to Biotech Beauty
Jessica Smith
From chemicals and synthetics being removed from our beauty products to now driving the industry forwards. Science is pushing the healthification of beauty. Alternate pharmaceutical substances, such as a molecule found in white blood cells for healing, focusing on underlying causes, rather than symptoms, and restoration of skin cells turning back time by 20 years. It was found that regularly moisturizing the skin can prevent conditions such as Alzheimer’s. We will even see shampoos that create waves or curls as you wash! Let’s leave behind misleading claims and embrace the biotech revolution!
Wellness + Cities: Urban Infrastructure Just Might Save Cities
Robbie Hammond & Omar Toro-Vaca
Wellness-focused infrastructure impulses growth in new businesses and enhances programming to serve people who can’t traditionally afford wellness activities for themselves. Singapore is now focussing its tourism efforts on wellness tourism far more than business. The Highline is now an old example, originally, the benefits were not spread equally. If you don’t have economic stability, you can’t have wellness. Any large projects, such as Thermae projects, need community engagement, and what can they do for the underserved communities? The successful cities are the ones that will have invested in wellness and this type of urban infrastructure that benefits the community.
Wellness + Weight: The Skinny on Brown Fat and Eliminating Obesity
Michael Roizen, MD
90 will be the new 40… but 90 won’t be old! Some have said that preventative care should stop at 75, however, longevity will be a good thing for the economy, if you can ‘reboot’ people at 90 back to 40. Ages 20-80 will replace 20-60 as the useful part of adult life. When looking at Alzheimer’s, a generic water pill showed a massive reduction in dementia. Many of the practices are inexpensive and available. The white fat to brown ratio is an important factor, white fat causes inflammation and cancer, if we could eliminate obesity the results would be incredible. Cold exposure for 11 minutes per week can have this effect, as can a medication shot, shown in sheep to increase brown fat and therefore longevity. Brown fat stimulation also regenerates skin.
Wellness + Government: The Case for Coming Together
Thierry Malleret
Preventative wellness saves money, as it always costs less than a cure. Funding regenerative agriculture and boosting the health span of any population. Wellness policies will become essential and empowering at a local level. Frome, in the UK, created opportunities for people to talk, with cafes and benches around the town inviting people to ‘sit here if you need someone to talk to’, they trained taxi drivers to talk to people about their mental health and saw a vast improvement in people’s mental wellness.
Wellness + Water: Blue, Hot and Wild
Jane Kitchen
There is a post-pandemic desire to connect more with the natural world, and being around water is beneficial to our well-being. An explosion of interest in ‘Wild Swimming’, especially in the UK, visiting lakes, streams, and the coastline to benefit from swimming in cold water. Cold water exposure helps with inflammation, depression, and many other factors. Wild Swimming groups have up to 100,000 members now, as interest grew when swimming pools closed during the pandemic. Hotels and resorts are tapping into this trend and offering programming including wild swimming and cold water plunges in nature.
Hot springs are also in demand as interest and investment are rising, attracting a multigenerational crowd. Hot springs yoga, thermal sound bathing, and music concerts are enjoyed from the comfort of a hot spring, where guests may also be covered in natural clay.
Wellness + Sports: New Business Models for Hospitality
Lisa Starr
The days of exercising in the hotel gym when traveling are changing, you will be able to go to your hotel and have a better workout there than you would at home. Sports-oriented hotels will offer state-of-the-art gyms, ‘with a hotel attached’. Health resorts in Europe, focusing on sports teams, will reserve space for hotel guests while on site. The biometric data from wearables will also come into play, as we can share information easily with healthcare providers. Recovery treatments that don’t require therapists are being marketed and utilized by sports teams, such as those available at Carillon Miami.
Wellness + Senses: Multisensory Integration
Ari Peralta
Our understanding of how our senses work is expanding, what we’re learning is that multisensory design plays a key role. We’re tired of being at our screens, we need to be in ‘feel’ mode, there is a sensory health crisis, we are all under a sensory overload, but seniors in our communities have a sensory underload. What can sound, light, color and touch do? When these senses are stimulated simultaneously, they have a combined effect. The sensory elements of nature are being brought indoors, and nature can be used to drive better behavior. The senses can distract us, but they can also comfort and guide us. Meditation can be deepened with VR, such as Brainbo, which uses color and sound to bring your mind away from what it’s stuck on. Lego has created mindful white noise for kids, incorporating their products. Light and sound can be used to treat dementia. As anyone who has recovered from disease knows, the atmosphere in which we are healing plays an important role in our experience. The new era of gamified wellness must incorporate multisensorial elements.
Wellness + Biohacking: The Wild, Wild West of Biohacking
Marc Cohen, MD
Science fiction meets medicine, but it’s now moving to the cutting edge of healthcare. In reality, our ancestors were master biohackers, working with yoga, circadian rhythms, and other ways to enhance their state. A time is coming when nanobots might clean and repair our inner world, while bots may also clean our air in the outer world. Can we steer technology toward a world of wellness? Biohacking is how the wellness industry has brought in the male wellness market.
Wellness + Faith: Having Faith in Business
Brian Grim, PhD
More companies are now tapping into their worker’s need for faith and religion. More than 84% of the world belongs to a religion, this is a powerful factor in retention and has a significant impact on success.
By Sara Jones, Editor
AraSpa Consulting 