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The Wellness Economy: How Self-Care Became a Profitable Obsession

Creatix / August 25, 2025

The Wellness Economy: How Self-Care Became a Profitable Obsession



Introduction: From Lifestyle to Lifestyle Obsession

Once upon a time, wellness was a niche for the few into yoga, meditation, and self improvement. Today, it’s a $5+ trillion global industry, and its products are no longer optional luxuries but daily habits. What began as healthy self-care has evolved into what some call the “Wellness Addiction Economy.” For many, wellness has stopped being a tool to improve life and has become the center of life itself, driven by apps, brands, and platforms that profit from the selfish obsession of continuously improving the self.

The Rise of Wellness as an Addiction

  • Wellness Apps Everywhere: Meditation and mindfulness apps like Calm, Headspace, and gamified journaling apps like Finch encourage streaks, daily check-ins, and notifications that resemble the behavioral hooks of social media. Miss a day, and users often feel guilt or anxiety—the very emotions these apps promised to heal.

  • Biohacking and Tracking: Wearables like Oura rings, Whoop bands, and FitBit trackers measure every heartbeat, breath, and REM cycle. For many of us, feeling that we're sleeping well is not enough; we must optimize every night of almost perfect sleep. After all, our mood will be dictated by our sleep score.

  • Supplements and “Health Stacks”: Companies push endless powders, nootropics, adaptogens, and collagen blends. The marketplace thrives on fear of missing out and falling behind in health. If you don’t take the latest elixir, you run the risk of missing out or alling behind in your health.

Wellness no longer ends at moderation; it thrives on perpetual dissatisfaction, the sense that you could always be sleeping deeper, eating cleaner, meditating longer, aging slower, breathing deeper, and optimizing endlessly until the day you die and you meet your creator.

How Companies and Us (Investors) Profit from the Wellness Addiction Economy

  1. Subscription Models: Wellness apps don’t just sell a product; they sell a daily ritual—$10 a month for guided meditation, $30 for personalized workouts, $100 for supplements that “optimize” your brain. The recurring revenue model depends on users feeling they can’t miss a single day.

  2. Gamification & Guilt: Streaks, badges, leaderboards, and constant nudges keep users hooked. Just as Instagram thrives on FOMO, wellness platforms thrive on FOWO—Fear of Wasting One’s Optimization.

  3. Status & Identity: Wellness is marketed as status signaling. Expensive yoga mats, boutique fitness classes, adaptogen lattes, and biohacking devices are ways to show you’re not just healthy, you have plenty and you’re enlightened.

  4. Algorithmic Growth: Social media fuels the cycle: influencers share morning routines, supplement stacks, “longevity hacks,” and polished self-care aesthetics that normalize obsession. Companies amplify this to create demand and increase shareholder value for us (the owners).

The Dark Side of Constant Optimization

While wellness tools can improve lives, addiction to them brings new forms of anxiety and dependency:

  • Orthorexia 2.0: Obsessive “clean eating” morphs into constant tracking, measuring, and moralizing food choices.

  • Wellness Guilt: Missing a workout or meditation becomes a source of stress, almost an existential crisis, undoing the purpose of wellness itself.

  • Financial Drain: Teens and adults alike are spending heavily on subscriptions, supplements, and self-care trends, often at the expense of actual healthcare, investing in marketable skills, getting out of debt, saving, and investing.

  • The Illusion of Biohacking: Companies promise that with enough tracking and optimization, you can hack biology, outsmart aging, stop disease, and create your very own Fountain of Youth. This is a seductive promise milking our conservation instincts, but a very unrealistic marketing campaign. 

Why We Can’t Look Away

The wellness addiction economy thrives because it appeals to our conservation instinct, our selfishness, and the most basic hereditary fear of all, the fear of death. We are the offspring of countless of generations of animals that feared physical pain and the prospects of death. That fear helped our ancestors survived and thus survived in us. We fear pain, decline, irrelevance, and ultimately death. Wrapped in positivity and self-care language, our wellness obsession feels virtuous rather than compulsive. In reality, it mirrors the mechanics of addiction and pathological personality disorders. We want to be forever young and are tempted by the promise of eternal health and immortality. Name one old billionaire fart on the Forbes list who would not trade happily most of his or her billions for being young and strong again.  

Wellness or Well-Less?

Wellness began as a rebellion against the deadly ignorance of our grandparents and parents. Now wellness risks becoming burnout culture in disguise. We are becoming hamsters spinning the self-improvement wheel. Companies will continue to profit and "milk us" as long as we confuse self-care with endless optimization.

True wellness may not come from another app, powder, or wearable. Perhaps it can come from realizing that we are irrationally afraid of suffering and dying. Suffering is the path to salvation. Death is the ultimate relief. We don't need to accelerate the process, but don’t need to be victims of it either. 

Here are several stocks and investment ideas to consider if you're looking to capitalize on the booming wellness economy—spanning fitness, digital health, personalized wellness services, and longevity-driven pharmaceuticals:

Top Stocks and Themes to Watch To Profit from Wellness

1. Fitness & Lifestyle Retailers

  • Life Time Group Holdings (LTH), Planet Fitness (PLNT), and SharkNinja (SN) are benefiting from Gen Z and millennial shifts toward wellness. Bank of America notes significant resilient spending on fitness, even amid broader economic softness.(Business Insider, Nasdaq)

  • Great adds for Fitness & Lifestyle Retailers (wellness-adjacent):

    • Lululemon (LULU) — athleisure leader; community/wellbeing programs + steady 2025 results. (Lululemon)

    • On Holding (ONON) — fast-growing performance running brand (shoes/apparel). (On Running Investors)

    • Deckers (DECK) — owner of HOKA; strong 2025 HOKA sales growth. (Deckers Brands)

    • DICK’S Sporting Goods (DKS) — experiential House of Sport rollout; also acquiring Foot Locker. (DICK'S Sporting Goods)

    • Academy Sports + Outdoors (ASO) — >300 stores and still expanding. (Academy Investors)

    • Xponential Fitness (XPOF) — multi-brand boutique studio franchisor (Pilates, barre, stretch, etc.). (Xponential Fitness, Inc., Xponential Fitness)

    • Skechers (SKX) — growing performance/fitness lines (running, walking, pickleball). (Skechers U.S.A., Inc.)

    • Nike (NKE) — core sports/fitness retail giant with 2025 updates. (Nike Investor Relations)

    • adidas (ADDYY) — global sportswear strength in 2025. (Adidas Group)

    • Garmin (GRMN) — fitness wearables retailer/manufacturer; fitness segment accelerating in 2025. (PR Newswire) 

2. Telehealth & Weight-Loss Platforms

  • Hims & Hers Health (HIMS) has surged in 2025—driven by GLP-1 weight-loss drug offerings like Wegovy and Zepbound. Its Q1 saw 111% sales growth and earnings up 300%, with over 2.4 million subscribers.(Investors.com)

  • LifeMD (LFMD), a telehealth provider specialized in GLP-1 weight-management, also reported a 49% YoY revenue jump in Q1 2025.(Wikipedia)

3. Health & Fitness Stocks in Growth Trajectory

  • Sprouts Farmers Market (SFM), Beyond Meat (BYND), Peloton (PTON), SunOpta (STKL), and Beachbody (BODI) are named as core players positioned to ride the expanding $11 trillion wellness market projected by 2034.(Nasdaq)

  • WW International (WW) continues to evolve into a digital-first health platform offering weight and behavior management solutions.(Nasdaq)

4. Longevity & Biohealth Innovators

  • Eli Lilly (LLY) and Novo Nordisk (NVO) lead the charge in GLP-1 therapeutics, with markets projecting global sales to jump from ~$50B in 2024 to over $150B by 2035. Lilly's future launch of a daily weight-loss pill adds further upside.(Kiplinger)

  • Other innovation plays include Guardant Health (liquid biopsies), Tempus AI (diagnostics/drug development), DexCom (wearable glucose monitors), iRhythm (cardiac monitoring), AstraZeneca, and AbbVie in oncology—particularly via ADCs (antibody–drug conjugates).(Kiplinger)

5. Broader Healthcare Momentum Picks

  • Medpace Holdings (MEDP) shows strong earnings and momentum with a "golden cross" technical signal and strong growth forecasts for 2025–2026.(Investors.com)

  • Tenet Healthcare (THC) and HCA Healthcare (HCA) both exhibit high Relative Strength (RS) ratings over 80, signaling potential for continued upside.(Investors.com)

  • IQVIA (IQV) is on investor watchlists, nearing a potential breakout zone, though still below the preferred RS threshold.(Investors.com)


Investment Insights

  • Diversification is key: Consider exposure across sectors—retail, digital health, pharmaceuticals, and services—to balance risk.

  • Watch technical indicators: Stocks like HIMS, MEDP, HCA, and Tenet show technical signals (buy zones, golden crosses, RS >80).

  • Be mindful of valuations: Giants like Lilly and Novo Nordisk sport premium multiples amid strong growth.(Wikipedia, Business Insider, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Kiplinger, Nasdaq, Wikipedia, Barron's, Investors.com, swingtradebot.com)

  • Long-term theme tailwinds: Demographic shifts, innovation in diagnostics and therapeutics, plus millennial-led spending trends all bolster sector resilience.

Now you know it. 

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