But all of that was before COVID-19 disrupted our lives, introducing the entire world to a new fear of an unseen enemy few had ever imagined, and upending the economies of the world. That unprecedented global crisis permanently changed the world view and priorities of billions of people, accelerating many societal and technological trends already in motion before the virus hit, introducing a several new trends and interrupting multiple others. The most important question to those of us in the wellness industry is what will happen to our cause and our businesses now as the world recovers from the pandemic and adjusts to a new normal.
Will the wellness industry as we know it still exist in five years? Absolutely! In fact, we are about to experience a massive new wave of growth.
All the research the Mindbody team has done, all the data we have looked at, all of our conversations with industry thought leaders, and all of the rapid technological innovations we are participating in point to one fabulous truth. The next ten years will surely to produce more wellness industry growth than the past two decades combined—regardless of economic recession, social distancing, and virus-related fears. Thanks to COVID-19, wellness has become the largest and most important issue of our age. In the decade ahead, humanity will surely invest and participate in wellness pursuits more than ever before. COVID-19 has in fact ushered in a new wave of wellness, one that will create myriad business opportunities for innovative practitioners and entrepreneurs alike.
Here's the bad news: Many of the wellness business models that were flourishing in the years leading up to COVID-19 simply won't work anymore. The COVID-19 thunderbolt has suddenly and permanently shifted our reality, and as wellness entrepreneurs we must adapt to that new reality or our businesses will die.
To understand how to fully embrace the future, we must first travel back in time and perform a thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine traveling back in time 100 years. You are sitting with your great-grandmother at her kitchen table. What would you ask her? Imagine asking these questions:
“Great-grandma, how do you stay physically fit?”
“What tools do you use to manage stress and maintain peace of mind?”
“How do you nurture meaningful relationships?”
“What are you doing to expand your mind?”
“What are you doing to protect the environment?”
“Do you find your work fulfilling?”
“What gives your life a sense of purpose?”
What we're talking about, of course, is wellness—in fact, the Seven Dimensions of Wellness—and I'm not sure about your great-grandmother, but I'm confident mine would have responded with something like this:
“What's the point of these questions, dear? Your great-grandfather and I are trying to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. We lost one son to World War I a few years ago and the other to the Spanish Flu Pandemic. Our biggest concern now is their younger brother being sent off to another war, or our daughter dying in childbirth. What gives me a sense of purpose? Keeping my family alive! Now, you look hungry. Let me get you something to eat.”
The Seven Dimensions of Wellness
What we are talking about with our great-grandmother in that imaginary conversation are the dimensions of wellness, and these are the central pursuits that drive most people alive today:
Physical Well-being: Keeping our bodies healthy and working optimally for as many years as possible
Emotional Well-being: Having the capacity to cope with the stresses of life
Social Well-being: Staying connected with our community, having the ability to maintain meaningful relationships, and finding love
Intellectual Well-being: Keeping our minds sharp and continually enhancing our wisdom and knowledge of the world
Environmental Well-being: Living in clean, nontoxic surroundings and protecting our planet
Occupational Well-being: Finding work that feeds our mind, body, and soul
Spiritual Well-being: Discovering the purpose and meaning of our lives
These are the Seven Dimensions of Wellness (shown in Figure 2.1), and our questions around them confused our great-grandmother, because she did not live in a world where she could spend much time thinking about them.
Unless your great-grandmother was among society's elites, she would have been as baffled by the wellness conversation as mine. This is because for nearly all of the first 200,000 years of existence, people simply didn't have the time or resources for wellness. The vast majority of them existed at the basic subsistence level, meaning their daily lives revolved around securing food, shelter, and physical safety—on staying alive and producing children.
Figure 2.1 The Seven Dimensions of Wellness
For those whose lives could be cut short by childbirth, war, disease, or famine, the causes seemed supernatural and outside of their control. All of us alive today are the descendants of those who survived those incredibly difficult millennia, and their suffering became our strength. Our adaptive minds, our instinct to create family units, our ability to form functioning societies, and our robust immune systems are all the result of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
Despite those inherent strengths, until very recently average life expectancy was only a fraction of what it is today. The average life expectancy of a Roman citizen was 25 years. One thousand years later during the Middle Ages, life expectancy had reached only 33 years. A thousand years after that—around the time we are having that imaginary conversation with our great-grandmother—average life expectancy had reached only 55 years. Through all those eons of time the highest aspiration of nearly every human being was to survive long enough to produce successful offspring.
That is why people got married so young and why the marriage contract included the phrase “'til death do us part.” People needed to start producing children as teenagers in order to have a reasonable chance of raising those kids into adulthood before they died, and death wasn't that far away.
Who had the time to think about wellness in a life like that?
To understand the relevance of this to our lives today, we need to understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: The Force Driving Wellness Industry Growth
In 1943, noted American psychologist and researcher Abraham Maslow developed a theory of human behavior that gave us a concise model for understanding what motivates us. Most important, Maslow recognized that our most basic needs for survival and procreation must be met before we can address the higher-level needs most people aspire to in modern society. The relationship of these needs is most often represented by a stacked pyramid, as shown in Figure 2.2.
The way to understand this pyramid of needs is to start at the bottom. Without our basic needs met—food, water, shelter, and safety—people simply don't have the time to be motivated by love or a sense of belonging. Further, without a sense of love and belonging, most people are unable to develop a sense of esteem, the feeling of