TL;DR
- The wellness industry is worth over $6 trillion globally and growing – and a lot of that growth is funded by you
- Not all wellness spending is equal: some of it genuinely supports your health, some of it is just expensive habit, and some of it is pure status
- The phrase “investing in yourself” has been repurposed to justify almost anything
- Here’s how to tell the difference
Health is wealth has become one of those phrases that sounds so reasonable, that nobody really stops to question it and that’s exactly why the wellness industry loves it.
What nobody mentions when they post that phrase under a photo of a £28 bag of collagen is that the wellness industry is worth over $6 trillion globally. It didn’t get that big by selling you things you actually needed, it got that big by convincing you that looking after yourself requires purchasing something, and that if you’re not purchasing, you’re not really trying.
The result is a generation of women who feel genuinely virtuous spending £200 a month on supplements, gym memberships, and infrared sauna sessions.
The industry that sold you a problem first
The wellness industry has a playbook, and it starts long before you open your wallet.
First, it tells you that modern life is toxic. Your sleep is disrupted, your cortisol is through the roof, your gut is compromised. Then it tells you that your body, left to its own devices, isn’t quite enough. Then it sells you the solution.
The genius of it is that the problem is never fully solved. You fix your sleep, but now your collagen needs attention. You sort your collagen, but have you thought about your lymphatic drainage? The goalposts are always moving, because a customer who has everything they need is a customer who stops buying.
This isn’t to say that looking after your health doesn’t matter because it obviously does. But there’s a meaningful difference between genuine self-care and an industry that has rebranded spending as a moral act.
Not all wellness spend is the same
Now we don’t suggest the answer is to cancel your gym membership and declare yourself cured. Some wellness spending genuinely matters, but some of it is expensive habit… And some of it is just status with a carrot juice in its hand.
It’s 100% worth knowing which category you’re in.
The genuinely useful stuff is the spending that has a measurable, meaningful impact on how you feel and function: a gym membership you actually use, a therapy session that you leave feeling lighter, medication, physio, a decent pair of running shoes. This spending has a clear purpose and a clear return. Nobody is telling you to cut it.
The expensive habit is the category most of us live in without realising. The supplements you ordered six months ago that you take sometimes (when you remember), the yoga studio membership that costs £90 a month but you haven’t been since February, the monthly wellness box that you don’t not like, but can’t really explain why you need it. These aren’t bad purchases, they’ve just become automatic, which means you’ve never actually decided whether they’re worth it.
The status spending is the most interesting category, because it often genuinely looks like self-care. The premium gym in the nice part of town, chosen over the functional one that costs half as much. The supplements that come in matte packaging with a sans-serif font. The retreat that costs more than some people’s monthly salary. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but it’s worth being honest: some of it is less about how you feel and more about who you want to be seen as.
The wellness industry understood something important early on: aspiration sells better than need. That’s why the marketing always features a certain kind of woman in a certain kind of life.
“Investing in yourself” deserves more scrutiny than it gets
This phrase has had a lot of impact over the last decade. It started out meaning education, skills, things that compound over time. Somewhere along the way it got stretched to cover expensive skincare, cold plunge memberships, and £300 functional medicine appointments.
To be clear: some of those things might genuinely be worth it for you and the issue isn’t the spending itself, it’s the framing that makes it unchallengeable. When a purchase is positioned as an investment in yourself, questioning it starts to feel like self-sabotage.
An actual investment gives you a return, so it’s worth asking, honestly, what return you’re getting and whether a different use of that money might give you a bigger one.
What good wellness spending actually looks like
The Financielle view on spending has always been the same: spend intentionally, on things that genuinely matter to you. That applies here too.
Before your next wellness purchase, it’s worth pausing on a few things:
- Do I actually use this, or do I just feel better having bought it?
- Is this solving something real, or am I paying to feel like I’m solving something?
- Did I choose this, or did an algorithm choose it for me?
- What would I do with this money if “wellness” wasn’t a category?
The goal isn’t to spend nothing on your health, the goal is to spend in a way that’s actually aligned with what matters to you, rather than what a very well-funded industry has convinced you should matter to you.
The content produced by Financielle is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.