When Wellness Became Another Competition

Scroll through Instagram or wander into any gym locker room these days, and you’ll notice something: wellness for men has turned into a full-blown tech sport. Sleep scores, heart-rate variability, glucose spikes, cold plunge streaks.. It’s like fantasy football, but for your body.

Somewhere along the line, “looking after yourself” stopped being about how you feel and started being about how many devices can prove you’re doing it right. If you’re not tracking your recovery, monitoring your stress, and optimising your testosterone levels, are you even trying?

This wasn’t always the case

For years, the wellness industry mostly ignored men. The spaces felt designed with someone else in mind - because they were. Spa-like studios, pastel mats, soft playlists. Most guys didn’t see themselves in that world, so they stayed out.

But the industry adapted. Us men like nothing better than a hunt, and to satisfy this evolutionary urge, it gave us targets and numbers to chase. 

Meditation was renamed “cognitive training.” 

Recovery turned into “optimisation.” 

And just like that, men engaged, because now it looked like performance.

But here’s the problem: in fixing the gap, we have built something else entirely. A new kind of pressure.

So we now have a sharp contrast in how men are treating their health. Some men don’t care until its absolutely necessary. Others now treat their health like a second job. Sleep isn’t just rest, it’s a score to maximise. Stress isn’t something to ease, it’s a cortisol metric to crush. Even relaxation has become competitive. We’ve turned wellness into another sport.

And that’s where the danger creeps in. Because if you’re chasing health the same way you chase work goals, you’re not actually resting. You’re just performing on a different stage.

Don’t get me wrong - data and tools can be great and they have their place. They help us notice things we’d otherwise ignore. But health isn’t meant to be gamified forever. At some point, wellness has to stop being about numbers and start being about how you feel when you put the numbers down.

What comes next

The next wave of men’s wellness isn’t about stacking more gadgets or pushing harder. Neither is it about going the other way by putting your head in the sand or rejecting the science. Instead, it’s about balance. 

It’s about remembering that health isn’t just data - it’s presence. It’s having the energy to show up for your family, the calm to switch off after work, and the space to reconnect with yourself without needing an app to validate it.

Maybe the bravest thing a man can do today isn’t to optimise another metric, but to put the phone down, strike a match, breathe deeply, and remember that wellness was never meant to be a competition in the first place.