I can admit that I have never been much of a numbers person. I’m much more naturally drawn to what something feels like, what it means, and what might be happening beneath the surface. But every once in a while, a number gets my attention. When I read that the global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is projected to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029, I didn’t feel shocked so much as I felt a sense of recognition. The number was enormous, but the idea behind it wasn’t surprising to me. I have spent more than a decade watching wellness move from something that many people practiced quietly or privately into something that has become a defining part of how we think about health, lifestyle, and the way we want to live. Global Wellness Institute — 2025 Global Wellness Economy Monitor
The more I thought about the number, though, the more questions it raised. Why is wellness growing so quickly? What does that growth actually tell us about the way we are living? Why are people spending more money on sleep, mental health, fitness, nutrition, retreats, beauty, healthy homes, and experiences designed to help them feel better? And what happens when something as personal as wellbeing becomes a global economy worth trillions of dollars?
These aren’t questions I’m approaching as someone who has simply noticed that wellness is trending. Wellness has been part of my life for more than a decade. I came to it because I was trying to understand myself and find holistic ways to heal, and over the years that search led me into yoga, meditation, breathwork, Reiki, sound healing, trauma-informed work, retreats, teaching, and years of study. I’ve experienced the industry as a consumer, a student, a practitioner, a teacher, and now as an editor and co-founder of Dwell Refine. That history matters to me because I don’t want to talk about wellness from a distance. I want to understand it from the inside while still being willing to examine it critically.
That is really what Dwell Refine’s approach to wellness is about: first-hand knowledge matched with editorial curiosity. We aren’t interested in telling people there is one correct way to be well, and we’re not interested in repeating every wellness trend simply because it is popular. We want to explore the practices, products, ideas, research, people, places, and cultural shifts that shape how we care for ourselves, while being honest about what we know, what we don’t know, and where the conversation is going.
Before wellness was something we talked about
My relationship with wellness began long before I would have called it that.
I was in high school when I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary I have today to describe it. There were moments when I was terrified by sensations in my own body and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t simply make them stop. Looking back, I can recognize many of those experiences as part of a much larger story, but at the time they felt frightening, isolating, and confusing.
I grew up in an environment where I learned to be self-sufficient very early. As the eldest of three, I often felt responsible for holding things together, and there were experiences in my childhood that left me feeling unsafe and uncertain. I became very good at appearing fine. I learned how to keep moving, keep functioning, and keep things to myself. I don’t say that to reduce my childhood to a single explanation for everything that came later, because life and mental health are much more complicated than that. But I do think it is important context for understanding why I became so interested in the relationship between what happens to us, what we carry, and how we eventually experience ourselves.
By the time I was in college, my panic attacks had become more severe. I was working, going to school, trying to support myself, and experiencing intrusive thoughts and anxiety that could feel completely consuming. Eventually I sought professional help. I was prescribed medication, including Xanax for panic attacks, and at another point in my life I became dependent on it. I also used alcohol and other substances in ways that, looking back, were attempts to manage feelings I didn’t know how to manage in healthier ways.
I want to be careful about how I tell this part of my story because I don’t believe medication is inherently bad, and I don’t believe holistic wellness should be positioned as an alternative to appropriate medical or psychiatric care. There were things I needed from conventional mental-health treatment, and there are people for whom medication is an important and appropriate part of care. What I wish I had understood at the time was that there could be more than one way of approaching what I was experiencing, and that I deserved to understand the care I was receiving rather than simply feeling like something was wrong with me that needed to be fixed.
Learning that the mind and body aren’t separate
Years later, I received more comprehensive mental-health care. I participated in an outpatient program that included cognitive behavioral therapy and regular psychiatric care, and that period of my life was important. Therapy gave me language for experiences I had previously struggled to understand, and I learned how to recognize patterns that had been invisible to me. But I also began noticing something that would eventually become central to my understanding of wellness: I could understand something intellectually without necessarily feeling different inside my body.
That distinction stayed with me.
I could understand why I reacted certain ways. I could talk about my childhood. I could identify patterns and understand the relationship between thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. But there was still a part of me that felt like it was operating independently of what I knew intellectually. I wanted to understand how to work with that part, too.
That search eventually led me to yoga.
One day in Los Angeles, I saw a sign offering two weeks of unlimited yoga for $20. I started going to a yin restorative class, usually at night, and I would sit in the back because I didn’t want to interact with anyone. The room was quiet and dim, and the practice was slow enough that there wasn’t anywhere to hide from what I was feeling.
At first, even being still was uncomfortable. But there was something about the teacher and the environment that made me feel safe. One night, while I was in child’s pose, she asked if she could place her hands on my back. I said yes, and I began to cry. What stayed with me wasn’t simply that I cried. It was the feeling that accompanied it. I didn’t feel like I was escaping my body. I felt like I was finally able to be inside it.
That experience didn’t cure my mental health. It wasn’t a replacement for therapy or medical care. But it introduced me to something I hadn’t understood before: the possibility that practices involving breath, movement, sensation, environment, connection, and presence could change the way I experienced myself.
That realization changed the direction of my life.
A decade of learning what wellness can mean
Over the next decade, I immersed myself in wellness. I studied energy work and became certified in Reiki. I trained in trauma release and nervous-system regulation. I became a yoga teacher, studied breathwork, practiced meditation, facilitated sound healing, and hosted retreats in places including British Columbia, Peru, Mallorca, and Tuscany.
I wasn’t doing all of this because I thought I had found one perfect system for healing. In fact, the opposite happened. The more I learned, the more I understood how individual wellbeing can be. What helps one person may not help another, and what someone needs at one stage of their life may be completely different from what they need later.
What I did develop was a deep appreciation for the role that different practices can play in helping people build awareness, connection, regulation, rest, strength, and a greater sense of agency. I also learned to be more careful about the claims we make around wellness. A practice can be meaningful without needing to be presented as a cure. An experience can support wellbeing without being medical treatment. And something can be personally transformative without being universally effective.
That distinction matters even more to me now that wellness has become such a massive industry.
So how did wellness become a $6.8 trillion economy?
The scale of the wellness economy is difficult to comprehend until you put it into context. According to the Global Wellness Institute’s 2025 Global Wellness Economy Monitor, the global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024, after growing 7.9% from 2023 to 2024. Over the longer period from 2019 to 2024, it grew at an average annual rate of 6.2%. GWI projects another 7.6% annual growth from 2024 through 2029, bringing the global wellness economy to nearly $9.8 trillion.
The size becomes even more striking when you look at what GWI includes within the category. Wellness is not one industry in the traditional sense. It encompasses eleven sectors, including physical activity, healthy eating and nutrition, personal care and beauty, mental wellness, wellness tourism, wellness real estate, traditional and complementary medicine, spas, and public health and prevention. Global Wellness Institute — Wellness Economy Data Series
And this is where the comparison becomes particularly interesting. GWI estimates that the $6.8 trillion wellness economy is larger than several other major global industries, including IT, tourism, sports, and the green economy. It is also nearly four times the size of the global pharmaceutical industry.
That breadth tells us something important about how the definition of wellness has changed. People are no longer thinking about health simply as the absence of disease. They are thinking about sleep, stress, mental health, movement, nutrition, their homes, their environments, their relationships, their energy, their appearance, their longevity, and the quality of their everyday lives. Wellness has expanded from a collection of practices into a broader way of thinking about how we live.
And that is part of why I think the $6.8 trillion number is so interesting. It isn’t simply telling us that people are buying more supplements or booking more spa treatments. It is telling us that wellbeing has become a meaningful category through which people make decisions about their lives.
When wellness becomes the place you live
Not every sector is growing at the same speed, and this is where it stops being abstract for me. Wellness real estate is the fastest-growing sector within the wellness economy, growing at an average annual rate of 19.5% from 2019 to 2024. GWI projects it to grow another 15.2% annually through 2029. The sector was valued at approximately $548 billion in 2024 and is projected to surpass $1 trillion by 2029.
What’s particularly interesting is how the definition of wellness real estate is changing. The Global Wellness Institute describes a market moving from aspiration to evidence, from luxury toward broader accessibility, and from individual buildings toward communities designed around how people live, connect, and age. Wellness is increasingly being considered not simply as an amenity inside a building, but as something that can be embedded into the environment itself.
You can see that shift in what is actually being built. Forbes recently highlighted a wave of new wellness resorts, residences, longevity centers, and communities, including Equinox Resort and Residences AMAALA on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, Aman Miami Beach, Six Senses Comporta, Six Senses Residences Dubai Marina, and Gelephu Mindfulness City in Bhutan. These aren’t simply hotels adding a spa. Wellness is moving into residences, medical facilities, private clubs, and entire communities.
Aerial rendering of Six Senses Comporta
People aren’t just buying wellness products anymore. They’re increasingly buying the actual environments in which they live, recover, connect, and age.
And I think that distinction matters. If our homes and communities can influence how we sleep, move, connect with other people, access nature, and recover from the demands of daily life, then the built environment becomes part of the wellness conversation itself.
Right behind real estate is mental wellness, which grew 12.4% annually from 2019 to 2024 and is projected to grow another 10.1% annually through 2029. That makes it the second-fastest-growing sector in the wellness economy.
The contrast with workplace wellness is interesting, too. According to the same GWI data, workplace wellness spending declined 1.5% from 2023 to 2024. GWI notes that employers have moved away from some programmatic approaches to employee wellness, while remote and gig work have left more workers without access to formal wellness benefits.
I don’t think that tells us the whole story about workplace wellbeing, but it is certainly worth paying attention to. Individuals are increasingly investing in their own wellbeing while one institutional category designed to support it is contracting.
If you’re looking at what the wellness economy is actually becoming, the pattern is bigger than any single product or trend. Growth is showing up in the physical spaces people live in and travel to, as well as in the ways they are trying to understand and support their mental wellbeing. Wellness is moving from something we consume occasionally into something increasingly built into the environments and systems around us.
The shift from treating illness to supporting wellbeing
For much of modern healthcare, the starting point has been a problem: something hurts, something isn’t functioning properly, a symptom appears, or a disease is diagnosed. Wellness operates in a different part of the spectrum. It often begins with a person asking how they can support themselves before something becomes a crisis, or how they can improve the quality of their life even when they are not technically sick.
That doesn’t mean wellness and healthcare should be placed in opposition. In many cases, they complement one another. Someone can need a psychiatrist and benefit from meditation. Someone can take medication and prioritize sleep. Someone can work with a therapist and also find that movement, community, nature, or breathwork supports their overall wellbeing.
I think the most valuable evolution in wellness is the recognition that these things don’t necessarily have to compete. We can make room for medical care, mental-health care, preventative health, movement, nutrition, rest, relationships, and the practices that help us feel connected to ourselves. The question isn’t always which one is “right.” Sometimes the question is what combination of support a person actually needs.
What childhood experiences can teach us about health
This is where the story becomes larger than my own experience.
In 1995, researchers at Kaiser Permanente began what would become one of the most influential studies examining the relationship between childhood experiences and health later in life. The original CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study was conducted from 1995 to 1997 and included more than 17,000 adults who completed confidential surveys about their childhood experiences alongside information about their health and behaviors. CDC — About the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study
The researchers looked at categories of adversity including abuse, neglect, and household challenges such as substance abuse, mental illness, parental separation or divorce, violence toward a mother, and incarceration. Participants received an ACE score based on the number of categories they reported experiencing. The CDC describes the study as showing that ACEs are strongly related to the development of risk factors for disease and wellbeing throughout the life course. CDC — About ACEs
The original findings were significant because they expanded the conversation beyond mental health. The study found a graded relationship between the number of adverse childhood experiences reported and negative health and wellbeing outcomes: as the number of ACEs increased, so did the risk of negative outcomes. CDC — About the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study
None of this means that a difficult childhood determines someone’s future health. An ACE score isn’t a diagnosis, and it isn’t a prediction of what will happen to an individual. Human beings are far more complicated than a number. Genetics, relationships, socioeconomic conditions, access to care, environment, resilience, and experiences throughout adulthood all matter.
What the research does give us is another way of understanding the relationship between our experiences and our health. It helps demonstrate why conversations about mental wellbeing and physical wellbeing don’t always make sense when we treat them as completely separate categories.
Mental wellness is growing for a reason
That connection is particularly relevant when you look at where the wellness economy is growing fastest. According to GWI, mental wellness grew by an average of 12.4% annually between 2019 and 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing wellness sectors. GWI projects mental wellness to grow another 10.1% annually through 2029.
I don’t think those numbers are accidental.
We are living through a period in which people are increasingly willing to talk openly about anxiety, depression, burnout, loneliness, trauma, stress, sleep, and the ways our environments affect how we feel. Younger generations, in particular, have grown up with mental-health conversations that are far more visible than they were when I was in high school.
The language has changed, too. People have more words for experiences that previous generations may have struggled to describe. We talk about nervous-system regulation, attachment, burnout, trauma, emotional regulation, mindfulness, somatic experiences, and boundaries. Some of these concepts are sometimes oversimplified online, and wellness culture can absolutely turn useful psychological language into trends or buzzwords. But there is still something meaningful about having a vocabulary for your internal experience.
There is a profound difference between thinking, “Something is wrong with me,” and being able to say, “I’m experiencing something I don’t fully understand, and I may need support.”
For me, that difference is personal.
What wellness can—and cannot—do
I think this is where the wellness industry needs both optimism and humility.
Wellness can create experiences, practices, environments, products, communities, and information that support people’s wellbeing. It can introduce someone to movement they genuinely enjoy, help them create a better sleep environment, give them a space to slow down, connect them with other people, or encourage them to pay attention to something in their life that they have been ignoring.
But wellness should not promise what it cannot deliver.
A meditation class is not a substitute for emergency mental-health care. Breathwork isn’t automatically a treatment for trauma. A beautiful hotel room cannot undo abuse. A supplement cannot replace appropriate medical care or eating well. And calling something “natural” doesn’t automatically make it safe or effective.
I think we can hold both truths at the same time: wellness practices can be deeply meaningful, and wellness claims should still be examined carefully.
That is part of the editorial responsibility I want Dwell Refine to have.
We can be enthusiastic without being uncritical. We can be curious without being gullible. We can acknowledge someone’s personal experience without presenting that experience as universal evidence. And we can talk about practices that are deeply rooted in tradition alongside emerging science while being honest about what has and hasn’t been established.
And then there is the question of access
This is the part of the wellness economy that I find myself thinking about most.
I recently read an idea that stayed with me: perhaps the next era of wealth will not be measured only by the yacht someone owns or the car they drive, but by the amount of time, space, and access they have to recover. That idea becomes particularly interesting when you look at the luxury wellness experiences emerging in places like New York.
At the Equinox Hotel New York Sleep Lab, a dedicated overnight sleep experience developed in collaboration with sleep scientist Dr. Matthew Walker, the experience brings together adaptive mattress technology, personalized sleep and wake automation, circadian lighting, soundscapes, rituals, a contrast-therapy shower, and personalized sleep insights.
I don’t say that to judge the people who choose them. If someone has the means and the desire to invest deeply in their own recovery, I genuinely want that for them. There is nothing inherently wrong with luxury, and I don’t think we should pretend that an expensive wellness experience cannot be beautiful, restorative, innovative, or genuinely valuable to the person experiencing it.
What I find worth examining is what happens when access to recovery itself becomes increasingly stratified. If the best sleep environments, most personalized care, most restorative spaces, and most sophisticated preventative services are available primarily to people with significant disposable income, what does that tell us about where wellness is headed?
I don’t think the answer is that expensive wellness shouldn’t exist. I think the better question is how we build an industry where luxury can exist without becoming the definition of wellness itself.
Because some of the most meaningful wellness experiences in my own life were not expensive. That yoga class that changed the direction of my life cost me $20 for two weeks. What mattered was the teacher, the environment, the sense of safety, and what I was able to experience within myself. The price of the class wasn’t what made it transformative.
That doesn’t mean everyone needs yoga, or that $20 is accessible to everyone, or that we should romanticize inexpensive wellness. It simply reminds me that the value of an experience and its price are not always the same thing.
That experience also shaped how I think about access. I don’t believe making wellness more accessible simply means making everything inexpensive. It means creating more opportunities for people to experience practices that may support their wellbeing without requiring them to have a large wellness budget. As Dwell Refine grows, we want to contribute to that effort in a tangible way by offering free resources, including guided meditations, breathwork, somatic practices, and sound meditations. These won’t be positioned as replacements for medical or mental-health care, but as accessible tools people can explore on their own, wherever they are.
If something I spent years learning can help someone create a few quiet minutes in their day, feel more connected to their body, or simply have another resource to reach for when they need one, I believe that knowledge is worth sharing.
Access is part of our definition of wellness.
What I hope wellness becomes
I don’t want to see wellness become another status system that tells people they are doing life correctly because they have the right products, the right morning routine, the right supplements, the right body, or the ability to spend thousands of dollars on optimization.
I also don’t want the answer to be the opposite extreme, where we become so suspicious of the wellness industry that we lose sight of the genuinely valuable work happening inside it.
There are extraordinary practitioners doing careful, thoughtful work. There are researchers studying prevention and mental health. There are companies creating products that genuinely make people’s lives easier. There are spaces helping people rest and reconnect. There are traditions that have been supporting wellbeing for generations. There are innovations that may change how we think about health in the future.
I want to see more of that.
I want wellness to continue becoming more evidence-informed without losing its humanity. I want people to have access to excellent medical and mental-health care while also having the freedom to explore practices that support their lives. I want luxury wellness to exist, but I also want wellness experiences that are accessible, inclusive, and grounded in the understanding that wellbeing doesn’t have to look the same for everyone.
Most of all, I want people to feel less ashamed of needing care.
Why this is the conversation we want Dwell Refine to have
Wellness is only one part of a much bigger conversation. At its heart, Dwell Refine exists to explore what it means to build a life that feels intentional and entirely your own. Sometimes that means looking at a practice or a product that helps us care for ourselves. Sometimes it means examining the research behind a wellness trend or asking harder questions about an industry that has become incredibly powerful. And sometimes it means simply hearing someone talk honestly about a decision they made, a chapter they went through, or the moment they realized they wanted something different from their life.
The way we care for ourselves affects the way we show up in our relationships. The environments we create affect how we feel. The work we choose affects our sense of identity. The stories we tell ourselves affect what we believe is possible. And the people we surround ourselves with can change the way we see our own lives.
That is why Dwell Refine doesn’t need to fit neatly into one category. It is a place for the whole conversation.
What’s coming
Something that’s been in the works: in 2027, Michelle and I will launch Dwell on This — a Dwell Refine podcast. A long-form conversation show built around the moments that change the way you see your own life. Not a show where someone tells you how to live. Something closer to the conversations that make you stop and think — I’ve felt that too, or I’ve never thought about it that way before.
We know something about those moments personally. Michelle left a career in the film industry she’d loved since childhood to build something entirely her own. I returned to school for interior design as a pivot from wellness work that had deeply personal roots. Dwell Refine was born at both of those crossroads.
The guests will come from many different worlds. Some conversations will be about wellness. Others about creativity, identity, relationships, ambition, culture, or what it looks like to start over. The thread connecting them isn’t a topic. It’s the idea that hearing someone else tell the truth about their life can give us permission to look at our own differently.
More on all of it soon.
What does it mean to live well?
When I first found wellness, I wasn’t looking for an industry. I was looking for a way to feel better in my own life and inside my own body. That search led me into more than a decade of classes, trainings, certifications, retreats, study, teaching, and personal exploration. It taught me that wellness is not one thing, and that healing is rarely linear or simple.
It also taught me that living well isn’t about reaching some perfectly optimized version of yourself.
There will always be another treatment, another supplement, another retreat, another product, another routine, another thing we could buy or try or improve. The wellness economy will continue to grow, and I’m sure many of those innovations will be genuinely valuable. But I don’t want us to lose sight of the life underneath all of it.
What are we actually trying to create?
Who do we want to become?
How do we want our days to feel?
Who do we want beside us?
What makes us feel connected?
What gives us a sense of meaning?
And what does it take to build a life that actually feels like our own?
The wellness economy reaching $6.8 trillion today, with a projection of nearly $9.8 trillion by 2029, doesn’t make me cynical. If anything, it makes me hopeful. It tells me that people are placing increasing value on their health, their mental wellbeing, their environments, their relationships, and the quality of their lives. But it also gives us a reason to pay attention to what happens next.
Because if wellness is going to become one of the defining economies of our time, I hope we don’t lose sight of the reason it exists in the first place.
People want to feel well. And maybe, underneath that, what we are really looking for is something even bigger: We want to build lives we actually want to live.
That is the conversation we want Dwell Refine to be part of. That is the conversation we want to keep having.
With Love,
Codi
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