Reflects a growing obsession with control, where wellness shifts from care to constant optimisation, raising questions about whether in trying to extend life, if we are forgetting to actually live it.
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This article explores the rise of healthmaxxing as a post-pandemic wellness culture shaped by optimisation, longevity planning and the need to control in uncertain times.
It examines how dopamine-fuelled impatience and uncertainty have transformed health into a form of self-surveillance through tracking, routines and extreme wellness practices.
The piece argues that healthmaxxing reflects a deeper cultural fear of aging, vulnerability and losing control in an unstable world.
Priyal Verma is a London-based writer with a Master's in Strategic Fashion Marketing from LCF, with 300+ bylines in Vogue, Femina & Voice of Fashion.
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The pandemic didn't just set the world back economically but sent us to the gym, straight from house arrest as health suddenly seemed a priority. The $2 trillion global wellness industry quietly started taking centrestage. It was more just a moment, it quietly slipped into our routine, all in the name of longevity planning.
Now, we're at the stage where healthmaxxing videos on Instagram look like we're getting ready for a war - LED masks, running to save our lives, meal strategy planning and especially, propaganda against all kinds of food, only to slow ageing. In the name of longevity planning, it feels like a repackaged hangover of the 2000 skinny craze. But, in this war to optimise every part of our routine, we often forget to ask - what are we fighting for? A better life or a life that we can control every minute of.
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Healthmaxxing on the surface seems like the friendly neighbourhood routine that wants to protect your body and help with longetivity planning. The idea is to maximise your health to the best possible outcome, using whatever tools 21st century has to offer. It started off innocently with the idea of longevity planning and moving our body to make us feel better. TikTok trends like hot girl walk, mental health workout and protein girl dinner started emerging. So far so good. It seemed like the adult thing to do as burnout, stress and sedentary lifestyle was a regular for most of us. But slowly the culture surrounding the idea of healthmaxxing went beyond self-care with the slow purpose to slow ageing. Somewhere along the way, we lost the plot and ran to the extreme.
Healthmaxxing became extreme restrictions, cold plunges, wearable technologies that tracked everything, controlled diets and expensive treatments. From a 6am cold plunge to a bedside table lined with rainbow-coloured supplements, to carb-free snacks and carbon filtered water; it's seeped into every task of our day. The body feels like a project that needs constant work, all to slow ageing. On top of it, this project is time-bound. Much of it has much to do with our impatience with rewards, thanks to dopamine spiking screens. Groceries? We blinkit it. Dopamine boost? Instagram. A sculpted face? Injections. A healthy body? Healthmaxxing. Since we have summer body goals, we need to cut down in 6 weeks with extreme diets, retinols aren't enough to eventually slow ageing we need botox to reverse it immediately. Your body can stretch as much like an elastic, but health doesn't improve in 6 weeks or deteroriate with one bad day of binge-eating. Slow progress is now just passe.
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COVID pulled a reality check when it put us face-to-face with our mortality and we have been piggybacking on uncertainty ever since as shown by a study (Wu X, Li J, Li Y, 2022) . The study connected uncertainty to experiencing COVID and the participants are more likely to choose smaller and sooner gains, leading to short-sighted behaviours. The after effects are now manifesting with more younger people quitting the workforce as per (Nuryanti, Rosyadi,Muhammad, 2024), people indulging in hobbies and learning to touch grass. Suddenly, somewhere between climbing the corporate ladder and surfing the marriage wave, we realised we might not have as much time on this planet as we assumed. Control became imperative.
We wanted to exercise our free will to switch careers, change appearances, mindsets and transform our life. And the idea of control seems safe in an unstable world with political disruptions, disease outbreaks, unemployement and increasing inflation. We might not be able to control the number of rejections we get from our dream companies due to budget cuts but, we can control whether our bodies would be snatched by the summer. It gives us something tangible to manipulate, where we can see results in real time. Hence, our need to control is making us into a potentially profitable project. The only risk? Losing ourselves in the process.
Think about it, when you're invested in the project, you carefully look at each and every source of costs and revenue, going through the numbers with a finetooth comb to optimise performance and make sure you get the best possible outcome. Similarly, since our bodies and lives have become ongoing construction sites, we have quantified everything, masking a self-surveillance. Health tech is an accomplice with tracked workouts, hormone tracking, even sleep has score assigned to it. How much propaganda did it take to optimise even rest. "Making lifestyle adjustments to improve your sleep quality is great, but it's important to not get carried away," explains Dr. Nadia Homedi, a family medicine physician (Health News, 2025). Advertising and social media narratives has fueled fear in this mix, showing the cost of not applying SPF, missing workout, side effects of cortisol spikes. The vocabulary of wellness is tainted with fear that creates a vicious cycle as it fuels our desire to control even more. It feels ironical as the idea of wellness that's supposed to bring us some calm and peace is the one thing putting us in a flight or fight response.
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Aside from control, healthmaxxing has much to do with this urgency we feel all the time. We are terrified with losing time, wasting it, aging because of it and not savouring it enough. Our ways to strategise the future, plan ways to cheat ageing, all longetivity planning is not a villianous obsession to live forever. It is just about wanting to have a good and productive life at the end of the day. Which raises a very interesting question - if we're so worried about not living a good life, why are we actually not living it? Healthmaxxing also creates a subtle illusion that a "good" life is one that is constantly disciplined. But life has never really worked that way. We are following our night routines rather than inconveniencing ourselves to go pick our friend up from the airport, not savouring an ice cream on a beautiful rainy days, having protein birthday cakes, choosing saunas over pool parties. What we end up missing is the actual opportunities of tasting life because we are too busy counting calories. The fitness culture repackages excessive discipline as a cheatcode to a good life, a way to never be in a vulnerable position. But vulnerability is a huge part of being alive. You come to terms with ageing in your own way, you learn to love a capable body instead of a ripped one and on tough days, you share one tub of icecream with your heartbroken friend. Health and fitness was never supposed to be this controlling. It was supposed to equip you with the ability to deal with vulnerabilities and uncertainties that comes with life. Because no amount of cold plunges or ashwangadha supplements can shield you from uncertainty entirely. They might delay ageing but our bodies will change. Stress will hurt us and on those days, carbs would help.
And perhaps the irony of healthmaxxing is that in trying so hard to preserve life, we become too preoccupied to fully taste what the plate has to offer.
