Why wellness brands need to stop behaving so well

Walk into the right bar in Chengdu right now and your night might start with someone taking your pulse, checking your tongue and asking how you’ve been sleeping.

Then they’ll prescribe you a whisky cocktail.

Welcome to “punk wellness”: a growing trend among young people in China that has been neatly described as “wrecking yourself while saving yourself”. Traditional Chinese medicine bars are popping up across the country, mixing goji berries, liquorice and jujube with rum and whisky. It sounds contradictory. That’s exactly why I like it.

For years, wellness has been sold to us as a lifestyle of perfection. The 5 am alarm. The 10,000 steps. The macros. The cold plunge. The green juice. If you’re going to be healthy, be really healthy.

Social media has helped push that to extremes. There’s always another routine to optimise, another “maxxing” trend, another way to turn looking after yourself into a full-time job. 

The irony is that wellness can start to look remarkably stressful.

But increasingly, younger audiences don’t seem interested in choosing one version of themselves. The person who runs 10k on Saturday can still eat a kebab at 2 am the following Friday. The person who tracks their sleep can still go to a festival. You can care about your health without making wellness your entire personality.

Punk wellness gives that contradiction a name and from a social strategy perspective, I think brands should pay attention.

Social has always been messy because people are messy. Yet brands have a habit of flattening audiences into neat personas: the fitness person, the party person, the wellness person. In reality, they’re usually the same person on different days.

Some of the best wellness work has already started challenging the idea that effort needs to result in a perfect physical transformation.

ASICS did this brilliantly with its Dramatic Transformation campaign. It borrowed the familiar before-and-after language of fitness advertising, except the man looked almost exactly the same in both images. The transformation wasn’t visible. The point was simply that exercise can still have changed how you feel. It flipped the usual wellness promise from “do this and become better” to “do this because it might make life feel better.”

More recently, Cowshed’s “Gloriously Untamed” relaunch has positioned itself against an over-optimised, over-prescribed wellness world, leaning instead into pleasure, indulgence and not taking yourself too seriously.

Premier Protein’s “Fuelling Friendships Social Sauna” takes a similar approach from another angle. Instead of talking to young people about reps, macros and performance, it turned recovery into a social experience, tapping into the rise of saunas, cold plunges and wellness hangouts as places to actually spend time with friends.

Even university partying is getting the treatment. “Wellness darties” have emerged on US campuses: daytime parties built around workouts, saunas and cold plunges. They haven’t removed the social mechanics of partying. They’ve just changed what happens at the party.

That’s what I find interesting about punk wellness. It isn’t necessarily asking people to give anything up. It’s wellness finding its way into places where wellness traditionally didn’t belong.

For brands, that creates much more interesting creative territory than another beautifully lit person meditating in activewear. Maybe the opportunity isn’t to sell people a better version of themselves. Maybe it’s to understand the contradictory version that already exists.

Make recovery social. Put traditional medicine in a cocktail bar. Let indulgence and wellbeing sit next to each other without pretending that one cancels out the other. Because the future of wellness might not be about being healthier all the time.

It might just be about being a little healthier without becoming incredibly boring.