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We're witnessing the end of wellness culture as we knew it. And honestly? It's about time.
For years, the wellness industry has operated in this strange space between science, aspiration, and wishful thinking. We've seen protocols built on single cherry-picked studies from 1987. We've watched influencers tout interventions based purely on how they "felt." We've been told to optimize everything while having no real way to measure whether anything was actually working.
Last year, the New York Times took a hard look at Eudemonia's inaugural event, raising questions about the line between legitimate science and snake oil. And honestly? Some of what they pointed out was fair. The wellness space has earned its skepticism.
But something fundamental is shifting. After years of hype cycles and miracle cures, the wellness industry is finally developing a relationship with intellectual rigor. And I don't mean the performative kind where someone cites a study in their Instagram caption but never actually read past the abstract. I mean real, evidence-based approaches that acknowledge limitations, embrace nuance, and admit when we simply don't know yet.
This past weekend at Eudemonia, I watched this shift happen in real time. It felt like the organizers took last year's feedback seriously and tried to build something more defensible and real. Like watching an entire industry grow up all at once.
The Conversation Is Changing
The most striking change wasn't in the technology on display or the treatments being offered. It was in how people were talking.
During a fireside chat on human potential, Dr. Andrew Huberman captured what's happening: "There's no going back. People are challenging their physicians in new ways. Physicians are challenging themselves in new ways. And I think it's long overdue."
He was in conversation with Dr. Maya Shankar, cognitive scientist, former Obama White House advisor, and creator of the podcast "A Slight Change of Plans." Their discussion about reaching human potential wasn't about biohacking shortcuts. It was about the messy, complicated work of actually understanding how our bodies and brains function.
This is the shift: we're past the honeymoon phase of wellness culture. We're not accepting claims at face value anymore. We want peer-reviewed studies. We want replicable results. We want to know not just that something worked for someone, but why it worked and whether it will work for us.
The most sophisticated conversations I heard all weekend came from people comfortable saying "I don't know" or "the data isn't conclusive yet." That kind of intellectual humility, the willingness to acknowledge the limits of our current understanding, is what separates science from dogma.
And make no mistake: dogma is what held the wellness industry back for so long.
Progress Is Messy
But here's where it gets interesting, and complicated. Because this maturation isn't happening cleanly or uniformly.
Dr. Jessica Shepherd, an OB-GYN and Chief Medical Officer, described a phenomenon that perfectly captures this awkward transition phase. She's thrilled that we're finally having open conversations about menopause and perimenopause. These topics have been ignored, dismissed, and underfunded for decades. Progress, right?
Except now she's seeing 28-year-olds self-diagnosing as perimenopausal.
We've gone from "women's health issues are systematically dismissed" to "women's health issues are trending topics being misapplied." It's progress, but it's messy progress. The kind where increased awareness creates new problems even as it solves old ones.
This is what growing up looks like in real time: not a clean evolution from ignorance to enlightenment, but a stumbling, iterative process of overcorrecting, recalibrating, and slowly getting closer to something that actually works.
The solution isn't to stop talking about these issues. It's to pair the conversation with better education, more accessible diagnostic tools, and more research. Much more research.
Being Honest About What Works
I spent the weekend trying various treatments and technologies. Some were remarkable. Others...less so. And that variance matters more than the wellness industry has been willing to admit.
ShiftWave's technology genuinely restored my nervous system after I got off a brutal red-eye. The difference was immediate and noticeable. Meanwhile, I lasted about five minutes in a hyperbaric chamber before discovering I might be claustrophobic. NanoVi's 25-minute session, supposedly backed by peer-reviewed studies and used by elite athletes, left me feeling exactly the same.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: not everything works for everyone. Not everything that works shows immediate results. And some things that are heavily marketed simply might not work at all, or at least not in the way we think they do.
Being evidence-based means being honest about all of that. It means acknowledging that a single session doesn't tell you much. It means being willing to say "this didn't work for me" without either dismissing the technology entirely or blaming yourself for not feeling the promised effects.
Real science embraces negative results. Real science says "we need more data." Real science admits uncertainty.
The wellness industry is slowly, finally, learning to do the same.
The Women's Health Gap
Here's what still needs to change: we need to stop relying on individual anecdotes and start demanding rigorous research. Especially for women's health.
Multiple speakers at Eudemonia talked about the nuances of women's approach to longevity. How our hormones work differently, how our needs change across our lifespan, how protocols designed for and tested on men might not translate to us. These are critical conversations.
But conversations aren't enough. Out of 271 speakers at the conference, roughly 75-80 were women, about 28-30%. Better than many conferences, sure. But we can't meaningfully advance women's health without women's voices, women's research, and women's bodies in clinical trials.
For decades, women were systematically excluded from health research. The FDA didn't require our inclusion in clinical trials until 1993. We're still catching up from that decades-long blind spot, and it shows in everything from how we diagnose cardiovascular disease to how we approach cognitive decline.
We need large-scale studies. We need diverse participant pools. We need to move beyond "here's what worked for me" and into "here's what the data shows across thousands of people."
That's the work ahead. And it's work that requires more than just good intentions. It requires funding, institutional support, and a fundamental restructuring of how we prioritize health research.
When Art Meets Science
I need to tell you about Dr. Mei Rui, because what she's doing represents the future of this more mature, evidence-based approach to wellness.
Dr. Rui is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Director of Music-in-Medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She's also an internationally acclaimed concert pianist. At Eudemonia, she performed live while wearing a dry EEG system. The audience, thousands of people, watched her brain activity displayed on massive screens in real-time.
For someone who works in brain technology professionally, I'm telling you: this was profound. Watching so much of her cognitive capacity, intelligence, emotion, technical skill, artistic interpretation, literally activated on screen was beautiful in a way that's hard to articulate.
But here's what makes this more than performance art: Dr. Rui's research is using music as medicine for cancer and surgery patients. She's helping them reduce pain medications and accelerate recovery times through musical interventions, and she's using EEG to dissect exactly which interventions work and why.
It's evidence-based. It's replicable. And it's working.
This is what the maturation of wellness looks like: not throwing out everything modern medicine has learned, but adding layers of understanding about how our bodies and brains actually function. Not choosing between art and science, but recognizing that both can inform our approach to healing and optimization.
From Tracking to Understanding
As the wellness industry matures, we're moving from simple tracking to genuine understanding. It's not enough anymore to know you slept seven hours or took 10,000 steps. We want to know what those numbers actually mean for our health.
This is where objective measurement becomes crucial. We're developing tools that can actually assess brain health, not just track proxy metrics like heart rate variability, but understand what's happening with cognitive function, focus, and mental performance in real time.
That kind of data changes everything. It moves us from "I think this meditation practice is helping" to "here's what's actually happening in my brain during and after meditation." It transforms subjective wellness claims into objective, measurable outcomes.
And critically, it allows us to stop wasting time and money on interventions that aren't actually working. In an industry that's been plagued by expensive placebo effects and wishful thinking, that kind of accountability is revolutionary.
What Comes Next
We're at a moment where people are hungry for real science, and the wellness industry is finally catching up to meet that demand.
The emphasis on evidence I saw this weekend, the intellectual curiosity, the willingness to say "I don't know," the recognition that individual experience isn't the same as scientific proof, represents real progress.
But we can't stop at conversation. We need to pair this new scientific rigor with actual research infrastructure. We need clinical trials that include diverse populations. We need longitudinal studies that track outcomes over years, not just weeks. We need to create systems that make evidence-based protocols accessible, not just aspirational.
The future of wellness isn't about abandoning science or blindly accepting every new protocol. It's about bringing rigorous measurement, honest assessment, and genuine curiosity to how we can live healthier, longer, better lives.
The wellness industry is growing up.
About time we all did too.
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
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