Top Health and Wellness Goals for 2023

Fast forward to 2023, which now seems to be the year of health and wellness. We’re constantly redefining the ways we can achieve good health – both mental and physical. Across the globe we are seeing new health trends across beauty, fitness, and healthcare. 

Recent health trends are taking a much more holistic approach to wellness. For example, the most popular health and wellness recommendations include practices and products focused on topics such as sleep, gut health, mental health, exercise, relationships, holistic health care, spiritual wellbeing and digital detoxing.

Sleep: Those of us who have experienced insomnia have probably looked desperately for an easy, quick fix to get to sleep and to stay asleep. From over-the-counter sleep aids like melatonin to prescription sleeping pills, medications are likely to be a first line of defense. A lack of sleep is said to make you “metabolically groggy” making it harder for your body to process insulin and contributing to weight gain. Sleep specialists are recommending holistic approaches such as acupuncture and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as a better solution. These therapies are specifically designed to regulate sleep disorders like insomnia and have been shown to be the most effective ways to tackle insomnia that lasts longer than three months. Acupuncture can help quiet the mind, increase relaxation and decrease stress to promote sleep. CBT is the next step in understanding the cause of the insomnia and utilizes other therapies like relaxation training, meditation, hypnosis, biofeedback and breathing exercises to significantly improve one’s sleep.

Gut-brain connection and a diet geared toward gut health: With the world becoming more toxic and stress levels on the rise over the last two decades, we’ve seen a huge rise in patients with gut problems. Over the last five years or so, there has also been a huge spike in patients experiencing mood disorders, depression and anxiety, and often this is also related to their gut. A holistic approach considers the gut-brain connection. There is a network of around 100 million neurons lining our gut. It is so extensive that many scientists refer to our gut as our “second brain”. This multitude of neutrons is called the enteric nervous system and produces more serotonin (our happy hormone) than our actual brain. This is why the gut-brain connection is key in maintaining good health and preventing disease.

While awareness of the importance of gut health has been growing in recent years, the gut-brain connection has only recently become a part of this conversation – and this will continue to grow throughout 2023 and beyond. The chemical messages that pass between the gut and the brain are affected by our gut microbiome – the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in the gut – and the importance of positively influencing this through our way of life and the things we ingest will become of even greater importance.

Mental Health: 2023 is set to be a year of transition for mental health, as the COVID-era public health emergency (PHE) comes to an end and economic headwinds impact the global economy. Having been taboo for decades, if not centuries, mental health is now being widely discussed. During these exceptional times of pandemic, many of us are confronted with psychological problems related to isolation, anxiety, loneliness, frustrations, addictions, insecurities, depression, fears and worry. This is beginning to change as more and more health care providers are expanding or focusing care on patients with serious mental illness and other higher-acuity needs. There is a wave of health care agencies, both private and governmental, that have entered the space with a mission of using a community-based approach to serving patients with more serious conditions.

Exercise: Exercise for people short on time, so common in today’s time-poor society, is now coined “incidental”.  A wellness trend that lets us fit exercise into work time, incidental exercise is activity that takes place in small amounts, at various points throughout the day. This growing trend can be just as beneficial for your health as longer, more sustained workout sessions, but the difference is that it can often be included as a part of your daily living, which makes it far easier to fit into your everyday life. Incidental exercise can be as simple as getting off the bus a few stops earlier and walking, increasing your speed when you’re walking to the shops, bounding up the stairs instead of walking, or squatting while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil. Investing in a mini-trampoline and doing 100 mini bounces at various points throughout the day to change your state and shake off stress is a great approach to weaving incidental exercise into your life. This, of course, is not meant to replace conventional workouts, but doing 15 minutes of exercise twice a day for five days a week adds up to 150 total minutes of weekly exercise.

Spiritual Wellbeing: A huge and impactful wellness trend for 2023 is spiritual wellbeing, a term that refers to a person’s sense of connection to something larger than themselves, such as a higher power, a set of spiritual beliefs, or a sense of meaning and purpose in life. This aspect of wellbeing is often associated with feelings of peace, contentment, and inner harmony, and it can play an important role in overall health and wellness. In the past, spiritual wellbeing was relegated mostly to formal organizations, such as religions, but it can also be achieved through one’s own practice. Some techniques include meditation, breathwork, a gratitude practice, or martial arts.

Digital detox: A recent British study determined people are spending up to 11 hours looking at screens each day. Our increased dependency on smartphones, tablets and laptops is making many people reconsider their relationship with their electronic devices – and in 2023 this will give rise to the digital detox.  We’re all becoming more aware of our screen time and the damage associated with being on our phones for endless hours of the day.  Screen time increased dramatically over lockdown, but we haven’t seen a drop in this since the end of the pandemic. More people are trying to reduce their usage of social media. One way to do this is to examine the content of your engagement to the media and ask yourself “what is it contributing to my life”? Is it solely to keep you entertained? Is it teaching you new skills? Is it enhancing your mental health?