People are more conscious of their general health; they engage with health and wellbeing issues in a holistic way, taking into account not just the physical, but also the emotional and spiritual.

People are becoming more proactive. They are conscious of their wellbeing and the negative implications of leading an unhealthy life. However, despite the increased awareness of health as a general issue, the conventions of modern life are often contrary to healthy living.

Today, people are leading largely sedentary lives, sitting down more and moving around less. The physical body is playing a smaller part in the way people conduct their everyday lives: work is increasingly office-based and transportation is generally preferred to walking from a to b. The issue of health has also changed; it now not only incorporates matters of the body, it also includes the mind and the soul. Modern living has led to a more holistic understanding of health referring to emotional and spiritual wellbeing as well as physical, a composite appreciation that has raised general awareness of all-round healthy living.

Re-learning to relax

To combat the stress of modern life people are concentrating on relaxing their minds, bodies and souls.

Today, it seems that everyone is experiencing stress of some kind. Although stress is often seen as a mental condition, it also affects the body and soul and it is exemplary of how the three facets of holistic health are inextricably linked. Manual labour is in decline. Most people are therefore using their minds to conduct the majority of their work. This increased intellectualisation of the employment sector correlates with the rise of stress levels.

Despite the increase in stress levels, people do not deem downsizing their obligations and commitments to be the answer to relieving the stress and strain of modern living. They want to have everything at the same time: the positive aspects of the modern world and the benefits of a calm life. For example, relocating to the country is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among middle-aged people, because they can enjoy the tranquility of the country but remain connected with broadband.

In addition to the adaptation of lifestyles, people are tending to their bodies, minds and souls; they are learning how to relax again in order to manage stress. Practices such as yoga and meditation are becoming ever more popular as people seek to redress the unhealthy stress imbalance. Exercise is being included as part of the working day, with many people now going to the gym in their lunch hours.

Efficient experiences

Increasingly time-starved lifestyles mean that people want tailored health experiences that allow them to achieve maximum results.

Everyone has a different life, body and personality so it makes sense to customise experiences. Tailored health experiences have been designed to make every wellbeing effort as relevant as possible. Gyms are designing exercise routines for each customer and personal trainers are being employed to make each exercise relevant.

Personalised experiences are time-efficient, but people also want to achieve more than one body-benefit at once. They want to work on their mental and spiritual wellbeing while toning their bodies. Services and regimes that offer consumers different treatments for different parts of the body at the same time are therefore welcomed. Yoga, for instance, is a popular exercise routine as it works the body, mind and soul rigorously and simultaneously. This health experience could be further enhanced, as people can save even more time if they practice yoga at the workplace or on a plane.

While experiences that achieve several things concurrently are important, so is minimum effort for maximum benefit. People are attracted to experiences that accomplish a lot in a small space of time. Power Plate is an example of a collection of products and services that claim to produce good, fast results. They claim that ten minutes two-three times a week will give most people the desired result because, according to Power Plate, achieving this is not about the duration of the training, it is about the intensity of the training. Plastic surgery is another example of a quick-fix body and health solution that may be financially demanding, like Power Plate products and services, but require minimum physical effort.

Efficient health and wellbeing experiences are not just about relevancy and time-efficiency, they are also about doing the exercise well. To have the desired, beneficial effect people must exercise correctly and regularly. Therefore certain reward schemes have been set up to give people incentives to encourage them to commit to keeping fit. These schemes include health insurance that rewards people who lead healthy lifestyles with lower premiums and video games for teenagers that keep players fit while playing.

Image extremists

While awareness of general health issues has grown, attitudes towards body image have polarised.

When it comes to body image two extreme reactions have emerged: those who are dangerously blasé about their weight and those who are overly body conscious. Body image is a confused subject: there is no one consistent message about body image. The media ridicules celebrities who have naturally sized bodies, it condemns abnormally thin celebrities and it features extremely thin models. The proliferation of shock-tactic television programmes is also confusing the matter. On the one hand it is raising the profile of body and health issues, but on the other, these programmes scare people by setting a high standard, both in terms of body image and healthy living. Such programmes include: Extreme Makeover, You Are What You Eat and Honey, We’re Killing The Kids.

The body image issue is a paradox. Obesity is a major public health concern and as it threatens to become a global epidemic, more and more people are becoming obsessed with how their bodies look to the point of endangering their lives. Although the body image issue has usually been attributed to women, men are increasingly becoming affected by this mass striving for the perfect physique. Anorexia is increasingly being diagnosed in men. In addition more and more young men are taking steroids to improve their muscle definition, which is endangering their long-term health.

Male grooming

Men are more body and image conscious than ever, creating a captive audience for health and beauty sectors to market to.

As societies become evermore health and body conscious, men are correspondingly aware of their appearances as they spend more on their body image, look/style and health. Representations of men have progressed and new ways of thinking about modern men have materialized. In recent years there has been much attention given to the term ‘metrosexual’, originally coined as a satirical attempt to describe the negative effect of consumerism on traditional masculinity. Marketers and reporters describing a new segment of male consumers have embraced this term to refer to younger and older men who care about how they look and are spending more on their bodies and images.

Despite a backlash to this breed of metrosexual men and the macho man making a comeback, men are still demonstrating vanity and consuming traditionally female products like face cream, body wax kits and shavers as never before. Indeed, a new appreciation of gay culture is being valued by straight men (Queer Eye for a Straight Guy is an entertainment case in point), who are acknowledging the importance of understanding fashion, style, and culture as being a fundamental part of doing well, or at least better, with the ladies.

Protecting the people

Societies’ vices are being targeted by governments as they try to minimise the damage people are doing to themselves with the unhealthy lives they are leading.

Governments are responding to the ever-worsening condition of their nations’ health by implementing strategies and campaigns that target unhealthy habits such as smoking, excessive drinking of alcohol, drug abuse and obesity. There are various ways in which the state discouragement of its people is being carried out. These include taxing, product and media campaigns and the generation of general hype. Influential people that are not in government, but in the public eye also generate this kind of publicity. High profile people are galvanising politically apathetic citizens to press governments to take action. Jamie Oliver is an example of one such non-governmental campaigner. His school dinners campaign, which aired on Channel Four, has influenced the UK government due to the public outcry it sparked. There have been governmental actions as a result that have seen new funding and schemes in place. Similarly, across the Atlantic Bill Clinton has been heavily involved in grassroots campaigning, both on health and environmental issues. Bill Clinton not only campaigns on national health issues, such as child obesity, he is also actively involved in campaigning on global health issues, such as the AIDS crisis.