Healthism is a term for the cultural shift towards striving for optimum health as an individual pursuit. Healthism places ‘health’ as a highly valued – often the most valued – characteristic of a person, one that’s enacted through self-mastery, self-discipline, and engagement with health and wellness.

In this way of thinking, as individuals we are responsible for becoming our healthiest and most well selves.

This is obviously an empowering concept, on the positive side. The idea that we can take control of our own health is super appealing, and in many ways genuinely motivates people – myself included. It’s not just me though; research shows that empowering language which tells people they can control their health data and habits resonates strongly with digital health consumers. It drives engagement, adoption and willingness to pay. Lovely.

But how fair, and how right, is it for brands to capitalise on healthism in marketing and product development, particularly in preventative health? There are definitely some issue to think about before we decide.

What’s the big problem?

We are not as autonomous or free-thinking as we might like to believe. Our lives are shaped by a huge number of factors that sit outside individual control. Genetics, big pharma, food manufacturers, pollution, desk jobs, industrialisation, housing quality, childcare, multiple jobs, social media marketing… Whether we like it or not, free will is a questionable concept.

So in a world where the determinants of health are not all subject to individual control, how true is it to suggest that we can meaningfully take control of, and ultimately “master”, our health simply by engaging with health tech?

Academics refer to this as 'cruel optimism', where people’s desires become attached to a particular object, in this case “good” health, that is structurally difficult or unattainable. In other words, we are encouraged to strive for an ideal that the world around us actively works against.

There is also a persistent elitist and white bias embedded in healthism. Healthism requires access: time, money, education, physical ability. Therefore ‘best health’ is disproportionately available to white, middle class, able-bodied, often childfree, university-educated individuals in the Global North.

Targeting and marketing commercial health products and services to these audiences makes perfect commercial sense – we should go where the money is, right? But when this is done without care or reflection, marketing can unintentionally deepen the divide between those who have and those who have not. That’s where smart marketing teams are needed.

Striking the right tone

Healthism is a real and dominant mindset and ignoring it would be naive. But designing products, pricing and marketing that ride only the healthism wave pushes brands towards a premium, high-agency positioning by default. This can alienate large numbers of potential users who simply cannot act in the ways the messaging assumes for very real reasons.

This is also where competitive gaps appear. Brands like Whoop, Garmin, Oura and 8 Sleep all market themselves to higher-means customers, intentionally or otherwise. In doing so, they leave space for lower-cost or more context-aware alternatives to move in and scale quickly.

The issue is not the audience, but whether that choice is being made knowingly and then used to direct marketing and positioning.

Where marketing goes wrong

A good example of this tension can be seen in 8 Sleep’s messaging:

“If you wouldn’t ignore credit card debt, don’t ignore sleep debt. Learn more how to not ignore yours. [sic]”

We get the point, and it speaks clearly to a particular type of consumer, but the implication is that people are ignoring sleep because they are negligent or uninformed. In reality many people are not ignoring sleep at all, they just can’t get enough of the stuff. They’re knackered but are still working too much, have kids that wake them up, are doing two jobs or live in poor housing, deal with mould, noise or overcrowding. They’re doing their best to sleep but just can’t get there.

Sure, many of those people are not the intended audience for a premium product like 8 Sleep, and that’s fine. But the framing still flattens the problem in a way that implies sleep is simply a matter of personal prioritisation, rather than something shaped by broader structural factors that a mattress cannot solve.

This is where healthism, when used uncritically, just isn’t right.

The same applies to business models, particularly in preventative health. Flo is a useful example here. If you want genuinely valuable, evidence-based insight articles, you have to pay for them. From a revenue perspective, that makes sense. From a health perspective, it drives me mad and raises questions about whether foundational health knowledge should sit behind a paywall at all.

When generic insight itself becomes a premium feature, especially in areas like reproductive or preventative health, what kind of message is Flo sending? If they’re not careful, it’s ‘you need to be able to afford to know’.

Drawing the line

I’m hopefully making it evident here that the problem is not healthism itself, nor is it premium pricing or targeting high-agency consumers. The problem is unexamined use of healthism as the default lens for product development and marketing, particularly when brands imply levels of control that don’t exist for many people.

Ethical health marketing doesn’t reject aspiration, it just doesn’t pretend that health exists in a vacuum. It recognises that life isn’t always plain-sailing and speaks to real life challenges as well as painting the picture of an empowered, aspirational future. And in product marketing, we need to design products that allow for friction, inconsistency and constraint and position progress as valuable, rather than perfection being the MVP.

From a commercial perspective, brands that understand the limits of what they can reasonably promise tend to build stronger, more durable relationships with users, and avoid positioning themselves as the answer to problems they just can’t fix. No one trusts that. Or if they do at first, that trust won’t last.

Healthism will continue to shape health tech, so the real opportunity is for leaders and marketers to engage with it consciously, and to build products and narratives that are ambitious – heck yes – but without being reductive or dismissive of real life.