A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

As humans have undergone personal digital transformations, living omni-channel and appreciating the conveniences that being switched-on can bring, there’s a growing demand for “analog wellness.”

That’s one of ten trends covered in the Global Wellness Institute’s (GWI) report on 2025 Wellness Trends, and one I want to dig into early this year as consumers are facing growing challenges to our privacy, social bullying, and workforce stressors compelling many employees to spend too many hours in digital isolation and loneliness.

To paint the larger landscape of and drivers underpinning analog wellness, I will weave several important reports and studies together, all but one of which is new in 2025. These insights come from teams working at Accenture, Deloitte, GWI, and Ipsos, a data note from Professor Scott Galloway, plus a bonus essay from Fast Company. 

First, a trip in the way-back machine to 2017, wiping the digital dust off of a Deloitte report I cited at the time of publication and frequently since then as the research brought me the useful and smart phrase, “a concerned embrace of technology.”

That’s what Deloitte observed in the firm’s 2017 Global Mobile Consumer Survey report, subtitled, “the dawn of the next era in mobile.”

In last year’s update on consumer technology, the Deloitte team wrote that consumers, “were trying to manage the drawbacks of too much tech—including tech fatigue and worries about well-being and data security….with growing awareness of the harms of digital life,”

including worries about data-security risks and location- and behavior-tracking, with “hacking and tracking” on the rise.

I follow Professor Scott Galloway in my Instagram feed as he is, for me, a trusted source on information into Our Digital Lives. This week he posted this chart on U.S. adult cell phone usage and habits (2023 data), telling us that 9 in 10 people check their phone within the first 10 minutes of waking up.

Furthermore, 7 in 10 U.S. adults have texted someone while in the same room with that person.

Finally, six in 10 people admit to saying they were “addicted to their phone.”

For some of these people, that phone-addiction is a self-diagnosis of a mental health challenge. One antidote?

Analog Wellness, a trend cited #1 of 10 in the latest Global Wellness Trends Report on The Future of Wellness: 2025 Trends.

As coined by Beth McGroarty in the report, analog wellness is the mainstreaming of digital detoxing, logging off and “analog-ing on” for and with retro-, pre-digital tech, hobbies and other off-line, in-person and in-nature experiences for our well-being.

Examples of the retro-tech “renaissance” as Beth discusses the phenomenon are retail stores curating and selling dumb phones, old school cameras like the Pentax 17 which uses film, and an analog technology shop in Vienna called Supersense which features restored vintage typewriters and classes teaching vinyl recording and bookbinding. On the hospitality front, you can book an “all-analog guest room” and sleep in this refurbished Viennese palazzo.

My own version of this shop can be found in Tampa, Florida — The Paper Seahorse, from whom I have taken virtual classes via Zoom and, in real life in their shop based in an historic bungalow, sells vintage typewriters and hosts in-person journaling salons.

From a business and policy point of view, the analog wellness trend impacts all aspects of every day life and living beyond health/care and wellness — reshaping technology, consumer goods and fashion, travel, home design, real estate, and public policy.

Another riff on this trend comes from Accenture’s latest Life Trends 2025 report, an annual update on consumer trends which is a perennial go-to for me in ongoing scenario planning work.

Among the five trends in this year’s report, Accenture points to a movement towards Social Rewilding — where peoples’ response to too much digital in daily life inspires folks to, “engage with the world in meaningful ways, finding textural experiences that connect them with their environment and each other.”

Globally, people report doing more of some physical activities in the past year — with nearly 50% of consumers spending time outdoors, in nature; nearly one-half more frequently hanging out with friends “in real life;” nearly half shopping in physical grocery stores more often; and nearly one-third reading physical books or magazines more. (I say more on this books phenomenon below).

I added further insights on this phenomenon in the past week attending a session with Ipsos on How Trump Reshapes the World for Business.

In Ipsos’s discussion, they explained that President Trump (#47) “promises a blitz of change.” Amidst lots of uncertainty (really, uncertainties), “Americans are likely to remain deeply polarized,” with one response being that, “in the face of a world that feels threatening and overwhelming, people are focusing on one thing they can control — themselves.

We can then connect the dots to conscientious health, Ipsos’s angle on that self-control impact. “Health is becoming more holistic, as most of us globally feel that we need to do more for our physical as well as our mental wellness….The interconnectedness of health with other systems, such as nutrition and technology, is also being examined,” Team Ipsos explains in their report on the consumer survey data. I share one of the charts with you here, focused on Ipsos’s consumer look into health (fielded in December 2024).

The Check-In….on analog wellness:  As it turns out, we love (and benefit from) our hybrid lives. We want omni-channel convenience and access, and the kind of personalization just-in-time an AI-embedded data ecosystem might serve up — if built with privacy-, ethics-, and trust-by-design.

Bit most health consumers still want face-to-face interactions for health care, wellness, and mental health services, the Accenture Life Trends survey found — health/care being the top category where people want in-person, in-real-life encounters.

Most of us also still want to grocery shop in person (like me, a committed Slow Food-Slow Cook loving home keeper who loves to hand-select produce and chat with cheese- and fish-mongers at the food store).

There’s another category to watch for that is signaling analog-growth in peoples’ retail lives: the bookstore, which was all but left for dead, commercially speaking, over a decade ago.

If you’re a bibliophile like me, you will savor this essay in Fast Company published this week about Barnes & Noble’s “bookstore revival:”

“2025 marks a new era for Barnes & Noble and other bookstores thanks to a few factors, including digital fatigue, TikTok’s #BookTok, the loneliness epidemic, and a rise in so-called third spaces.”

Jennifer Mattson writes that,

“With loneliness and isolation at an all-time high, people are returning to these third places, including bookstores, because they are free and safe environments stocked with reading material, and often coffee and cold drinks—which draws in more visitors (this is why many newer bookstores have added a coffee shop or café to help make the store more inviting). Bookstores also offer a way to be around like-minded people who have similar interests. That’s why, around the country, niche bookstores—romance bookstores, in particular—are also booming.”

One of my favorite bookstores is Taschen in Brussels, Belgium. It is, for me, that third space that is also an art gallery and a place to have great conversations with those like-minded people Jennifer writes about….where I can “socially re-wild,” live my analog life, and relish gorgeously-produced printed books in a colorful shop.

Welcome to analog wellness.