Until three years ago, I wore two bands on my wrists. One was an Apple Watch, forever nagging me to close my rings—steps, calories, movement, a small guilt machine strapped to my arm. The other was a Whoop, which each morning told me how my night had gone, whether I was ‘recovered’ enough to push hard that day, and what my heart rate variability had done while I slept.
I had been optimizing for years by then. I’d wake up and, before I asked myself a single question about how I actually felt, I’d check the band to be told how I felt.
It took a yoga teacher training for me to notice the absurdity. The only instrument I actually needed was the one I’d stopped consulting: myself. So I cancelled the Whoop. I traded the Apple Watch for a basic Fitbit that does exactly two things—counts my steps and tells me the time—and I started waking up and asking myself where I was, emotionally, mentally and physically, before any device got a vote.
Turns out, I’m not alone—and the signals are now everywhere.
The over-optimization backlash
This January, the Global Wellness Summit’s annual Future of Wellness report named the defining shift of the year an over-optimization backlash.
After years of the market being rewritten by longevity clinics, diagnostics and an avalanche of wearables, it argues that the most human parts of us are reasserting themselves—that we are hardwired to seek pleasure and joy, moving away from measurement and self-surveillance and back toward meaning, release and self-expression. I’ve been making this argument from conference stages for years; this report is another signal that this trend is only getting stronger.
The numbers underneath this are not soft either. Circana finds that 60% of U.S. consumers are actively trying to manage stress, and that 67% practice some form of mental or emotional self-care—up from 59% in 2022. The consumer healthcare market has reached $107 billion. And Circana pegs the buying power of well-being-focused consumers at more than $1.1 trillion in the U.S. alone.
Stress has quietly become a line item in the household budget. Calm has become a category.
Here is where most of the market misreads the moment. They see these numbers and reach for the old instruments—conversion rates, NPS, engagement dashboards, the boardroom equivalent of the wrist strap I threw out—and conclude the answer is to bolt on a wellness line.
That is the small reading, and it is wrong on both counts. The signal isn’t ‘sell wellness.’ It’s that emotional outcome has quietly become the competitive battleground, and almost no one has a framework for competing on it.
The Emotional Economy isn’t a category
It’s a lens. Every brand, in every sector, is either adding to a person’s stress or quietly subtracting from it. A bank can remove the dread from a money decision or manufacture it. A B2B software platform can turn a confusing workflow into something that builds quiet confidence, or it can spike cortisol before 9 a.m. A grocery run can be a chore or, with one unexpected moment of delight, a small upgrade to someone’s afternoon.
The question was never whether you’re a wellness brand. It’s whether you’re charging a stress tax or paying a Joy Dividend.
The brands that win design deliberately for the neurochemistry of feeling better: serotonin for calm and safety, oxytocin for connection and the sense of being seen, dopamine for anticipation and reward, endorphins for release and relief. None of that requires a category change. It requires intention.
Optimize for the right thing
So here’s the reframe for any leadership team still chasing the old dials: you don’t have to stop optimizing. You have to optimize for the right thing.
The companies pulling ahead aren’t the ones squeezing another point out of conversion or engagement—they’re the ones treating how a customer feels as the number that actually compounds. That’s the most durable competitive advantage left on the table, and almost no one is building for it on purpose.
I’ve spent years turning that gap into a method—grounded in empirical brand studies and neuroscience—that gives any company a way to optimize for joy on purpose, at every touchpoint, and earn the kind of loyalty that compounds.
If that’s the advantage you want to build, I lay out the full framework in The Joy Dividend. I also speak about it to leadership teams and run brand joy-stress audits: a structured look at where an experience is quietly taxing customers and where it could be paying them back instead. Start a conversation if you want to see where your brand sits on the matrix.