Opinion: How ‘Optimisation’ Hijacked Men’s Wellness

There’s a man in my gym who arrives every morning at 7 AM with a duffel bag that looks like a NASA mission kit. A continuous glucose monitor is attached to his arm, an Oura ring tracks his sleep, a wearable Whoop tracker measures his recovery. He drinks a health drink called “Athletic Greens,” and I often hear him in the changing rooms talking about saunas and ice baths, and how he’s tracking his testosterone levels through yet another new app. He is, by every metric that matters in 2025, the picture of masculine wellness.

He is also, I suspect, insufferable to be around.

Perhaps it’s not his fault. I’ve often wondered if traditional wellness failed men spectacularly. The industry built around wellness created a language and an aesthetic that spoke largely to women — soft lighting, flowing movements, performative vulnerability. Men saw spaces that felt fundamentally foreign to their socialisation.

The numbers don’t lie: according to the Center for Disease Control women are more than twice as likely as men to practice yoga, make up 65 percent of meditation app users (per the National Library of Medicine) and men represent only 36 percent of therapy referrals, said the UK-based Mental Health Foundation. But perhaps men needed wellness more: They were dying earlier, drinking more, connecting less.

So the business of wellness pivoted. It gave men data, competition and performance. We rebranded self-care as “life hacking” and meditation as “cognitive enhancement.” We turned wellness into a tracker.

And it worked. Sort of.

In our rush to solve the very real problem of male disengagement from self-care, we’ve perhaps created something far more insidious; a new form of masculine performance anxiety dressed up as optimisation.

This man I see in my gym crystallised this thought I’d been having for some time: Are we looking at the unintended consequences of our campaign to get men feeling well?

The New Wellness Gurus

The new male gurus are not spiritual teachers or therapists, but podcasters: Joe Rogan discussing ice baths and sensory deprivation tanks, Andrew Huberman breaking down the neuroscience of morning sunlight, and Tim Ferriss optimising everything from sleep to sex to supplements.

These men can talk, that’s clear, but what they created is performative masculinity with a lab coat.

In the span of a decade, the masculine ideal shifted from the strong, stoic type to the quantified, biohacked super-human that is injecting fat into their face. The new masculine archetype doesn’t just work out, he tracks his heart rate variability (HRV), monitors his sleep stages and can discuss the metabolic benefits of cold thermogenesis with scientific precision.

I watch men in my social media feeds perform optimisation like a competitive sport. They post their Whoop recovery scores, share screenshots of their glucose curves and document their 4 AM workout routines with the dedication of war correspondents. They’ve turned self-improvement into self-surveillance, another arena for masculine competition.

The language is clinical, using words like “protocols” and “stacks”, and there is little room for emotion or to care for the self as a being, not a machine. The irony feels staggering. We created a more masculine form of wellness to address male mental health, loneliness and disconnection. Instead, we’ve given men new ways to feel inadequate. Not sleeping optimally? Your HRV is trash. Can’t afford a $500 red light panel? You’re not serious about recovery. Don’t have time for a 90-minute morning routine? You lack discipline.

We’ve replaced “be a man” with “be an optimised man," and somehow convinced ourselves this was progress.

The Path Forward

As a meditation teacher, I’ve spent years building content and businesses in this space, so I have to acknowledge: I may be part of the problem. The optimisation mindset is so deeply embedded that even critiquing it, I find myself reaching for better metrics, smarter frameworks and more efficient solutions.

But maybe the real issue isn’t that optimisation culture exists — it’s that we’ve made it the only system available to men. Historically, men had multiple overlapping development frameworks: sports teams that taught performance and teamwork, military service that combined discipline with purpose, religion that espoused community responsibility. Even in secular circles, living in smaller, closer-knit communities where folks shared resources and opened their homes to one another created a sense of purpose.

I’ve long believed that this represents a massive opportunity for brands and institutions willing to think bigger. There’s white space for offerings that combine performance pressure with mentorship, competition with character development, individual growth with team accountability. Men want to excel at something meaningful, not just measurable.

Someone or something who is going to figure out how to serve men’s actual development needs more than just one narrow slice of them. The question is whether it will be existing wellness brands expanding their scope or entirely new institutions built from scratch.

We’ve come a long way getting men to care about their health. The opportunity now is teaching them to care about everything else.

Manoj Dias is a meditation teacher, brand consultant and co-founder of the mindfulness studio and app, Open.

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