Mainstream wellness is predicated on the belief that the more data, the better. More and more of us are tracking glucose, monitoring sleep quality and logging every run on Strava. It’s no longer enough to wake up in the morning and know whether we’ve had a good night’s sleep based on how tired we feel; now we’re encouraged to rely on a device-calculated sleep score. And yet, a revolt is underway: a growing cohort is rebelling against optimisation and moving towards something more intuitive, embodied and carefree.

Where the industry largely sees data as king, the “unquantified self” movement deems feeling the ultimate metric. Its adherents still train in gyms and live in chaotic cities, but want to align themselves as closely with nature as possible. It’s why you might see them barefoot and grounding in London Fields, or flowing through the streets of Silver Lake and Williamsburg in a pair of Hart Workshop or Vivobarefoot sneakers (they desire to be as close to barefoot as possible, naturally). They opt for beef liver supplements and organic cotton over synthetic gels and high-performance apparel.

It all comes down to the belief that not everything that contributes to wellbeing can be tracked. Expanding the category of wellness to include the subjective and intangible, they consider energy, consciousness and what “feels true.” With this comes an interest in books by self-help guru Eckhart Tolle and Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet, as well as curiosity about topics like non-dualism, ego-death and manifestation. They don’t want to quantify their wellness or themselves.

It’s no surprise we got here – every trend ultimately inspires its counter-trend. “I think it’s a very natural reaction to everything being maxxed,” says Tom Garland, brand strategist and founder of edition+partners. Garland has long researched wellness culture and its consumers: he was the first to identify the wellness anarchist archetype. “All of these things get really exciting for a bit, [but] over time, and at a quickening rate, people get quite tired of that. It’s just a natural point on its own trend cycle.”

The backlash against over-optimisation has been long simmering, as predicted in the Global Wellness Summit’s 2026 Trend Report. Jessica Smith, brand strategist and author of the report, tells Dazed, “what first stood out to me wasn’t people rejecting wellness. It was the growing sense that wellness itself was becoming a form of self-surveillance.” The ditching of wearables, decline in HIIT and growing discourse around wellbeing burnout, hypervigilance and orthosomnia [an unhealthy obsession with achieving perfect sleep] were all signals, Smith observes, of a shift away from quantification.

“If optimisation and discipline is rigid and moralistic, then the antithesis of that is very [much] trusting your own intuition,” says Tatum Brandt, wellness and fitness creative strategist whose reel on “intuition-based wellness” and the “somatic era” garnered much discussion. “[It’s] I trust myself. I trust my own experience. I trust my own body, and I’m going to take my health back into my own hands.” The “unquantified self” set embodies this. From the rise in reiki and qi gong, to somatic healing and spinal energetics, signs of its resonance are all over the internet. The search term “intuitive wellness” is up 2,021 per cent globally this past year, per Google Search data.

For some, the obsession with tracking has always felt incongruous with wellness. “Wearables represent what I think is ultimately wrong with our society at the moment,” Olivia, 32, tells Dazed. “People have completely lost the ability to listen to what their body is telling them, to go inwards and to listen to their body’s natural cues.” While her friends happily tracked steps and logged runs, Olivia vehemently refrained. For her, data added “pressure”, turning wellbeing into something to optimise instead of nurture and support.

This was also the case for Natasha Glasgow. A professional in the beauty industry, she broke up with her Apple Watch when she realised the data was having the opposite effect than intended. “It made me feel really unwell,” she says. Each notification was a trigger, another reminder that she wasn’t doing enough, which she “already felt constantly.” Rather than helping them become more embodied and in touch with themselves, many people feel the modern wellness industry has prevented them from listening to their bodies.

The “unquantified self” movement aims to challenge this. And while this faction may appear marginal when compared to the $6.8 trillion global wellness industry, its influence is already permeating across the landscape. Josh Lynott, ultra-marathon runner and poet, colloquially named the “Running Rumi,” has read poetry at events with Nike, On Running and Mental Athletic. His ethos, visible across his socials and brand, Notes Running, is one of slowing down and enjoying “the small little moments.” From this lens, running is about experience and feeling, not optimisation and performance.

And yet for all the benefits the “unquantified self” espouses, it also raises its own set of questions, particularly as brands are increasingly getting involved. While the foundational principles – intuition and listening to your body – are in theory free, the lifestyle around it is not always cheap. Organic produce and “high vibrational” products are sold at a premium. Tickets for the recent Healf HX26 “anti-optimisation” summit (attended by wellness figures like biohacker Dave Asprey, Dr Barbara Sturm, and Naomi Campbell) cost up to £725 for two days and hosted wellness brands promoting everything from red light panels and creatine to anti-ageing gummies for children.

The movement's ethos risks turning subjective experience into its own kind of dogma. As Brandt observes, elevating personal experience, whether your own or an influencer’s, can become dangerous where it supersedes science. There’s also an undeniable element of aesthetic performance to the “unquantified self” movement. Wearing Hart Workshop trainers and NAGNATA knitwear while waxing lyrical about “high vibrations” risks turning into a cliche, a uniform to signal that one is part of an exclusive it crowd.

For now, though, the unquantified self crowd aren’t worried about. “I’m not worried about that,” says Grayson Hart, founder of Hart Workshop. “It’s not my place to judge,” says, Grayson Hart, founder of Hart Workshop. “All I’m expressing is what I feel is true to us all: that we’re all born complete. It’s just an illusion that makes us think otherwise.”