Wellness in the USA, Part II: The Drivers of Wellness
The Wellness in the USA Dataset and the 4 Drivers of Wellness
Welcome to Track Changes by Ripple Research! Every week, we closely analyse an interesting global event or phenomenon, bringing you a data and analysis-backed perspective on critical public debates. Thank you for reading and subscribing, and we look forward to reading your comments and feedback!
In Part II of our series on Wellness, we examine the Wellness in the USA dataset and take a look at the 4 Drivers of Wellness (Sleep, Meditation, Fitness and Nutrition). The Wellness transition brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has been far-reaching, with both individuals and corporates experimenting with innovative ways of staying healthy and keeping anxiety at bay. In Part III, we look at Mental Health within the dataset.
Source: Pinterest
In Part I of our series on Wellness, we broke down the ‘churn’ in the Wellness industry and practices, both from the production and consumption sides. In Part II, we go into a macro overview of the Wellness in the USA dataset and look at some of the drivers of Wellness. The data suggests that Meditation and Fitness are the dominant drivers of Wellness, a finding that is borne out by our analysis of Wellness Apps in the upcoming Part IV of this series.
Wellness is a choice of lifestyle marked by a balance of the body, or physical wellness; the mind, or the social, emotional, and intellectual wellness; and the spirit, or spiritual wellness. Each of these three dimensions have multiple sub-categories driven by various factors. In order to better understand the pandemic-induced Wellness transition, we broke down these dimensions into four ‘Drivers’ of Wellness and then analysed the data to investigate trends and information points.
Our dataset consisted of over 4 million online conversations and over 2 million unique authors, both of which represented a sharp uptick over the previous three-month period (October to December 2020):
Image 1. Source: Internal Analysis
The point of note here is the 300% increase in conversation volume. This means that wellness – whether positively or negatively framed – is an important component of online interactions and mentions. As the pandemic approaches the one-year mark, people are talking more about wellness, marking it as a key domain of potential intervention. Moreover, the three sharp peaks in the graph (Image 2) are all associated with mental health-related social media impressions, backing up our findings on the relevance of mental health (analysed in Part III). Clearly, this is a conversation which has gained renewed importance, especially in light of the broader societal churn in the USA driven by gun violence, police overreach and a broader social justice movement. Critically, this shows that aspects of mental health are interlinked- conversations are driven by the pandemic, key public events and political interventions all at once.
We then narrowed down this large dataset, attempting to identify category-wise transitions in Wellness that were playing a critical role in changing the online and offline landscape of this broad domain. Our analysis uncovered the extent to which Sleep, Fitness, Meditation and Nutrition were being talked about during the pandemic, as well as the Net Sentiment (shown here on a scale of 50 for Positive and Negative) attached to these categories:
Source: Internal Analysis
It’s quite evident that Fitness and Meditation dominated American conversations around Wellness, with those two categories far outweighing the mention volume for Nutrition and Sleep. This corresponds directly to our own experiences: being boxed in with little opportunity for physical activity outdoors exacerbated feelings of anxiety and other, more serious mental health challenges, which we examine in Part III. The popularity of devices such as the Peloton and the spike in the use of Meditation apps such as Calm corresponded to these burgeoning crises, which required innovative, on-demand solutions in the absence of fitness centres, yoga classes or dance studios.
Americans clearly see the appeal of a two-pronged self-betterment approach: mental and physical. Although lockdown measures are no longer in full effect, the residual impact of fitness and exercise as a means to combat the monotony of the pandemic is evident. In both the leading macro trends, the net sentiment is positive, albeit to varying degrees. This means that the majority of the conversations are indicative of positive, constructive change in Fitness and Meditation. This would appear to be in line with their heightened importance as other activities which kept communities ticking were curbed. Nutrition is an area for potential intervention- the number of mentions on this topic are not far behind Meditation and Fitness, and its growth in relevance presents exciting opportunities. Sleep, while important, is not as relevant within this dataset- though it may become significant in the context of conversations around the mental health disorders.
The dataset shows three clear spikes in mention volume, which have distinct drivers themselves. The explanations behind peaks also go to show that mention volume in itself is not adequately informative: it’s critical to know the intention of producers and consumers of online information. In other words, Ripple’s High Tech meets High Touch approach helped make sense of the raw numbers. For example, Spike (A) resulted from the rapid spread of a campaign-related hashtag:
Image 2. Source: Internal Analysis.
A huge, often underreported consequence of the pandemic was its impact on mental health as social and financial structures and practices broke down. In fact, mental health was the ‘second pandemic’, causing widespread distress and anxiety and a corresponding rise in mention volume. As our analysis shows, Americans were vocal online about the struggles they were facing, giving public health authorities enough information to act on the drivers of the mental health crisis.
Stay tuned for Part III of the series, where we examine the mental health ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you liked this post, click Subscribe to receive more like it directly in your mail inbox! We’d love to hear your feedback and comments. Catch up with us over e-mail at ravi@rippleresearch.ai.