wellness

Staying in bed all day, rebranded as wellness. Named by TikTok, diagnosed by the newspapers, and gone before anyone had to defend it.

Abstaining from phones, sugar, music and other 'stimulation' for a day to reset one's reward system — the dopamine detox — a 2019 Silicon Valley practice, taken up by self-improvement YouTube, and criticised by neuroscientists for describing nothing that dopamine does. The record's entry for sitting in a room, branded.

Optimising sleep with every available accessory — mouth tape, magnesium, weighted blanket, sleep tracker, no screens, a specific pillow — until going to bed becomes a project. The '-maxxing' suffix applied to the one thing it should not be.

Treadmill at 12 per cent incline, 3 miles an hour, 30 minutes — 12-3-30 — a routine Lauren Giraldo posted in 2019 and re-posted on TikTok in 2020, after which every gym's treadmills were occupied by people walking uphill at the same speed. The record's entry for the workout that is three numbers.

Waking at five as a philosophy — the 5am club — from a self-help book into the morning-routine video, in which a man drinks water and journals and tells you about it. The record's entry for the hour as a virtue, and for the people who are, at five, simply awake.

Seventy-five days of two workouts, a gallon of water, a diet, ten pages of reading and a progress photo, with any slip resetting to day one — a 'mental toughness' programme that became a TikTok genre of day-count videos and a way to lose friends for two and a half months. The record's entry for the challenge as an identity.

Repeating digits — 11:11, 222, 444 — read as messages from the universe, a numerology idea decades old that TikTok's spirituality corner turned into a daily practice around 2020, and into a caption whenever a screenshot showed a matching timestamp. The record's entry for the belief that your phone clock is trying to tell you something.

A 3:52 a.m. wake-up, a banana peel rubbed on the face, an ice bath, a dunk in Saratoga water, all set to strings. Presented as a routine; received as a comedy. Spawned a thousand parodies and a spike in sales of one specific bottled water.