Since October, hundreds of Londoners have been gathering in parks across the city not to walk or have a picnic — but to scream.
What began as a simple idea from former corporate lawyer Mon Sharx, inspired by the scream clubs she saw going viral in the US, quickly drew more than 600 people to an inaugural session. The concept has since evolved into Scream Squad, a community-driven club where collective yelling replaces the aesthetic Pilates sets and matcha rituals that have come to define contemporary wellness culture.
Sharx, who first tried primal scream therapy on her therapist’s recommendation in 2023, says the practice releases suppressed emotion through uninhibited vocal expression. Rooted in ancient ritual, but long dismissed as fringe, it offered her a clear alternative to consumer-led wellness. “I was interested in moving away from buying wellness and more toward feeling wellness,” she says — a sentiment that resonates as traditional self-optimization practices become increasingly exhausting.
Indeed, for the past decade, wellness has been defined by optimization. Consumers have been encouraged to protein-max, track macros, biohack sleep and monitor every bodily function through an ever-expanding ecosystem of wearable technology. Oura rings promise better health through data. Full-body scans like Prenuvo offer early detection and control.
In response, a growing number of consumers are turning away from hyper-quantification and toward ancient healing systems that prioritize balance over performance. On TikTok, practices once dismissed as niche are gaining traction at scale: needle-free acupressure technique ear seeding, rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), has gone viral in recent months, while somatic therapies, including breathwork and primal scream sessions, are increasingly reframed as tools for nervous system regulation. Even in fashion, the shift is visible. When Amelia Gray and Rachel Sennott appeared on covers of The Face and Perfect Magazine, respectively, with red circular marks on their backs, they signaled the growing visibility of cupping, a TCM practice used to support circulation.
To mark the shift, The Future Laboratory coined the term “rhythmic health” — predicted to be one of the defining wellness trends of the year, according to the forecasting agency’s 2026 Future Forecast report. The framework positions the body and the mind not as something to optimize, but as something to align with, encouraging consumers to work with natural cycles like circadian rhythms, hormone fluctuations, seasonal change, breath patterns and nervous system states, rather than pushing the body through productivity tools.
“We are finally recognizing that the body regulates through nature, not force,” says intuitive healer Sarah Bradden and founder of The Bradden Method, a nervous system-led practice rooted in TCM, acupuncture, somatic regulation and energetic medicine. “Human biology is rhythmic by design — circadian cycles, hormonal waves, seasonal shifts, breath, digestion, nervous system oscillation. Ancient healing systems were built around this truth. They don’t override the body; they listen to it.”
Burnout as the catalyst
The rise of rhythmic health is inseparable from the collapse of optimization. “The increased demand [in ancient healing practices] is a direct response to burnout,” says Bradden. “Biohacking promised control, but it delivered exhaustion. Wellness tech told us to track everything, but tracking didn’t make us feel better, it just gave us more data to stress about.” After years of living against natural rhythms, whether through artificial light, constant stimulation or uninterrupted productivity, Bradden argues that many people are now “dysregulated at a cellular level”. Somatic and traditional practices, she says, resonate precisely because they restore what the modern world has stripped away.
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