In 2025 we heal ourselves from the inside out. Will technology help us or hurt us?

It’s never been easier to get under your skin, but are we going deep enough?

Wearable health trackers such as smart watches and smart rings continue to advance their research into how our bodies work. Continuous glucose monitors – which officially hit the US “mainstream” wellness market in 2024 with a non-diabetic license – offer an even more intimate look at our metabolic health, elevated yet ignored aspect of health for the majority of Americans.

But as we fill our carts with the latest technology and shell out money for apps in the name of good health, are we actually getting healthier? c some cases, yes. But it’s possible, or even likely, that what we most need to track, we still can’t. At least not at this point.

Dr. Dave Rabin, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, has spent 20 years studying stress and what he calls “chronic burnout.” He has experience in non-traditional therapeutic spaces such as psychedelic research and is currently the medical director of Apollo Neuroa wearable device company that aims to improve your well-being by sending vibrating pulses to your skin. His work leads him to believe that unprocessed trauma is at the root of most of our health problems, mental and physical. He describes unprocessed trauma as at least one intense or meaningfully challenging experience, after which you receive no support.

According to Rabin, the way most people currently use technology is doing us no favors, and more work is needed to reach the goal of getting beneath the surface of our health problems. Here’s why: the intent and purpose behind much of the consumer technology and apps on the market is to sell us stuff and “distract” us from our feelings. Additionally, we may be mired in raw stress response after stress response under a pile of notifications from our smartphones, health tracking apps, and everything else that dominates our space and time. Yes, even in the name of good health.

“We end up training ourselves to be more reactive to stress — people aren’t taught to use it safely,” Rabin said. “Healing is all about feeling your feelings, facing your pain and not avoiding it.”

The argument can be made that we encounter pain (physical or mental) every time we open an app or strap on a wearable designed to help us monitor our health or improve our well-being. But truly being “healthier” requires connecting our own dots and making sure we’re paying attention to wellness trends that actually serve our version of “good”—whatever that is.

As we look ahead to a healthier 2025, we must continue to ask whether our technology is actively enhancing our lives or taking us away from it. We should also consider asking less questions about existing technology to help us be healthier and more questions how and whether to use it in the first place. We probably already have a good toolkit for better health built in.

“Most people think of their smartphones and technology as something that stresses them out, but that’s not what technology is supposed to do,” Rabin said. “Technology should serve humanity.”

Here are some of the hottest trends worth watching in 2025, and how to make them count for your health.

Healthy brain, healthy ageing: will technology connect the dots?

Interest in “healthy ageing,” a general term for spending more time in health rather than just living long, was more than a buzzword in 2024. – it was a whole movement. In 2025 we can expect healthy aging to enter more spaces such as supplementsbut one area we need to look at to keep up with Jones’ healthy aging is brain health. Dr. Daniel Friedmanneurologist at NYU Langone Health and director of the Division of Epilepsy, called advances in technology for brain health “an interesting area of ​​research,” but one that is not fully formed.

Specifically, Friedman pointed to research on how people use phones and consumer devices — how fast they type, how they interact with them, and even the complexity of the words they type — as “early predictors” of neurocognitive problems like dementia.

Dartmouth researchersfor example, developed an app called RealVision that tracks how users interact with their phone through eye movement and quick reaction time, potentially identifying dementia in the early days. Other studies published in 2024 also looked at information collected from smartphones, finding older adults at risk of dementia based on orientation (ie, navigating around) data.

It may take some time before technological advances hit consumer devices in a way that will actually benefit people’s lives in terms of practical health advice.

“You’d probably be angry and panicked if your phone said, ‘Hey, by the way, there’s a 20 percent risk of developing dementia in the next 10 years,'” Friedman said.

In the meantime, he emphasizes the importance of staying on top of modifiable health factors that we know can tip the scales in terms of dementia or brain health risk. They include getting adequate sleepto move your body regularly, to go for regular examinations for rumor and vision health to ensure your brain gets the kind of information it needs to stay busy and eat a nutritious diet.

Fuel for mind and body: a constant focus on nutrition

The importance of a well-rounded diet full of essential nutrients is as old as time, but in 2024. there has been a particular surge of interest in nutrition and heightened awareness around the idea of ​​’food as medicine’.

2025 will only build on it. This year, for example, we will see a revision of the US Dietary Guidelines, which will primarily be an eating pattern that has been proven to support a healthy heartwith limited intake of foods such as red meat and ultra-processed foods. The new guidelines emphasize plant-based proteins, such as beans and lentils, and vegetables and fruits.

Another area of ​​nutrition and overall health that will continue to evolve in 2025 is the gut microbiome. This field continues to gain momentum due to its connection to metabolic health, skin health, and more. Genetics, medications, and lifestyle factors all affect gut health, but the number one determining factor is nutrition and the foods we eat.

Federica Amati, clinical medicine researcher and chief nutritionist at the health sciences and home gut testing company ZOEtold us that upcoming research in the pipeline will help seal the deal in terms of people’s growing awareness of what they eat and how it affects their gut health (and therefore their overall health).

“We’re getting to a point where we can use gut microbiome data to understand what people are actually eating,” Amati said. An upcoming partnership between ZOE and Mass General Hospital will investigate potential links to specific strains of gut bacteria associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer in younger adults. The results could have huge implications for the growing number of people facing this diagnosis.

Gut health is also directly related to inflammation, which month after month continues to become not just a buzzword, but a necessary evil, which in many cases leads to or is accompanied by an autoimmune or chronic disease worse than necessary . Amati explained that inflammation is necessary to help us when we’re sick, protect ourselves from infection, or, in small amounts, in other daily bodily functions. The problem is when it becomes chronic and continues to simmer for months or years, and it is was associated with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and infertility.

“When we think about metabolic health conditions and when we think about chronic disease, inflammation is the fire that drives it,” she said. There is a direct link between overall health and solid nutrition as well minimizing inflammatory foods such as processed fats found in store-bought baked goods, alcohol and red meat, Amati gave examples. Fiber, as it happens, is good for the gut microbiome and anti-inflammatory.

Although it doesn’t have a screen and doesn’t fit our technical definition of technology, the increased focus on fiber and getting more of it in our diet through whole foods will only gain momentum in 2025.

“It’s not rocket science, but it’s not happening yet.”

Overall health: how to actually feel good in 2025

Rabin, who works with emotion regulation through his company, says the innovation in emotion regulating vagus nerve the booster space is likely in 2025. Perhaps more interestingly, Rabin says the technology in the near future will continue to close some of the loopholes in health that wearable data can create.

“You’re going to see more products coming out that will use closed-loop AI,” Rabin said.

This means that in the future we will see more health technologies that “create a signature” of our bodies, more directly describing what our health data looks like when we feel good and when we feel bad. This can be expanded upon Apollo and Oura Ring integrationwhich is now available to blend mind and body by combining rigorous health metrics such as heart rate variability with anxiety-calming properties.

Another factor to consider in 2025 is how you allow notifications into your life or how your consumer technology fits you. Dr. Ryan Sultanpsychiatrist who runs a bioinformatics lab at Columbia University, said one way to reduce stress around technology is to consider whether it’s helping you stay healthier. It seems simple enough, but the way apps are designed doesn’t always make it that intuitive.

“A lot of apps are really too notification-heavy,” Sultan said.

But should we rely on technology to help us get healthier in 2025? The answer may depend entirely on whether it actually helps us achieve our health goals by getting to the bottom of them. The idea that we should look at the root cause of disease from a more holistic view rather than being symptom-oriented is relatively new to Western medicine, but it is based on the healing practices of Eastern culture. For example, wellness practices like breathing continue to benefit and accumulating evidence for their potential role in anxiety management.

In 2025 we may have more technologies that promise to benefit our health, but that doesn’t mean they’re a panacea or that we should use them all. Although health technology is mass-produced and over-the-counter, health truly remains personal, and what you use to enhance it should be based on what’s best for your body. and mind

In other words, in a world full of things vying for every inch of our sight and square inch of our brain, we don’t just deserve to be picky. We owe it to our health.