Mental health is being reframed as ‘mental fitness’, while stress regulation and social connection are added to the prescription list
The US non-profit Global Wellness Institute (GWI) published its summary of nine trends in lifestyle medicine for 2026 on April 6.
The list, produced by the Lifestyle Medicine Initiative, starts from the assessment that lifestyle interventions are moving beyond their supporting role in treatment to become a first-line option. It also shows the place meditation and stress regulation occupy within that shift.
The initiative is co-chaired by Dr Melissa Sundermann of the US and Professor Sunil Kumar of the UK.
From support to first-line treatment
The direction is clear from the first item. GWI states unequivocally that lifestyle medicine is no longer an add-on treatment. Evidence-based lifestyle interventions are becoming the main treatment for cardiometabolic disease, mental health, musculoskeletal health and care for cancer survivors, it says.
Prescribing function, not time
The second and fourth items highlight a change in how the body is treated. The focus is shifting from how many minutes someone exercises to functional capacity, strength, balance, maximal oxygen uptake and mobility. Resistance training and cardiorespiratory fitness have become essential components of healthy ageing. Longevity medicine is also increasingly treating lifestyle medicine as its fundamental foundation, with diet quality, physical activity, sleep, stress management, social connection and a sense of purpose identified as key drivers of healthspan.
In diet, the shift away from examining individual nutrients continues, with an emphasis on minimally processed, fibre-rich, plant-focused diets. Behaviour change that addresses cooking skills, cultural appropriateness and the food environment together was identified as a key challenge.
From mental health to mental fitness
The fifth item is the one most closely connected to meditation. GWI says discussion of mental health is shifting towards the term ‘mental fitness’. The concept includes stress regulation, recovery, purpose and connection, and is treated as something to manage in daily life rather than only as a problem to address when difficulties arise. It is being used to support treatment adherence, performance, resilience and overall wellbeing, the report says.
The sixth item, sleep and circadian rhythms, follows the same logic. As sleep rises to the status of a foundational pillar, clinical attention is turning to circadian alignment, light exposure, sleep duration, mitigating the effects of shift work and screening for sleep disorders.
Treating loneliness as a modifiable risk
The seventh item is social connection. As loneliness and social isolation are treated as modifiable health risks, formats such as group visits, shared medical appointments and exercise groups are becoming more common. Meditation groups and yoga classes can therefore be understood as mechanisms for building relationships, rather than merely as individual practices.
The eighth item focuses on healthcare professionals themselves. It proposes treating burnout prevention, resilience and sustainable performance as evidence-based behaviours to be prescribed to clinicians in the same way as they are to patients. The ninth and final item highlights the use of artificial intelligence and digital tools to integrate wearables, remote monitoring, tests, imaging and patient-reported data to support personalised lifestyle prescriptions.
Questions for Korea’s meditation scene
The trend list contains no separate statistical figures. It is closer to a document setting out concepts and directions. Even so, the movement to bring stress regulation, social connection and sleep into clinical language is relevant to Korea’s meditation sector. Overseas, efforts to analyse meditation more systematically from a scientific perspective are highly active. In Korea, however, research in this area remains limited, and securing research funding for such work is itself difficult. Of course, science cannot explain or help us understand everything about meditation. But a scientific approach is especially important if modern people are to be persuaded logically and encouraged to put it into practice.