The Wellness Industry Has a 50% Failure Rate. It Just Never Measured It.
Meditation has had a good PR run. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who says meditation isn't good for you. The same is true for other wellness practices. Breathwork and ice baths have both had more than their five seconds of fame. Yet, can you be sure it's working for you? And have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that maybe it isn't? You're right to question. The wellness industry has a 50% failure rate. It just never measured it.
IMIN is a smartphone app that reads your nervous system and tells you exactly what it needs. It uses rPPG* technology – analyzing subtle physiological changes in your face via your phone’s camera. After you do one of the many wellness practices, you measure how it performed. I built it because I got tired of watching people fail at techniques that were never right for them in the first place.
The measuring part is crucial. In IMIN's early testing phase, across 1,000+ sessions with pre and post biometric measurement, randomly assigned techniques produced no meaningful improvement in 47% of cases, and 20% got worse. This metric sounds surprising, but it really isn't. In fact, I see it reflected in the research of other wellness tools too. Most of the time a wellness technique would be "proven" effective for 50% of the participants. What about the other 50%? Do we just ignore the ones that need it most?
The failure is no reflection on the wellness technique itself. I'm not going to raise an issue with the millennia of spiritual teachers who have suggested meditation. But I do know that timing matters. When IMIN measures your state and your daily context, things like caffeine, sleep, and mental health, 85% show meaningful improvement after the appropriately matched technique, and nobody gets worse. When IMIN knows your history, that number climbs to 98%. The difference between 47% and 98% is not a better technique. It's the right technique, for the right nervous system, at the right time.
Perhaps 100 years ago, we were all fairly regulated and meditation was the way into stillness, peace and spiritual clarity. In 2026, for many people, the nervous system's set point is simply too dysregulated to make the shift from panicked to peaceful. It is like trying to slow a car down that is going 100 mph with the brakes out. Forcing it to come to a standstill isn't going to be a pretty sight.
Similarly, if you force the body to calm down through the wrong wellness technique at the wrong time, it will push back and you will be in the coin flip of the group of people where the technique didn't work, or even made you worse. This isn't something only IMIN's data shows. There is a significant body of research that has identified what is called "meditation induced adverse effects." These include anxiety (the very thing you're trying to reduce!), emotional flooding, and in rare cases psychosis.
I’m not surprised by the data, because I've witnessed this in my own life and in my community. I received the following email from a long time family friend, who read one of my early newsletters about IMIN:
"For years meditation worked for me, literally, like a charm. Then it didn't, being disciplined, I tried to stick with it to no avail. I adhered blindly to my meditation discipline until it became a trap, holding me without gentleness or meaning. Ugh! …while meditation helped me realize tremendous spiritual and mental growth, so did stopping it. Many of my peers have expressed similar experiences. For most of us, this realization happened only after months, sometimes years, of fruitless effort."
Having known this wonderful woman for many years, I know these years were also the years that she was facing tremendous pressure in her personal life. Knowing what I know now, I see meditation didn’t fail her because it isn’t a great tool. It worked when she was mostly regulated in life but failed when the body needed other tools to make such a large downshift.
The data backs her up, but I fear that this confession would sound wrong to many. Meditation must work! Is the battle cry. We've been led to believe it is king. And yet the question remains, is it? In every other industry a product with a 47% failure rate would be in crisis. Wellness just tells you to try harder.
It's not that meditation is bad. It may just not be the right medicine for the moment.
It's not that you're broken. It's that no one bothered to check whether the tool matched your nervous system state.
IMIN does. And when it matches to your needs, the body responds.
New here? Read the story behind IMIN.
rPPG* (remote photoplethysmography) -- a non-contact technique for measuring physiological signals using a camera to detect subtle color changes in skin caused by blood volume pulse variations as the heart beats. It's distinct from PPG (photoplethysmography), used by wearables such as Oura and Whoop, which requires a physical sensor (e.g., a pulse oximeter) touching the skin.
How rPPG works:
A camera captures video of a person's face or skin
Algorithms extract tiny color fluctuations (especially in the green channel) from regions of interest
Signal processing isolates the pulse waveform from noise (motion, lighting changes)
Physiological metrics are derived from that waveform
