Why Workplace Wellness Programs Fail and How Identity, Environment and Purpose Fix It

The Law of Sustainment: Why Lasting Change Requires Identity, Environment and Wisdom

Globally, employee wellbeing programs are no longer a fringe benefit. They are a full industry. Recent market analyses estimate the global corporate wellness market at roughly fifty to sixty five billion United States dollars in 2023 to 2024, with projections to exceed one hundred billion United States dollars over the next decade as more organisations invest in physical health, mental health and lifestyle programs for staff. These programs sit inside a much larger wellness economy that reached more than six trillion United States dollars in 2023 and is expected to keep expanding.

In the United States, workplace wellness is now standard rather than exceptional. More than eighty percent of large firms offer some form of wellness program and about eighty three percent of large firms report a structured wellbeing initiative. These programs touch more than fifty million workers and are marketed as ways to reduce medical spending, increase productivity and improve wellbeing. Employers are spending billions collectively, and many report that they see value in lower absenteeism, better morale and improved retention. Some industry reports claim a return on investment of three to six dollars for every dollar spent, mainly through reduced health care costs and compensation claims, although independent academic work often finds that hard financial returns are modest or non significant in the short term.

The scientific evidence is mixed in a very revealing way. Rigorous evaluations show that wellness programs can improve some self reported health behaviours and mental health symptoms, especially when they focus on stress management and basic lifestyle skills. However, several high quality trials have found little or no impact on hard outcomes such as long term clinical markers, health care costs or objective productivity within the first eighteen months. Recent studies of workplace mental health initiatives also show a gap between the number of programs on paper and the value employees actually feel they receive, suggesting many initiatives do not yet address real stressors in the work environment.

In other words, the industry is large and growing, but it is still leaving a huge amount of potential on the table. Most programs deliver short term motivation and some helpful skills, yet they sit on the surface of behaviour. They rarely touch identity, they do not redesign the light, sound and electromagnetic environment people work in, and they seldom engage purpose or meaning. As a result, they get a burst of engagement and a bump in survey scores, but they do not fundamentally change how a person’s nervous system, mitochondria and circadian rhythms are being treated for eight to ten hours every workday.

This is why the space is about to boom again, but in a different direction. Employers are already shifting from a narrow return on investment mindset to a broader value on investment approach that includes morale, engagement and psychological safety. The next wave will favour programs that go deeper. Programs that integrate identity and purpose work, redesign the physical and digital environment to match human biology, and are rooted in disciplines like circadian biology, light and EMF hygiene, and mitochondrial health. That is the open field for truly effective wellbeing: moving from generic step challenges to environments and cultures that make coherent biology and coherent behaviour the default, not the exception.

The Law of Sustainment

The law of sustainment teaches us that we do not stick to behaviors that conflict with the way we see ourselves. Change does not last unless it aligns with our identity.

You can learn all the science. Wake with the sunrise. Avoid blue light at night. Eat with the sun. Ground your body. Build your circadian rhythm. Expose yourself to cold and heat. Avoid EMFs. Sleep deeply. These biophysical practices work. They restore vitality. But many people try them for a few days, then stop. Not because they are lazy or broken, but because on some level, they do not yet believe they are the kind of person who deserves to feel amazing.

We do not sustain what contradicts our self-image. If you were raised to believe health is a struggle, that your body is fragile, that stress is your normal, or if illness or fatigue became part of your story, you will unconsciously sabotage the habits that could free you.

Real change begins not with effort but with identity. You must believe you are worth being healthy. Worthy of feeling sharp, strong, clear and vital. Not just consciously, but unconsciously. That belief has to live in your nervous system. Otherwise you will want the result but resist the path.

But identity alone is not enough. Environment matters too. We do not rise to the level of our intentions. We fall to the level of our setup.

If you want to live in alignment with your biology, you must design your environment to make it easy. Keep your blue blockers on the nightstand. Have a backup pair in the car and another in your jacket pocket. Replace overhead LEDs with warm lighting. Program your tech to shut down before bed. Stock your fridge with food that honors your circadian rhythm. Remove temptation. Remove friction. Set things up so that the right choice is the obvious one.

Even small visual cues—like leaving out your red or amber night lights, grounding sheet, Faraday bag, or blue light blockers—can have a powerful psychological effect. They remind you who you are becoming. They reinforce that you are prepared, supported, and intentional. This quiet signal to your brain lowers resistance and makes it easier to act in alignment with your goals.

And there is one more layer. Wisdom. Most people are making sincere efforts, but in the wrong direction. They are focused on managing symptoms. Calories, macros, blood sugar, weight. But these are downstream metrics, not root causes. They are often distractions from the real levers.

To sustain deep health, you have to understand what truly creates life in the human system. That is where biophysics comes in. It pulls you out of the noise and zooms in on the foundation. Light, water, magnetism, frequency, mitochondria. It sees the body as a living, dynamic energy and information system. When you nourish biology at that root level, the entire organism recalibrates. Every tissue, hormone, organ and emotion begins to return to coherence.

When you shift your belief system, design your environment and focus your efforts on the deepest drivers of biology, you do not just heal. You evolve.

Health is not earned through punishment or force. It emerges from coherence. Between who you are, where you live and what you focus on.

And that is the real key to sustainment.

Standard Employee Wellness Program Example

Employee Wellbeing Programs like HabitJam attempt to help create healthy habits for hard working employees but programs like this fall short in our opinion. HabitJam is a well-structured program for those who need external motivation and a basic framework to develop healthier habits, but it does not provide a truly comprehensive approach to health. While it encourages positive behavior changes through accountability, gamification, and daily check-ins, it primarily focuses on quick wins rather than addressing the deeper root causes of poor health. The program leans heavily on surface-level habit formation, encouraging better movement, nutrition, and mindfulness, but does not fundamentally shift a person’s metabolic health, circadian rhythms, or environmental exposures in ways that would create long-term resilience. For individuals who already understand the deeper layers of health optimization, light exposure, meal timing, fasting, cold thermogenesis, and environmental detoxification, HabitJam may feel overly simplistic and not particularly useful beyond general motivation.

HabitJam employs several strategies to facilitate behavior change, but these tend to be more about engagement than true physiological transformation:

• Daily Check-Ins: Encourages participants to track simple health-related behaviors such as mindfulness, movement, and hydration. These check-ins offer accountability but do not dive into the deeper physiological processes that drive optimal health. (habitjam.io)

• Practical Challenges: Promotes stress management and self-care through structured activities, but lacks emphasis on how environmental factors like artificial light, circadian disruption, or EMF exposure impact long-term health. (habitjam.io)

• Team-Based Engagement: Uses gamification to make habit change feel more social and fun, with group tournaments lasting 2–4 weeks. This approach helps engagement but does not replace the need for deep, personalized health strategies based on an individual’s biology.

While HabitJam may help people stay engaged and motivated in the short term, it does not provide a truly foundational approach to human health. If someone is new to wellness and needs external structure, it can be a useful entry point. However, for those who seek to optimize mitochondrial function, circadian biology, and deeper metabolic health, this program lacks the necessary depth to create meaningful long-term improvements.

The BioSpectral Systems Approach

The deeper point is that sustainment is not about more nudges, more reminders or more gamified streaks. It is about aligning identity, environment and meaning so strongly that healthy behavior becomes the natural expression of who you are. Psychology backs this. Self determination theory shows that long term motivation only persists when people feel autonomous, competent and connected, not when they are externally pressured or bribed by points and badges. When those needs are met, people choose hard things willingly and keep going when the novelty wears off.

Identity based habit work points in the same direction. James Clear popularised the idea that we do not rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems, and that lasting habits flow from who we believe we are, not what we temporarily want. That is exactly what the law of sustainment is pointing at. If someone still sees themselves as the exhausted employee who always crashes at night, no amount of step challenges will permanently rewrite their biology. But if their environment quietly reinforces a new identity, the person whose sleep, light, food and energy matter, then the same actions begin to wire in as part of their story.

There is also strong evidence that guided self reflection and goal writing, the kind of work popularised by Jordan Peterson and colleagues through future authoring and similar programs, changes outcomes in the real world. In one randomized study, struggling university students who completed an intensive online personal goal setting and reflection exercise showed significant and sustained improvements in academic performance compared with controls. In a much larger cohort, a scalable written goal setting intervention closed almost the entire gender achievement gap and dramatically narrowed ethnic minority gaps in credits earned and retention, simply by asking students to clarify who they wanted to become and how their daily actions served that future. These are identity and meaning interventions, not fitness challenges, yet they produce measurable behavioral change.

Implementation intention research adds another layer of precision. When people take those self authored identities and translate them into clear if then plans, for example, if it is 9 pm, then I switch off screens and put on my blue blockers, their chances of following through rise sharply because the environment is pre linked to the action. Combine that with a biophysical focus on light, water, magnetism and circadian timing and you have something far more powerful than a wellness app. You have a system that rewrites the story people tell about themselves, reshapes the spaces they live and work in, and targets the real levers inside their cells.

That is what the law of sustainment demands. Not another program that asks people to try harder inside a broken environment, but a framework that helps them become someone new, in a place that supports that identity, guided by a science that knows what actually builds energy and resilience. When identity, environment and biophysics line up, habit is no longer a fight. It is simply how life moves through a human being who is finally in coherence with themselves.

At BioSpectral this is exactly what we are building toward. Our education, coaching and community work are designed to help people reconnect with a deeper sense of purpose and identity, while our melanin infused lenses, circadian friendly lighting and EMF mitigation technology reshape the environment around them so their biology is no longer fighting their lifestyle. When people understand why they are here, live in spaces that honour light, magnetism and rhythm, and have tools that make aligned behaviour effortless, the law of sustainment finally works in their favour.

References

• https://Biospectralsystems.com 

• https://Biotra.com.au 

• Original “scalable goal setting closes the gap” study
  Schippers, M. C., Scheepers, A. W. A., & Peterson, J. B. 2015.
  A scalable goal setting intervention closes both the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap.
  Palgrave Communications, 1, 15014. https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201514

• Follow up paper on written goal setting and academic performance
  Schippers, M. C., Morisano, D., Locke, E. A., Scheepers, A. W. A., Latham, G. P., & de Jong, E. M. 2020.
  Writing about personal goals and plans regardless of goal type boosts academic performance.
  Contemporary Educational Psychology, 60, 101823.  

• Report on Future Authoring in a large college setting
  Finnie, R., Poirier, W., Bozkurt, E., Peterson, J. B., Fricker, T., & Pratt, M. 2017.
  Using Future Authoring to Improve Student Outcomes.
  Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. https://heqco.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/HEQCO-Formatted_EPRI-Mohawk.pdf

• Original McGill “struggling students” goal setting experiment
  Morisano, D., Hirsh, J. B., Peterson, J. B., Pihl, R. O., & Shore, B. M. 2010.
  Setting, elaborating, and reflecting on personal goals improves academic performance.
  Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(2), 255–264.