MY idea of wellness is to take a slightly longer route in the morning, one that runs alongside the River Clyde.

To my right there are still car fumes and brick but, on a nice day, the water shimmers and glints and the bridges make pleasant frames of the view.

What an amateur.

Wellness has become a whacky business, full of wild, increasingly complex fads to improve physical and mental health. If you're not luxuriating in a daily gong bath are you truly alive?

Whereas yoga was once the niche preserve of New Age hippies, it's now the bottom of the hierarchy of restorative exercise. Ever-more creative ways to manipulate your fascia, clean your energy and unlock your magnetic field replace, say, Legs, Bums and Tums.

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I saw cryotherapy listed recently as a "traditional spa treatment". What if you just want your nails done? Instead, boost your beauty with an autologous conditioned serum, made by incubating blood at high temperatures to boost its concentration of anti-inflammatory proteins.

It's about beauty no longer, though, it's about wellness, a slightly more opaque notion.

An opaque notion that generates vast sums of money. The Global Wellness Institute, totting up everything from spa days to workplace wellbeing initiatives, calculates the global health and wellness industry to be now worth $4.2 trillion.

Wellbeing in the form of health and contentment is absolutely a worthwhile pursuit. We routinely hear of the damaging effects of stress in our overly-switched on, obesogenic, fast paced lives. When even workplaces are switched on to the fact that people need to slow down and care for themselves, you know it's something to be taken seriously.

Eating a balanced diet, switching off social media, taking regular exercise... all sensible. But when there's a will to buy into health fads, there's a way to make an increasingly cynical buck.

Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle website Goop is regularly derided as a pile of expensive hokum but, confession, I love it. I love reading about the utter nonsense rich people buy, the promises made by wellness gurus that surely can't be kept.

Gwyneth Paltrow takes a lot of stick. It’s hard to argue against - she once advocated for the idea that shouting at water changes its molecular structure and famously promoted vagina steaming. Best not to ask. 

But I love reading about GP, as she styles herself, earnestly praising the virtues of her "clean beauty" morning routine of drinking alkaline water with a squeeze of lemon, just as my grandmother used to.

Here comes the science bit: the acid in lemon neutralises the alkaline so you are left with... nothing more than flavoured tap water, about which there is nothing wrong in the first place.

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Paltrow's evidence in this week's ski-and-run trial has been a gift from a goddess to lesser mortals. For someone so obsessed with wellness inside and out, one watches her evidence at court and wonders whether she has any focus on improving her spirit, as well as her gut microbiome. 

What did she lose as a result of her ski-slope collision with a retired optometrist, she was asked on the stand. "A half day's ski-ing," she replied, in perhaps the most matter-of-fact statement utter by Paltrow in the past decade. 

Well, maybe second most. Terry Sanderson, 76, is suing Paltrow. The court heard, at the time of the incident, yelled: "You’re skiing directly into my f***ing back," which seems a little lacking in Zen.

Thanks to advocates like Paltrow, five-a-day is now deeply passé, pathetic almost, when one should be adding adaptogens such as ashwagandha to one's morning smoothie. While these start off as niche trends they eventually filter down to the common people.  

You can pinpoint the moment these things enter the mainstream when Pret A Manger begins offering them. You'll find turmeric in your muesli, Kombucha in every fridge.

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And fine, a decent balance of nutrients - whether from spinach or Spirulina - does you only good.

This, though, is humanity and humanity strives for more. A Sunday magazine feature from a few years ago, which detailed the daily rituals of wellbeing devotees, re-emerges online every so often to hold the country in an ecstasy of mockery.

One used a HumanCharger to get themselves going in the morning, a device not unlike an iPod that shines light into a person's ear to give them energy. It costs £175. That's £175 for a small torch that goes in your ear, shining light on nothing other than your own gullibility.

Another takes Quinton Isotonic. I Googled this as it was beyond my ken. It is "pure marine plasma diluted to match the concentration of your blood." I assume you drink it. It claims to detoxify your system, relax you and restore your emotional and physical balance.  

Yet another spends time every morning outside "receiving electrons from the earth"; another "sun-stares" first thing as "the UV rays aren't harmful to my retina for the first hour after sunrise."

While many of us are worried about the drain on our time and mental health from relentless social media scrolling and that work emails on our mobile phones are a sapping tether to the office, a wellness worrier has concerns he is absorbing radioactive and magnetic waves from wifi.  

One person gained some kind of positive experience from owning quartz.

It's interesting how many minor wellness ideas are modern, ramped-up takes on hippy notions - like the yoga, like crystals. It's the counter-culture, commodified.

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Taking wellness to yet further extremes is a growing group of people calling themselves life extensionists whose aim, whose belief, is that they will be able to live for hundreds and hundreds of years, the catch being they will have to stay alive long enough that the technology catches up with their desires.

Those attempting to live long enough to be able to live forever tend to be Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists: you need cash to be a non-gerontologist.

There is a new Netflix series out this week, Wellmania, which skewers this entire trend. Its star, the actress Celeste Barber, has just turned 40 and, in a recent interview, reflects on the strain of having two young children, ageing parents and a growing realisation that she can't keep battering her body - but the pressure to be "well" is another grinding task causing stress. 

While the type of wellness devotee being re-injected with their own blood is the victim of unabashed piss-taking, I feel sorry for them.

The strain of such a rigid, obsessive lifestyle must undo whatever benefits there are. You see this with YouTube vloggers who fall from grace - the vegan influencer Yovana Mendoza, known for 25-day water fasts, was caught on camera eating some fish and forced to prostrate herself before her followers with apologies.

It was not eating the fish she should have apologised for but, rather, encouraging so many others to eat unsustainable diets.

"Wellness," presenter Dan Rather said in 1979, introducing a TV segment on a new health movement, "There’s a word you don’t hear every day." How things accelerate. 

While there's fine talk of trying to live your best possible life, the real root core for these ultra-wellness adherents comes from somewhere deeply human: a desire not just for super-longevity but for immortality.

We used to take our answers from religion. Heaven was a form of immortality but as Britain becomes increasingly secular is it any wonder that people are looking elsewhere for the meaning of life?

While at first glance it may appear to be some fool trying to absorb nutrients directly from the earth, I see an existential panic and the desire for the comfort that once came from believing one would live on after death. 

Some go for Jesus, others sleep on electromagnetic mats and steam clean their lady parts; both involve faith in unprovable things.