Photo: VCG

"Shift your attention on the parts of your body that are in contact with the floor, such as the back of your head, shoulders, back, hips, legs..." a soft voice accompanied by soothing music from a medication app makes Li Huizi feel relaxed and helps her to empty her mind after a busy day's work.

Every night after finishing work, Li, a 29-year-old employee in the fast evolving consumer goods industry in Shanghai opens a meditation app to do 30 minutes of exercise.

"I used to go to gym but since the outbreak of pandemic, practicing meditation has become a new routine for me. During the session I would just focus on my breath to disperse a day's negative energy," Li told the Global Times on Monday.

Compared to its popularity in the West, such practice to help sleep is relatively new and niche in China. But the disruption brought by the COVID-19 outbreak and the quickening pace of modern life has led to the pastime boom in China.

Induced by pandemic

Online sleep courses have become popular since the outbreak of the COVID-19 in early 2020, which has ramped up demand for mental health services.

A search for sleep apps on Huawei's app store shows dozens of recommended apps, and some top apps have dozens of millions of accumulated downloads. On Chinese video platform Bilibili, the column under medication has gathered 61,000 videos and 250 million views.

Data from fitness app Keep showed that the number of sleep classes on the platform has doubled to 207 as of May 2022 from 101 in December 2021, as such classes gain rising attention. 

Len, founder of Now Meditation app, told the Global Times on Monday that their monthly subscribers have doubled during the epidemic, rising from the 50,000-150,000 subscribers per month to 200,000-300,000 per month after March 2020. The app now has over 10 million subscribers.

The pandemic has awakened people's concerns about mental health, and more users are trying meditation to relieve anxiety, Len said.

Physical classes are also booming. 

Mental health solution provider KnowYourself (KY) in 2020 established its first physical store called "Practice in City" in Shanghai, which can hold eight courses per day, and the overall signup members surpassed 10,000 in 2021, Qian Zhuang, the founder and the CEO of KY, told the Global Times on Monday.

KY operates its mental health businesses via a WeChat Mini Program and mobile apps, and its users across all platforms have reached 20.2 million. Cities with the highest number of users are China's first-tier cities where income levels are higher, though competition is fierce.

According to Len, its customers are primarily 25-35 years old. Most of them are white-collar workers in the first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as they often face higher work pressure.

This presents a huge market.

For example, about 300 million people in China suffer from sleep disorders, with 57.41 percent of respondents reporting insomnia from between one to seven days each month, according a report by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2022.

According to data from iiMedia Research from 2016 to 2020, the overall market size of China's "sleep economy" has increased from 261.63 billion yuan ($38.69 billion) to 377.86 billion yuan, an increase of 44.42 percent and is expected to exceed one trillion yuan in 2030.

According to Orange IT data, from 2021 to April 2022, a total of 17 investment and financing projects took place in the field of mental health, with the cumulative amount of investment and financing exceeding 1.5 billion yuan.

Growing market scale

The "sleep economy" could be a good business that has just taken off in China though it remains small compared with that in the US.

According to the Global Health Institute, mental wellness is a $121 billion market and insiders estimated that market size of China's mental health sector is around 300 billion yuan. 

As an important branch under mental health, global meditation market will reach $20.5 billion by 2029, according to DataBridge. The US is the world's largest meditation market with $1.21 billion in 2017 which is projected to reach $2 billion in 2022.

According to Now Meditation, 14 percent of the population in the US practice meditation as a lifestyle, but in China the figure is less than 1 percent.

"The Chinese market is still relatively small. However, due to the large base of Chinese users and increased attention to mental health, it is believed that meditation is expected to become an integral part of China's mental health market," Len said.

The absence of top players and professional instructors are major hurdles for the development of industry, according to insiders.

Len says that many people have stereotypes about the practice and see it as something mystical and religious.

The practice can be traced back to India. In 1978, Jon Kabat-Zinn from Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced "mindfulness-based stress reduction" which helped strip away its religious overtones.

"The market needs to be cultivated," Len said, noting that it is not easy to find qualified professional talents in China, which is also an urgent problem for the industry to solve.

Qian noted that mental health services in China are now understaffed, with uneven levels and a lack of uniform standards.