Someone finally counted. A study from Manhattan Mental Health Counseling tracked 23 -maxxing terms across TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and X, and CNN en Español ran it yesterday under the question every relative has asked at dinner: how did “maxxing” conquer the influencer world?

CNN printed the top five. The full table, with platform splits, had already appeared in Portuguese on netthings.pt on 23 September. We couldn’t find the study’s own page online, so that’s the copy everyone is working from. Put together, it’s the closest thing the scene has to a league table, and the league has one team.

The gap

Looksmaxxing: 1,351,274 mentions. Second place, heightmaxxing, has 53,438. That’s roughly 25 times the runner-up, and more than every other published term on the list combined, with room to spare even if ranks 11–20 each hit the ceiling of rank 10.

The rest of the top ten, for the record: lifemaxxing 31,609, fibermaxxing 28,596, hardmaxxing 16,600, softmaxxing 15,366, healthmaxxing 10,978, auramaxxing 10,121, moneymaxxing 6,840, sleepmaxxing 6,484.

Every other -maxxing is a spinoff. Looksmaxxing is the franchise.

Every platform has a favourite

The totals are fine. The splits are where it gets good, because each platform turns out to have its own personality.

TikTok carries looksmaxxing, with 667,400 of its mentions, then Instagram with 505,000, Reddit 156,974 and X a modest 21,900.

Heightmaxxing barely exists on X. Of 53,438 mentions, X contributed 190. That’s about 0.4%. TikTok (27,900) and Instagram (24,300) are where the height people live. Reddit adds 1,048. On X, apparently, everyone is already 6’2”.

Reddit owns the hard/soft split. Hardmaxxing is 14,201 Reddit mentions out of 16,600, with TikTok a distant 1,800. Softmaxxing is 13,469 of 15,366. Roughly 85–88% of both, on one site. The debate over which interventions count as “hard” is a forum argument, and it stays on the forum.

Instagram beats TikTok on fibre. Fibermaxxing logs 14,800 on Instagram against 12,000 on TikTok, with Reddit at 696. It’s the one top-five term where the grid wins, which makes sense: a chia pudding photographs better than it narrates. And fibermaxxing has more than four times the mentions of sleepmaxxing. The scene would rather post about fibre than about bedtime.

Auramaxxing lives on X

Here’s the screenshot stat. Auramaxxing gets 4,040 of its 10,121 mentions on X, about 40%, the highest X share of any term with a published split. Looksmaxxing still has the biggest raw X number (21,900), but that’s only about 1.6% of its total.

The runners-up for X share make the pattern obvious. Healthmaxxing is TikTok 5,400, X 3,860, about 35%. Lifemaxxing posts 4,130 on X, technically more than aura in raw terms, but it’s only 13% of a bigger pile. Moneymaxxing splits TikTok 2,700, Reddit 1,720, X 1,420.

So the vibes-and-abstractions end of the scene, aura, health, money, lives on the text platform, and the body-and-face end lives on video. People film their jawlines. They type about their aura.

The bottom of the table

Ranks 11 to 20 weren’t published. Then the list picks back up: productivitymaxxing 350, hormonemaxxing 139, and in 23rd place, readingmaxxing, with 124 mentions, mostly on Instagram.

Looksmaxxing outscores readingmaxxing roughly 10,900 to one. Readingmaxxing’s 124 belong to people who photograph their books, which is, to be fair, a commitment.

The numbers come from social listening tools, not a scientific sample. Per netthings, the counts were pulled with Social Searcher, THINKPOL and native Instagram and TikTok search, so treat them as a leaderboard of loudness, not a census. The gaps are real. The last digit is not gospel.

What CNN thinks it’s about

CNN also does a glossary lap through newer arrivals like sardinemaxxing, chinamaxxing and nonnamaxxing. That’s a reminder that the suffix will attach to anything the moment someone takes it seriously enough.

For the why, CNN quotes Daniel Parris of the Stat Significant blog. Translated from Spanish, his read is that behind the trend sits a belief that there’s an ideal standard of beauty, health or professional success, and that some influencer has cracked the code. And his longer view: “What will endure is the timeless nature of human insecurity.”

Maybe. The table also says something more cheerful. Twenty-three subcultures each picked a stat, gave it a name and went all in, and one of them picked the stat that everyone else picked too. Looksmaxxing didn’t win the leaderboard by a nose.

It won by 1,297,836 mentions. Readingmaxxing, all 124 of it, is still in the race.