On wellness, metrics and never quite arriving
It’s Saturday morning and I’m excited for the day.
But according to my watch, I should feel like crap.
My sleep score is 42. Body battery 24.
Shit. I should go back to bed.
Sometimes I’ve felt awful and my scores were great, so I don’t always trust the readings. I still like looking at the metrics though. I like comparing scores across activities — seeing what zone I hit on a climb, or what my max heart rate was. I love my apps too. One checks whether a supplement is “clean” and third-party tested. I’ll shamelessly photograph bottles in the store just to see the score.
Caring about this stuff isn’t a bad thing. It’s just easy to go down a rabbit hole. There was a stretch when I was spending an embarrassing amount on supplements — brain health, skin, digestion, muscle recovery. I’m down to three now, and two of those are vitamins.
Instead of thinking, Wow, I feel pretty good, I catch myself wondering what I’m deficient in. Am I getting enough REM? Is this going to spike my blood sugar? Should I take a probiotic? Do I need more collagen?
All this effort to be healthier seems to leave me feeling perpetually not quite healthy enough.
Metrics can surface things I’d otherwise miss and help me to train smarter. I get the value. But it’s hard to know where to stop. Sometimes the information makes me doubt my own body. I’ll wake up feeling rested, look at my watch, and think – maybe I’m not.
There was a time I’d jump on my bike with just an odometer. Going up a hill meant I was probably in zone 3 or 4. Coasting meant I was recovering. That was that.
If I was hungry, I ate something. Usually healthy, but if someone offered chips, I didn’t say no. I wasn’t worried they’d wreck my microbiome for a week or spike my glucose.
And if I was tired the next day, I just took that into account. I didn’t need a body battery reading to tell me how hard to push.
I’m not an elite athlete. No coaches are waiting on my recovery data. No race hinges on whether my HRV is up or down. I get why these metrics matter. Knowledge can be useful. My point isn’t that we shouldn’t use them. I just wonder whether more information sometimes makes us more vigilant without necessarily making us healthier.
There will always be another metric.
Another biomarker.
Another supplement.
Another potential risk.
Another longevity intervention.
There’s no finish line to optimization.
You can be objectively quite healthy and still receive a steady stream of information about all the ways you could do better. Sleep more deeply. Recover faster. Build more muscle. Stabilize your glucose. Improve your VO2 max. Diversify your microbiome.
At what point does taking care of our health turn into believing we’re never quite healthy enough?
Recently I came across the idea of salutogenesis. Medicine has traditionally focused on pathogenesis — what causes disease? Salutogenesis flips the question and asks: What creates health?
It seems like a subtle distinction, but I don’t think it is. Prevention matters. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, fitness — these numbers can tell us things we should know, and sometimes that information can change the trajectory of a life.
But preventing disease and creating health aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Later that morning I went for a hike. My dog had a blast dodging in and out of the stream. The sun slipped behind the clouds just enough. My legs felt strong. My breathing was easy. I was with someone I love, on a beautiful morning, doing one of my favorite things.
I felt pretty damn awesome.
My body battery was still 24.
Maybe health shouldn’t be something we constantly measure.
Maybe it’s also about the things that help us forget about measuring anything at all.