Is Optimization Culture Is Making Us Less Healthy?

Health optimization promises more energy, better sleep, and a longer life. But for many people, the constant pursuit of perfect habits, metrics, and routines is creating more stress, anxiety, and self-surveillance than actual health.

The Exhausting Pursuit of Optimizing Health

The recent Steven Bartlett “winegate” controversy got me thinking: Are we confusing health with optimization? Wearable devices like smart watches, Oura rings, fitness trackers, continuous glucose monitors, even smart jewelry have become the latest health and fitness fad. There’s even a smart toilet health tracker that analyzes your poop in real time.

But the result isn’t always better health, These devices can cause more stress, more self-monitoring, more anxiety, and less enjoyment of life.

Not long ago, being healthy was relatively straightforward. Eat mostly whole foods. Move your body regularly. Get enough sleep. Spend time with people you love. Don’t smoke. Manage your stress.

I explain to my clients that perfection causes added stress, and the happy ground was somewhere in the middle, the 80-20 rule (read about that here). Health wasn’t something you measured every minute of every day. Every metric, tracked.

Today, however, health can feel more like a full-time job.

We’re tracking our sleep scores, recovery scores, heart rate variability, blood glucose, resting heart rate, body composition, protein intake, steps, workouts, stress levels, poop score, and biological age. Every week seems to bring a new wearable device, a new health metric, or a new expert telling us that something we’ve been doing for years is quietly destroying our health.

Coffee? Maybe too much cortisol. Eat fruit? Watch the glucose spike. Stay up late? Your recovery score will suffer. Have a glass of wine? It will wreck your sleep. Skip a workout? You’re losing muscle. Sit too much? You’re shortening your lifespan.

The message is relentless: You could always be doing better. You could always be healthier, always optimizing something.

And while all of this information is meant to help us become healthier, I’m not convinced that’s what’s happening. In many cases, I think optimization culture is making us more stressed, more anxious, and paradoxically less healthy.

When Health Becomes Performative

Somewhere along the way, health stopped being about feeling good and started becoming a performance. Bragging about sleep scores, posting metrics online, sharing your blood glucose levels and aiming for fewer spikes.

What’s interesting to me is we are no longer talk about being healthy. Somehow health switched to optimization: peak, elite, high performing, biohacking with costly unproven and sometimes dangerous therapies.

The goal is no longer avoiding disease or feeling energetic enough to enjoy your life. The goal has become squeezing every possible percentage point out of your physiology.

If your sleep score is 85, why isn’t it 95? If your resting heart rate improved, could it improve more? If you’re healthy, could you be healthier?

The finish line keeps moving.

The problem with optimization is that it creates a mindset where normal human experiences begin to feel like failures.

A late night becomes a recovery problem. Birthday cake becomes a metabolic problem. A missed workout becomes a fitness problem. A stressful week becomes a health problem.

Rather than supporting our lives, health becomes another thing we have to manage, monitor, and worry about.

More Information = More Anxiety?

One of the biggest ironies of modern wellness culture is that despite having access to more health information than any generation in history, people seem more anxious about their health than ever before. And this can paradoxically have a negative health impact through increased stress when we don’t feel optimized.

In my practice, I see this constantly. I see people who are terrified of eating carbohydrates because they wore a continuous glucose monitor for two weeks and interpreted absolutely normal glucose spikes after a meal as fear that they’re pre-diabetes.

I often see people who panic after one night of poor sleep, people who are afraid to travel because they won’t have complete control over their food, people who avoid social events because it might interfere with their workout routine.

I see people who spend hours researching supplements, testing, and protocols while completely overlooking the basics that actually move the needle. That’s why I always start with foundational health, because if you don’t have the basics dialed in, how can you optimize from a weak place?

The more data we collect, the more opportunities we create to worry.

At what point are we over-optimizing? And what effect is this having on our health? When does the line cross from living and enjoying life cross over to optimizing everything?

The wellness industry has become exceptionally good at convincing us that every deviation from perfection is a threat. Every symptom needs fixing, every fluctuation needs explaining, every metric needs optimizing.

The result is a population that is increasingly focused on health but doesn’t necessarily feel healthier.

The Rise of Health Hypervigilance

One thing I’ve noticed over the past several years is that many people are becoming hypervigilant about their bodies. And while I always support and celebrate focusing on one’s health, I am also seeing the pendulum swing a bit father than it should.

Every headache, digestive symptoms, bad night’s sleep, energy dip means something and requires analysis. This isn’t entirely surprising. We live in a culture that constantly encourages us to monitor ourselves.

Wearables provide a continuous stream of feedback. Social media exposes us to endless health advice. Podcasts dissect every aspect of human physiology. Algorithms feed us content designed to make us believe we’re one mistake away from disease while promoting the latest overpriced supplement or peptide. They’re marketing to our fears rather than a place of support.

At some point, health stops being something we experience and becomes something we surveil. Instead of asking, “How do I feel today?” we ask, “What does my device say, and what latest supplement will support improving my metrics?”

I’ve had people tell me they woke up feeling fantastic, only to check their sleep score and immediately become concerned because the number wasn’t high enough.

Think about that for a moment: They felt good until the data told them otherwise. I see my clients spiral with this quite frequently. They are relying on a device rather than human experience to let them know how they feel.

When we stop trusting our own experience and begin outsourcing our sense of well-being to technology, something important gets lost.

Steven Bartlett & “Winegate”

A recent internet debate perfectly illustrates this phenomenon.

Entrepreneur and podcast host Steven Bartlett sparked discussion after describing how a few glasses of wine negatively affected him for several days.

According to Bartlett, the alcohol disrupted his sleep, affected his recovery metrics, reduced his productivity, and created a cascade of negative effects that lasted well beyond the night itself. Some people saw this as proof of alcohol’s harmful effects, while others saw it as evidence that health optimization culture may have gone too far.

Personally, what interested me was the fact that if three glasses of wine can genuinely derail your life for three days, I have to ask an important question: Are we becoming healthier, or are we becoming less resilient?

Then I think about the famous bio-hacker Bryan Johnson who structures his life around “not dying.” But in my opinion he focuses so much on his routine that’s forgetting to live. He won’t step outside without an umbrella to shield him from the sun; he’s asleep at 8pm every night in a separate room from his girlfriend so she doesn’t disrupt his sleep.

His entire day is structured so much on not dying that he doesn’t seem to be doing too much living.

The goal of health shouldn’t be to create a life where every small disruption has major consequences. The goal should be building a body and mind that can adapt to the realities of being human.

Resilience Is a Better Goal Than Optimization

This is where I think the conversation often goes off track. Health and optimization are not necessarily the same thing. Optimization seeks perfection, while health requires resilience.

A resilient body can handle occasional stress, recover from a poor night’s sleep, tolerate vacation meals, celebrations, travel, life’s inevitable disruptions. Yet many wellness conversations focus almost exclusively on creating ideal conditions.

But life isn’t perfect, and if your health falls apart whenever your routine is disrupted, that’s not resilience; it’s fragility.

We Were Never Meant to Live This Way

We have more health tools than ever before, yet so many people are exhausted by the constant pursuit of self-improvement.

The reality is that human beings evolved to be adaptable, not optimized. Our bodies are remarkably resilient systems which can recover from occasional blips and missed workouts. I think the counterpoint to support wearable devices is that we do actually have access to helpful data about ourselves; it’s the interpretation of it and how we react that’s the problem. And these devices do not seem to be supporting resiliency, quite the opposite in fact.

Our real struggle as modern humans  is chronic stress. And ironically, obsessing over health is a major a source of chronic stress itself.

When Wellness Becomes Another Stressor

Many people enter the wellness world hoping to feel better. Unfortunately, some end up trapped in a cycle of constant self-monitoring, always trying a new protocol or chasing a new metric goal. I see this so frequently in practice

Many of my clients remain worried they’re missing the one thing that will finally unlock optimal health, and these devices are the key missing piece.

But at some point, wellness starts to resemble perfectionism. There’s always another supplement or test or biohack, and when that happens, the finish line keeps moving farther away.

And because perfection is impossible, the feeling of inadequacy never fully goes away. The irony here is that the stress created by this pursuit may be more harmful than many of the things people are trying to avoid.

A Different Definition of Health

What if we’ve been aiming at the wrong target? Health can be simple. And to me, health means having enough energy to participate in your life and enjoy meals without fear. It means trusting your body and recovering from setbacks.

The healthiest people I know aren’t necessarily the ones with the best biomarkers or the highest recovery scores; they’re the ones who have developed a healthy relationship with their bodies. They can enjoy health-promoting behaviors without becoming consumed by them. They understand that wellness should support life, not become your entire raison d’étre.

TL;DR: The Bottom Line

I think the biggest problem with optimization culture is that it exploits a very human psychological tendency: the desire for certainty. Life is inherently unpredictable. We can’t control whether we’ll get sick, age gracefully, develop a chronic condition, or wake up tomorrow feeling great. That uncertainty is uncomfortable, so we’re naturally drawn to anything that promises more control. Wearables, trackers, tests, supplements, and endless streams of health data create the feeling that if we just monitor ourselves closely enough, we can eliminate risk and guarantee an optimal outcome.

But that’s an illusion. In reality, more information often creates more vigilance, and more vigilance creates more anxiety. We begin scanning our bodies for problems, analyzing every symptom, and interpreting normal fluctuations as signs that something is wrong. The result is that we become increasingly preoccupied with our health while feeling increasingly insecure about it. And the wearable devices pick up on this! Ironically, the people who seem healthiest are often not those who have eliminated all uncertainty, but those who have learned to tolerate it.

Health information can be valuable. Wearable devices can provide useful insights. Nutrition matters. Sleep matters. Exercise matters.

But there comes a point where the pursuit of optimization starts undermining the very thing it’s supposed to improve.

Health was never meant to be another source of anxiety, and perhaps the ultimate sign of good health isn’t having perfect metrics. It’s having enough resilience that you don’t need to think about them all the time.

Want help optimizing your health from a real live human? Book a discovery call with me here.