Are We Destroying Our Health By Tracking It?

Like many Americans, I’ve watched with a mixture of curiosity and horror as millionaire Bryan Johnson documents his journey to “live forever.” His girlfriend and business partner, Kate Tolo, has recently joined onto a strict health protocol to analyze and optimize her health. Every minute of her day is accounted for, she explained when announcing this undertaking. Tolo’s story, though, is much different from Johnson’s: By her own admission, she finds “looking after herself” “painful” and “arduous.”

And while most Americans aren’t accounting for every minute of our days (certainly not in the age of social media scrolling and endless mindless entertainment), the same technology that has derailed our lives also tracks our sleep scores, steps, recovery time, and more. Apple Watches, Oura rings, Whoop straps, continuous glucose monitors, Fitbits, and a litany of other health devices promise data-driven insights into our health, but those same insights also offer an implied call to action to change our habits and a quantification of our health successes and failings. In many cases, the fixation on that data and the implied obligation of overoptimization isn’t worth the cost, especially when that cost is the very health we’re trying to optimize. 

Tolo’s goals to document female health and hopefully uncover more information about women’s health struggles — such as endometriosis, which Tolo has been diagnosed with — are noble. Likewise, the gym bro who straps on a Whoop to track his training or the mom who uses her Oura to get a sleep score are pursuing the reasonable goal of a healthier lifestyle. But when health becomes an idol and optimization becomes an obsession, there’s a trade-off to the constant monitoring. 

To the extreme degree that Johnson and Tolo track their health, they sacrifice most of life’s freedoms to the rigidity of routine and tracking, by Johnson’s own admission. The typical Apple Watch wearer isn’t on a strict protocol like Tolo, but having the data about missing step goals or an elevated heart rate isn’t always constructive.  

For a self-described free spirit like Tolo, it’s likely the pressures of following such a strict routine and being intensely monitored will affect the data she’s able to collect. It’s the classic scientific quandary: How does observing a phenomenon change the event’s outcome? There’s evidence, for example, to suggest that being told you slept well (or poorly) will influence your own perception of the night’s rest, rather than how rested you actually feel upon waking up. And anyone who’s been asked about their stress levels in a health questionnaire, in the cardiologist’s office, or at an annual physical knows that stress can negatively affect their health. The extreme version of this comes with physiological symptoms; a friend of mine years ago suffered stomach ulcers as a college student. The less extreme version of this comes with the symptoms of stress that we’re all familiar with, such as increased heart rate, trouble sleeping, and changes in appetite.

For the health tracker who gets pulled onto the treadmill of the “optimization” game, the resulting stress may be working against the very health goals she wishes to seek out. Every day of a missed step count is both a lost workout and also a guilty feeling of breaking the streak, and every night of a suboptimal sleep score is reinforcement of fatigue throughout the day and worry of a similar night trying to fall asleep next time. As with most technology, the danger is when we become slaves to our devices rather than use them as only one tool in an arsenal of many data points toward our overall goals. 

Life is about balance. I have my own boundaries: I don’t like to stay out too late, I aim to get in my reps at the gym, and soda isn’t my thing. But on the Fourth of July, I’ll watch fireworks with friends and get to bed after midnight. I skip the gym when I’m traveling. And on Christmas, I eat nothing but junk food. Those are the moments in life that I stay healthy for. I know I have a duty to my family and friends to keep myself in good enough health to keep up with everyone, perform the responsibilities I’ve undertaken, and stay active enough to truly live my life. 

Sometimes, that balance might mean using the luxury of modern tracking technology, and where these devices can identify disease before it becomes deadly and diagnose complicated or unseen conditions, we’re fortunate to have access to their data. At their best, those metrics are a useful tool for self-improvement and serious health intervention. At their worst, they can make getting perfect numbers become an end in and of itself. 

Put another way, not every moment in life can be contained in data, and the best moments are the ones that cannot be quantified by a sleep score.

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Jordan Jantz is the assistant editor at IW Features as well as a freelance writer, editor, and website designer.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.