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.