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A few weeks ago I was at dinner with friends. Someone was mid-story and they could barely get the words out because they were laughing too hard, and the whole table went with them. No one was checking their phones or wearables, and no one brought up a biohacking protocol. I felt my ab muscles get sore from laughing, and I remember thinking, clear as anything: this is the wellness. Right here. This is the thing none of us can buy.
I’ve written extensively on how wellness got heavy, how self-care quietly turned into self-surveillance and how our obsessing over protocols is making us unwell. We’ve optimized ourselves out of “well.”
Let me clarify one thing first, because I don’t want to be misread: I love biohacking. I use wearables, red light and PEMF therapy. I sauna, I cold-plunge in whatever’s cold — a shower, the pool or the occasional fancy plunge tub at a wellness studio or spa.
I track metrics quite a bit, but I use the data as a tool. I don’t live by it or swear by it. I’m not telling you to throw your Oura ring into the ocean. I’m telling you it belongs second. Foundations first, gadgets after, and most of us have that backwards.
Here’s what backwards looks like. There’s a clinical term now, orthosomnia, for the anxiety of chasing a perfect sleep score, where people sleep worse because the tracker told them to worry. Doctors are seeing wearable-induced health anxiety, where normal minute-to-minute shifts in heart rate suddenly look like emergencies. None of that is the ring’s fault. It’s ours. We let a device outrank the body it was supposed to be listening to.
I learned this the hard way, and it cost me years of injuries and fatigue. In my triathlon and Ironman days, I followed training plans so precisely that I treated exhaustion as evidence I was doing it right. Dead legs meant discipline. A skipped meal on a low-carb streak meant willpower.
My body was sending clear signals — rest, eat more, back off — and I overrode every one of them, because the plan on paper didn’t have a box for “listen to your body.” My Garmin told a beautiful story: splits dropping, volume climbing, every workout logged and green. The data showed progress, although I was reaching for a pre-workout drink before every workout and relying on caffeine gels to get through them.
I nailed my training plans and raced fairly well, so you could say I was “optimized.” In hindsight, that’s not true. I was the most depleted I’ve ever been — training through injuries, limiting my carbs and adding a Pilates class as an “extra” third workout. That’s the trap: I trusted the plan over the body running it.
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