It’s like clockwork every morning. I’d wake up at 7:38 am, turn around and grab my phone. Through drowsy, half-open eyes, I’d unlock my phone and click on the black and grey app to check whether I’d hit the holy triple crown for the day. Within seconds, I’d be mentally rearranging my day based on what the data from my Oura ring was telling me, allowing it to influence how I felt, even before my feet had hit the ground.
The irony is that as a certified Integrated Nutrition Health Coach, I should know better. I understand that wellness isn’t one-dimensional and yet I still found myself believing there was a particular set of metrics I needed to hit in order to feel well.
And that’s when I realised this wasn’t really about my Oura ring. I’d somehow turned wellbeing into something I had to achieve.
Wellness culture has turned wellbeing into a scorecard
We’ve taken something inherently nuanced and turned it into a scorecard. There’s an enormous amount of information out there telling us what wellbeing is supposed to be. Hitting 120g+ protein, fibremaxxing, 10k steps, zone 2 cardio and 8 hours of sleep. Each individual recommendation might be perfectly reasonable but collectively they’ve created this impression that there is a correct way of being well.
The more metrics we have to measure ourselves against, the more opportunities there are to feel like we’re failing. Instead of experiencing wellbeing, it becomes something we have to achieve.
Ambitious women already know how to play the scorecard game
She’s used to knowing what success looks like and being rewarded for going beyond her targets, especially when it comes to her career. At work, hitting the target gives her something tangible: a promotion, a client, more money, a fancy title. She’s learned how to turn vague ambitions into measurable outcomes.
The exact skills she’s learnt at work now apply to wellbeing. She turns the metrics into goals, tracks them, optimises them and judges herself against them. And with that begins the all-or-nothing approach.
We’ve taken the achievement mindset that makes us successful in our careers and applied it to looking after ourselves, then wondered why we feel like we’ve failed.
On a high-capacity week, she does everything. But during a busy or stressful week, she can’t and instead of adjusting the standard, she decides she’s failed. She’s planning her wellbeing around a version of life that doesn’t actually exist. The same black-and-white thinking that can make you successful at work doesn’t work when you apply it to your wellbeing.
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I didn’t need more data. I needed to trust myself.
Which brings me back to me obsessively checking my Oura ring every morning. After years of pushing beyond my limits, I knew that I needed to start looking after myself and I needed reassurance that I was doing okay because I didn’t trust my body anymore.
As a chronic overachiever, failing at something as important as my wellbeing hit me hard because it changed how I perceived myself. How could I nail every part of my life but fail at looking after myself? That’s exactly how I ended up trusting the algorithm more than I trusted myself.
It wasn’t until I went on a business trip where I was so busy that I didn’t have a chance to check my app every morning that the illusion started to wear off. As I got into bed that night, I looked at my stats from earlier in the day, which showed I was stressed, when in fact I felt fine.
That's the thing about optimisation culture, it doesn't just give us more things to do. It can make us outsource our own authority. It’s the belief that there is a correct score we need to hit in order to be doing wellbeing properly.
Send this to the friend who checks her Oura ring before she's even out of bed
Your body isn’t a performance review
There is no perfect wellness scorecard and no single routine that you should execute every week. As your capacity changes every week, so should your approach to wellbeing so it can flex with your actual life.
Looking back now, my problem wasn’t that I wasn’t doing enough. I’d actually set a Gold Standard for myself and somehow treated it like the bare minimum. Not only that but I was using this ideal version of my life as the benchmark for my actual life. You know, the one where I’m sleeping well, eating well and have all the time and energy to do it. So it makes sense that every time real life got in the way (which of course it would), I would read that as failure.
What changed things for me was creating a Minimum Effective Dose: the smallest habits I needed to do that genuinely moved the needle. For me, that’s an early morning walk before work, a nutritious meal and an early night so I have more energy the next day.
That’s the bare minimum I can do, even on a busy week. The walk might only be 10 minutes instead of 45. The nutritious meal could be something I prepped earlier and froze or even a yummy salad from The Salad Project. And sleep, I’ll never need an excuse to get a full nine hours of shut-eye.
On a good week, I might do more but either way, once I’ve done the minimum effective dose, I’m done. Anything else is a bonus. It might sound like I’m trying to do as little as possible, I’m not. I’d rather have a super simple routine that works than a 12-step one that I fail to maintain every single time.
The Gold Standard tells you what wellbeing could look like if everything goes to plan. The Minimum Effective Dose tells you what matters when life doesn’t.
And yes, before you ask. I still wear my Oura ring. I just check in every now and then instead of first thing in the morning, because I’ve finally started to trust how my body feels rather than looking at an app.
So, what would your Minimum Effective Dose be this week? Tell me in the comments below
About the author:
Hi, I’m Priyanka, the face behind Successful on Paper which is my attempt at a modern day version of Cosmo magazine, if it was written by Carrie Bradshaw. If you’ve done everything by the book and are still wondering why it isn’t enough, you might be the exact person I’m writing for and I’m so glad you found me. When I’m not cosplaying a magazine writer, I’m building a portfolio career using all the skills I learnt in my nearly decade long marketing career.
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The world's top athletes have their training and performance tracked all the time. Back in the day the tools were pen, paper and stop-watches. Now it is wearables+apps+other devices. Those same devices landed among non professional sportspeople, like us. A market for that was created and we bought into it. However that did not come along with the professional psychological support a Premiere League footballer can rely on. Nor with the whole ecosystem of dietitians, coaches, you name it, they can enjoy. Hence, yet again, we are left with another set of hard-to-reach goals. We are not the Lionesses. So, as you pointed out, setting our own targets, totally customised to our own endurance is the only way to go.