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 130g+ protein, fibremaxxing, 10k steps, zone 2 cardio and 7-8 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.
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 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.
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.
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