Optimization Culture is Making Us Fragile
A poor night's sleep should not ruin three days of your life
A popular podcaster recently said drinking a few glasses of wine “ruined the next three days of his life.”
He specified he “didn’t get drunk,” but “got worse sleep that night” and said that when he looked at his wrist-worn device it messed up his score and “dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol” and he podcasted worse as a result.
Y’all—this optimization stuff can make you super fragile.
Before I go any further, an important disclaimer: alcohol is not good for you, especially if you are someone who struggles to stop after a drink or two. If you have a substance-use disorder or family history of substance-use disorders then a few drinks can absolutely ruin your week (or worse). There is nothing wrong with choosing to abstain for any reason at all. And yes, of course, getting drunk can derail a day or two.
But that’s not what this post is about.
Rather, it’s the latest example in a long line of internet optimization culture: eat this way, sleep that way, wake at this time, do that single exercise, follow this guru, take that supplement... This content is more about the performance of being great than the actual pursuit of greatness itself. It can even lead to anxiety.
Here’s what’s at the root of optimization culture: life is uncertain, scary, and hard. There’s always a chance of illness, injury, or failure. It’s normal to have some level of anxiety, but trying to control every little thing doesn’t help. If anything it gets in the way. When you obsess over readiness scores and other data, you risk creating a fragility mindset. You start to believe that you must be and feel 100 percent to do great work. But this is nonsense. It’s not how life works.
I almost never drink, precisely because alcohol isn’t good for you and I don’t feel well after. I’m on the same page as the podcast host so far. Occasionally, however, I’ll have two drinks, maybe even three. It happens a couple times per year—weddings, anniversaries, other big celebrations. I enjoy myself at these outings but I don’t sleep as well afterwards. I often wake up the next morning with a dull headache and sloshy stomach.
But then, instead of tying my destiny to a black-box algorithm on a wrist-worn device, I make breakfast, walk the dog, and get on with my day. I don’t obsess over how I feel and convince myself that my dopamine and cortisol are out of whack (which, by the way, are biochemicals implicated in just about everything we do, including reading this post right now). I simply say oof, I’m not feeling so great and get going anyways. A few hours later I am fine. It certainly does not ruin three days.
It seems the massive and prolonged decline in performance is less about the glass of wine—or cheeseburger, or child waking you up in the middle of the night, or going a day without exercise, or any of the other vagaries of life—and more about the obsession with metrics and purity and the spiral that follows.
I interviewed over one hundred people who are the best at what they do for The Way of Excellence. Olympians, authors, musicians, and entrepreneurs. When I asked, “How often do things go according to plan?” No one has ever responded, “100% of the time.” Not once.
When you need to control everything always, you lose the ability to perform well when you can’t. The best performers keep the main things the main things. But they aren’t optimizers. That shit burns you out. You need to know when to lock in and when to let go. You can’t be so delicate that any small change to your routine throws you for a massive loop.
One of my favorite stories is that of the golfer JJ Spaun. In the span of 8 years, Spaun went from being ranked 584 and missing the cut in many big tournaments to capturing a major championship. But the night before he won the US Open, Spaun was awakened at 3 A.M. by his 2-year-old daughter Violet, who had fallen ill. She couldn’t stop vomiting. Spaun ran to CVS to get medication while his wife tended to his daughter. He was up all night. He described the situation as “chaos.”
The next morning, he outplayed the field and won the championship.
Human beings are not machines. Nobody cares if you have the highest sleep score or lowest biological age (which isn’t a real measure anyways). I never got less sleep than when I became a parent. My readiness score—if I had tracked it—would have been crap. But I still went to the gym, even though I didn’t feel like it. And I wrote a book that I’m incredibly proud of. It would have done me absolutely no good to pay attention and stress about arbitrary numbers from a watch or ring.
Living an excellent life is not about attaining a score on a screen or never having a glass of wine. It’s about showing up consistently over a long period of time, expecting the ups, downs, and messiness of life, and giving what you’ve got to give.
Control the controllables. But when you slip up or choose to enjoy yourself at the expense of being perfectly fine tuned always, don’t freak out. The irony is that the mindset of needing to be perfectly fine-tuned always is actually one of the greatest performance killers there is.
Don’t make yourself fragile.
Life isn’t meant to be optimized. It’s meant to be lived.
If you can't have a glass of wine without "ruining three days of your life" (outside of substance abuse, of course), then how can you possibly market yourself as someone who is "optimized?" Whatever the hell that means, anyway. Everything in moderation. Love your take on this one, Brad.
Love it! And there's a parallel in football that maps.
A QB who refuses to throw unless his primary receiver is open won't last long. Instead he "checks down" and makes a short, safer-probability throw rather than taking a sack or forcing a contested throw.
When life covers your primary plan (the full gym session, the meal-prepped dinner, the perfect night's sleep) you don't just give up. You find the check down and keep driving forward. Your primary receiver is your ideal plan: 45 minutes of lifting, a full meal-prepped dinner, your planned 5-mile run, an optimal readiness score. The coverage is life: unexpected meetings, poor sleep, family emergencies, low energy.
The check down is the scaled-back but still productive alternative that keeps you moving forward. 15 minutes instead of 45. A decent meal instead of the planned one. A walk instead of the run. Not failure. A completed pass.
I've found in my 40+ years in fitness that the key is mostly check downs. It's mostly imperfect reps, decent-enough meals, and slightly tired training sessions. Because in reality, fitness is like walking up a down escalator. The moment you stop actively moving upward, you go back down.
Bad readiness scores, poor sleep scores, a couple of old fashioneds, none of that ruins anything. What ruins things is deciding that imperfect conditions are a reason to stop. That decision, made repeatedly, is the only thing that actually loses the game.