How to avoid falling into the 'optimisation trap'

We are living in a world that’s pushing a culture of self optimisation, but what happens when it fuels obsession, anxiety and compulsion?

Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash

Glucose levels, sleep scores, step counts. We are living in a world that’s pushing for optimisation. New tech is touted as the answer to our health anxieties, offering a picture of our fitness, lifestyle habits, and offering insights into areas for improvement. You didn’t get your steps in today? Make up for it by closing an exercise ring elsewhere. You had a big night out and ate a bit more than expected? Let your diet app know and watch how its calorie cycles for you into the next day. Struggling to sleep? Don’t worry, there’s an app and a wearable that can help you to optimise and understand your sleep patterns and habits. Albeit, encouraging you to attempt to control something that by its very nature cannot be controlled due to the inherent need for rest and relaxation to be done.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my Apple Watch. I use it whenever I remember to charge it. It reminds me to breathe, stand, and to close my exercise rings. I use MyFitnessPal to understand my protein levels and to help make me feel a bit more in control of my diet. I find it helpful, but I’ve seen firsthand how it can be abused, fuelling disordered eating, compulsion, and anxiety. My ex, who became an exercise addict and struggled with disordered eating, used these metrics as a tool for punishment. If they didn’t meet their calorie target, they’d feel immense shame that would trigger a binge. If they didn’t close their exercise rings, best believe they’d be up earlier the next day trying to make up for it despite exhaustion. What I’m saying is, that new technology and innovation can be helpful. It can be wonderful in fact. Yet, when it’s geared towards feelings of control, compulsion, and commitment, it can equally be used as a tool for self-blame, punishment, and shame.

The onset of the optimisation trap

These days, wearables are everywhere. Watches, rings, sunglasses, and newer devices that integrate AI into their operations. According to IDC’s Worldwide Wearable Device Tracker, 611.5 million wearable devices were shipped globally in 2025, and these shipments increased 9.1% year-on-year. Further research has found that fitness tracking, ECG and heart monitoring, sleep tracking and smartphone integration were the key drivers of the success of the wearable sector, with smartwatches accounted for roughly 46% of the wearable market in 2025. Only recently, Meta announced a new collaboration with Kylie Jenner on a new range of smart glasses that can record, film and assist users with a range of different tasks and accessories.

The popularity of these wearables has manifested into a culture of optimisation. The drive to be constantly improving and in control of metrics, numbers and analytics on the devices strapped to our wrists has been touted as the ‘quantified self’, which is built around the idea of gaining self knowledge through numbers. Tracking on these devices now exceeds sleep and productivity, to include mood, stress, fertility and focus. Moreover, sociologists now believe the onset of wearables means that people are continuing to view the body as something that should continue to be monitored, managed and improved by data. Gamification also makes it easier and equally as addictive for people, because when one target is met, they soon find another, making the pursuit endless.

What’s wrong with it

While knowledge is power, particularly when it comes to health and well-being, how much data is too much data, and at what point does monitoring turn into obsession, compulsion and a trigger? Some experts have found that optimisation has now become something people feel they should do, not necessarily something they want to do. Optimisation has, in effect, become a moral expectation. How often have we heard someone ask, “Did you get enough sleep?”, “How many steps have you done”, or “Have you closed your rings?”. Researchers are now arguing that good health is increasingly framed as not only a personal benefit, but something that is down to individual responsibility, reflecting broader cultural expectations around self-management and self-control.

This is the key tenet and underpinning motivator. Control. When the economy isn’t working as it should be, when the news agenda is filled with stories of death and despair, or when the workplace is increasingly in flux and people feel as though their self of power has been eroded, what do they look for? Control. However, this sense of control can breed feelings of anxiety when targets are missed, obsessive checking, feelings of guilt or shame related to targets and metrics, and reduced trust in bodily intuition. What this means is greater outsourcing of our knowledge of self to technology, when at times, we know ourselves how we feel, and whether something is wrong.

The optimisation culture can also perpetuate pre-existing conditions like disordered eating or anxiety. Many people with Anorexia nervosa, Bulimia nervosa and Binge-eating disorder describe wearables as becoming another tool through which the disorder operates. In fact, a growing body of research has found that calorie expenditure can become a target rather than information, step counts can become compulsory minimums rather than goals, and exercise rings or activity goals may reinforce compulsive exercise.

Rather than helping recovery, the devices may strengthen the eating disorder’s focus on numbers and control. This is why several eating disorder clinicians now routinely ask patients whether they use fitness trackers because of their potential to reinforce compulsive monitoring. Qualitative studies have found that some patients feel unable to rest because their watch indicates they have “not done enough,” even when medically advised to reduce activity.

This is an extreme example, but the principle still stands, that many of us are succumbing to optimisation culture, but how can we avoid it?

How to avoid succumbing to it

1) Let your body lead, and your data follow

Wearables should complement, not replace, your own judgement.

A healthy question is: “How do I actually feel today?”

before checking: “What does my watch say?”

If your device reports poor sleep but you feel rested, or suggests you’re ready to train but you’re exhausted, it’s worth giving your body’s signals significant weight. This approach, sometimes called interoceptive awareness, helps maintain trust in internal cues such as hunger, fatigue, stress and recovery, rather than becoming overly dependent on external metrics.

Perhaps consider delaying how often you check your wearable’s dashboard until you’ve taken a moment to assess your own energy, mood and physical state.

2) Focus on behaviours, not perfect numbers

One of the biggest traps of optimisation culture is treating metrics as pass-or-fail tests.

Instead of aiming to:

• hit 10,000 steps every day

• achieve a perfect sleep score

• maintain an unbroken activity streak

focus on sustainable habits:

• moving your body most days

• getting enough rest over the course of a week

• exercising because it feels good, not because an app tells you to

Research on behaviour change consistently shows that intrinsic motivation—doing something because it aligns with your values or feels rewarding—is associated with more durable habits than chasing external scores or rewards.

Try to think in terms of trends over weeks or months, rather than judging yourself based on a single day’s metrics.

3) Build in periods where you are intentionally “unmeasured”

Optimisation culture can create the feeling that every aspect of life should be tracked and improved. Deliberately stepping away from measurement can help preserve a healthier relationship with technology.

This might mean:

• leaving your watch at home on some walks

• exercising without recording the session

• turning off non-essential notifications

• taking occasional “tracking holidays”

• enjoying meals, sleep or leisure without analysing the data afterwards

These breaks can help reinforce the idea that your value and wellbeing are not defined by a dashboard.

Schedule one activity each week that you do purely for enjoyment, with no tracking, scoring or performance goal.

Technology isn’t the problem. Wearables, health apps and AI-powered tools have the potential to help us move more, sleep better and understand our bodies in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. Used well, they can be empowering. The problem begins when we stop using them as tools and start treating them as judges.

The irony is that in our pursuit of perfect health, we can end up becoming less healthy. We outsource our intuition to algorithms, mistake data for wisdom, and allow numbers to determine whether we’ve had a “good” or “bad” day. We become so focused on optimising our lives that we forget to actually live them.

Perhaps the healthiest thing we can do isn’t to chase another metric, close another ring or shave a few minutes off our sleep debt. Perhaps it’s to rebuild trust in ourselves. To remember that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to communicate hunger, fatigue, joy and stress long before a smartwatch could measure them. Data can inform us, but it shouldn’t define us.

The goal, then, isn’t optimisation. It’s balance. To use technology as a compass rather than a dictator. To embrace innovation without surrendering our autonomy. Because a life well lived cannot be reduced to a dashboard, and our worth has never been measured in steps, calories or sleep scores.