Hi friends,

Today, almost everybody has a device that keeps track of some biological measurements—heart rate, step count, distance walked, etc.

Let’s start with the benefits of wearable biosensors such as smart watches, smart rings, and other trackers that you can have on your body that collect physiological data.

One, they can be great motivators to lead a more active lifestyle. For instance, it can make setting and achieving goals measurable and salient. If you set a goal to get 10,000 steps per day—which is a completely arbitrary goal for step count, but not a bad starting point—and you’re at 8,500 steps at 7 pm, you may be more inclined to go for a short walk to hit your goal.

Another benefit of wearables is the ability to track progress over time. If you start running or cycling, you can track how your pace, heart rate, and recovery ability have changed throughout your training.

Wearables can also measure the amount of sleep you got the night prior, and how long you stayed in each phase of sleep. Then, almost like a report card, it gives you a score of how well you slept.

Tracking your sleep and other biological processes within your body can provide insight into your health, but too many people are obsessing over their numbers. For example, the anxiety from checking your sleep score in the morning could lead to you sleeping more poorly.

When life events such as weddings, family gatherings, or just hanging out with friends change how much you sleep, you shouldn’t be stressing out about the quality and quantity of sleep you are going to get.

Instead, we should just aim to be reasonable and shoot for 7-9 hours most nights of our lives and accept that there will be inevitable circumstances that arise.

Once you put a quantifiable objective on your sleep, recovery, and stress levels, it is easy to become preoccupied with the numbers, which ironically, can hinder your health by leading to higher stress levels.

Some may benefit from biological wearables to get an understanding of their health and how different circumstances and events affect their quantifiable physiological measures. But once you start to sacrifice quality of life to optimize your numbers, you’ve lost the point of wearing the device in the first place.

Until next week,

Kevin