Why optimizing your health is making you feel worse

I wear Whoop to track my sleep and my health nearly 24 hours a day. I get my blood work extensively done multiple times a year, and I get my body composition checked with an InBody scan a few times a year as well. I'm not Bryan Johnson, but I do track a lot, and I'm here to tell you that you should probably be tracking less in 2026, not more. We have never had more tools at our disposal to optimize every single area of our life than we do today. Sleep, blood, workout schedules, relationships, vacations, even our dining experiences. There's now an app, a tracker, or an AI tool for each of those. Has any of that actually made our lives better or has it just given us more to manage? There's a reason why the Global Wellness Summit just named overoptimization as the leading trend for this year. And once I show you what's actually happening behind the scenes, dopamine, the AI component, and Bryan Johnson's $2 million a year protocol, you might start to see optimization a little differently. So the wellness industry is at a turning point in 2026. I'm telling you this as somebody who is currently using a lot of these optimization tools. I'm not anti-tracking, but I am anti-over-tracking, and there's a really big difference between the two. I'm gonna break this down into 6 different key components, and trust me, you're not gonna wanna miss any of these, especially the last 3. So stick with me. Every January, the Global Wellness Summit drops an 150-page report forecasting the trends that will move the wellness industry that year, and it's the single most cited for forecast in the wellness space. This year they named 10 trends in particular. The framing trend, the one that they say defines all the others, is called the over-optimization backlash. The report notably quotes, well-being has shifted from something that we feel to something that we perform correctly. The report then goes on to describe what they call a modern well-being paradox. Quote, never before has health been so measurable, and never before has it felt so psychologically demanding. These researchers, clinicians, and therapists that are part of the Global Wellness Summit, they're saying that data-driven wellness optimization is turning into a fixation. People are getting analysis paralysis instead of clarity. They're ultimately terrified of getting wellness wrong, and the wellness industry is starting to course correct away from the body as a perfectible machine model towards what they call regulation over results, internal coherence over external validation. What I did not see coming 12 months ago was how fast AI was gonna pour gasoline on that fire. But before we get to AI, we have to talk about the human face that is behind a lot of this whole conversation. Bryan Johnson. If you don't already know, Bryan Johnson is the 48-year-old tech entrepreneur who sold Braintree to PayPal for around $800 million and then pivoted his entire life to not aging. He spends, by his own published numbers that he's released, over $2 million a year on his own health optimization protocols. He has over 100 supplements that he takes daily, regularly tracks over 70 biomarkers, and calls himself, quote, the most measured human in history. Look, I'm not here to dunk on Bryan Johnson. He publishes all of his data openly, which is way more than most health influencers would ever do. But here's the problem that the longevity research community has been quietly flagging. Matt Kaeberlein is one of the most well-respected longevity researchers in the world, and he ran the OptiSpan Academy at the University of Washington. And here's exactly what he said about Bryan Johnson's Blueprint protocol. Quote, you can't separate the signal from the noise. If someone improves their diet, starts exercising, fixes their sleep, and takes 100 supplements, you have no idea which of those is actually doing the work. That's not a hater, that's just an actual scientist saying even the most measured human alive can't tell you what's working and what's expensive theater. I'm bringing up Bryan Johnson because he is the cultural mascot for the era that we're leaving. The Global Wellness Summit is basically saying that era—body as machine, more data equals more health, and optimize everything— is hitting a ceiling, and the rest of us who are not spending $2 million a year need to learn from that ceiling instead of trying to climb it. Question before we go further: how many tabs of health information do you have open right now? How about notification badges on your Oura or on MyFitnessPal or on some CGM app? Now imagine adding AI to that equation. In January of this year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, a dedicated experience inside of ChatGPT where you can plug in your Apple Health data, MyFitnessPal, your function blood work, even your hospital's patient portal records. Why? Because, and this is for OpenAI's own data, in their words, over 230 million people globally ask health and wellness-related questions on ChatGPT every week. 40 million a day. A KFF tracking poll from this spring found that about one-third or 32% of US adults use AI for health information and advice in this past year. KFF said that that figure actually rivals the share of folks who use social media for their health information. A separate West Health and Gallup survey of over 5,600 adults found that 1 in 4, so about 66 million Americans, used AI tools or chatbots for health information or advice in the past 30 days. And then there's the AI health coaching avatar market, AKA chatbots that are specifically designed to coach you on your health, is projected to grow from $1.7 billion in 2026 to $6.54 billion by the year 2030. So here's why this matters for the over-optimization story. AI didn't just make optimization easier, it made it infinite. Before, maybe you had a Fitbit and a Notes app you were using. Now you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to build you the perfect circadian-aligned, HRV-optimized, glucose-stable, mitochondrial-supportive, longevity-extending morning protocol, and it'll spit out a detailed plan in about 7 seconds with sources, with supplement timing, and with exact macros. It feels productive, it feels like progress, but you're not. You're just planning. And that— the difference between planning and doing— is where the real damage of this era Victoria is hiding. Here's the part that I find nobody is connecting the dots with. There is a well-documented neurological reason that we keep buying the next wearable, downloading the next app, asking AI for the next protocol, even though we already have more than enough information to be healthy. Brian Nustin over at Stanford published a foundational functional MRI finding back in 2001's NeuroReport, basically showing that the dopamine-rich part of your brain something called the ventral striatum, lights up most strongly during the anticipation of a reward, not when you actually receive it. Even more so, Anna Lembke, who runs Stanford's Addiction Medicine Program, wrote a book called Dopamine Nation, and she describes it like this, quote, once we get the anticipated reward, brain dopamine firing increases well above tonic baseline. But if the reward we anticipated doesn't materialize, dopamine levels fall well below baseline. In other words, as it pertains to planning for our health, the high is in the planning. In reality, almost always disappoints, which is exactly what happens when you spend over an hour building the perfect optimization plan for your health and then realize that you actually have to wake up at 5 AM to execute it. Then there's the whole separate thing called the planning fallacy. Bueller, Griffin, and Ross's 1994 paper out of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that people are systematically overconfident about how fast they'll execute on plans they make. And then there's the meta-analytic data on this. Sheeran's 2002 review, 422 studies, over 82,000 participants, found that people's intentions only explain about 28% of the variance in their actual behavior. So when we look at this data all together, we learn that anticipation gives a bigger dopamine hit than execution. We systematically overtrust our own plans, and our intentions only weakly predict our actions. You start to see why we're hooked to the planning of over-optimizing instead of the actual doing. Planning the morning routine feels better than doing the morning routine. Buying the Whoop feels better than acting on what the Whoop is actually telling you to do. Reading the protocol feels better than living the protocol. This is why I roll my eyes a little bit when somebody asks, should I add a CGM to my optimization stack, and they haven't even gone to the gym in the past 3 weeks. That's not a data problem, that's a doing problem, and no new device or measurement is going to fix that. So let me show you guys really quick about a personal example about tracking for the sake of tracking working and something that you can execute on daily without really having to think about it that can actually improve your health. This is my Bluevia countertop reverse osmosis system. I've been using it for about 18 months. I'm not personally tracking my water and I'm not scoring my hydration, and I don't have an app that's telling me if I'm meeting my hydration goals. I just fill my water and drink it. Execution, not over-optimization. Bluevia makes this process so, so easy, and they specialize in countertop reverse osmosis technology. And the cool thing is, is that reverse osmosis filters down to 0.0001 microns. That's filtering things out like heavy metals, PFAS, microplastics, fluoride. Personally, my Chicago tap water comes into my sink at around 170 parts per million of total dissolved solids. Sometimes we can get down to 150, but it's usually pretty high. After filtering with Bluevia Ropod Lite, it's always under 10, and I can verify that with the TDS meter on the Ropod Lite every single day. Verification without obsession. That's the difference. Another great thing about these countertop RO units is that there is no installation required whatsoever, and I'm renting, so that's a huge win for me. There's also a glass craft, so there's no plastic contact with your water, and there's only one filter change in about a year. That's it. You don't have to think about it, and it's not another insane thing that you have to measure and track every single day. Not everything needs to be tracked. Some things just need to work. So if you want to guarantee that you're getting the healthiest water at home without having to think about it, then definitely try Bluevia. Link is down in the description, and you can use use code Victoria 15 for 15% off. So if you only remember one line from this entire video, I want you to remember this one: not all data is good data. So dataset number one that is not always good data is sleep data that causes orthosomnia. Orthosomnia is basically just insomnia caused by anxiety around sleep. What ended up happening is in 2017, a psychologist and behavioral sleep science medicine doctor, Dr. Kelly Barron, She started to see lots of people in these sleep studies having normal nights of sleep but getting a bad sleep score from their wearable and having recurring anxiety over sleep as a byproduct of seeing that bad sleep score. And now in 2024, it's estimated that between 3 and 14% of the general population now struggles with orthosomnia. So while sleep data can be helpful for most people, for a lot of people it can actually make sleep worse. Dataset number 2 that is increasingly not super helpful for a lot of people: continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, in people without diabetes. A 2024 University College London review in Diabetic Medicine, they said that there's currently insufficient data that CGMs benefit people who are living without diabetes, and they specifically flagged a risk that they noticed of people using CGM who are non-diabetic, that it can cause eating disorders like dysregulated eating patterns, and even skipping out on going out and eating with friends. Glucose spikes after eating is just normal physiology, and watching them happen in real time on a graph can feel terrifying. People then start eliminating whole food groups like oats and fruit, and then they end up sicker than they were before they started using the device. The third set of data that can also be more harmful than good is HRV data, AKA heart rate variability. Whoop's own published studies of 170,000 people, including 7.9 million days of data, have shown real positive associations between HRV, sleep consistency, and mental health markers. So HRV is a useful metric to pay attention to. However, I see this often in my coaching where people let HRV control and dictate their lives, basically letting it dictate when and how they train. That's one number in one day driving downstream behavior. That's not what I would call data informed. That would be more data controlled, and there's a difference. The fourth type of data, and I find this extremely, extremely problematic, is whole body MRI scans, particularly unhealthy people without symptoms. A few years back, Kim Kardashian posted a Prenuvo scan on Instagram and called it, quote, a life-saving machine, and Prenuvo's waitlist exploded overnight. Sounds great, right? Catch cancer early, be proactive. But the deeper medical and radiology community had a lot to say about this, with many radiologists calling it humbug bordering on quackery. Many others concluding that there is no scientific evidence that full-body MRI screening is beneficial or cost-effective for healthy asymptomatic people, and that there is a substantial risk of false positives leading to invasive tests and unnecessary treatments. Translation: when you scan a body in that much detail, you find stuff, and most of it is normal variation in a body that you would have never known about. But now you know about it, and now you're paying for follow-ups, biopsies, more MRIs, and it all turned out to just be an incidental normal finding. The body often has these weird benign things in it, and you don't have to know about every single random shadow or weird thing that shows up on a scan. Okay, so if I'm not telling you to throw your Whoop in a drawer and forget all the data, which to be clear I'm not, then what am I telling you? Well, 3 things in particular. Number 1, every person needs a different couple of tools or routes to make a measurable difference in their health. Not 10, 2, maybe 3, but the right 2 or 3 for you, given your sleep, your stress, your training history, your injuries, your schedule. Those are not gonna be the same for any 2 people. Bryan Johnson's stack will not make you Bryan Johnson. It will just make you anxious and broke. Number 2, stop confusing data with action. Data without execution is just expensive information. So try just taking action on the data that you do have. Number 3, there are 3 things that AI and wearables and apps cannot give you, no matter how good the model gets. The first gap is initiation. These things cannot initiate the action for you. You have to get up and do the thing no matter. The second gap is memory across time. Yes, you can continue to refeed AI everything that's happened to you, and yes, you probably have a long history of input that you've already put in there, but AI generally still needs to be prompted to refresh and give appropriate context for each individual conversation. The model won't know you and hold depth of lateral context that a human would. Someone like a coach might notice that you've blown off 3 workouts, and then they connect that to the work stress that you mentioned a month ago, and then the sleep score trend that you've been having lately, all without you having to brief them. The cross-time pattern recognition is what clients tell me is the most valuable part about coaching, and it's the hardest thing for something like AI to replicate. And the third gap, which is honestly the most important to me, is having honest pushback. AI is trained to be agreeable because it wants you to come back and continue to use it the next day. If it were arguing with you and pushing back against you and your ideas every single day, it probably wouldn't feel great to want to come back to it. So when you ask it something like, should I incorporate a CGM, it'll give you a balanced, somewhat helpful, and well-organized response. A good coach would say, No dude, the issue isn't your glucose, it's that you haven't been sleeping more than 5 hours for the past 2 weeks and you've been asking me about using creatine to help boost your energy instead of fixing your bedtime. That's the kind of pattern-breaking honesty that AI won't deliver to you because it wants you to come back tomorrow. Of course, so does a coach, but that's what's different about a human relationship. It's a relationship and it's more dynamic and nuanced. So if you've watched this whole video and you've seen different components of this in yourself, you've maybe got a wearable, you have several tracking apps, a supplement stack, and maybe unread biomarker results, and you still don't feel like your health is moving in the right direction, then that's the exact problem that I built my coaching practice to solve. My team and I do one-on-one health coaching with busy adults, oftentimes business owners or former athletes who have plenty of data but not enough strategy and accountability. So we have to figure out the one or two things that will move the needle in the right direction for your body, your life, your schedule, and your goals. And then we build accountability and structure around and helping you to execute them. So if that sounds interesting to you, you can book a free call with us down in the description. And as always, guys, if you found this video helpful or interesting, please share it with a friend. Give this video a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. We greatly appreciate each and every one of you. See you on the next one. Bye.