The Hidden Cost of Trying to Optimize Everything

I have always taken sleep for granted.

For most of my life, eight hours came easily and if I needed an afternoon nap, that was no problem. Sleep was simply not something I thought about very much, which in hindsight was probably exactly why it worked so well.

That all changed when I turned fifty. Suddenly I found myself waking in the middle of the night, my mind already running, mulling over the day behind me and the one ahead. I tried the usual remedies; notebooks by the bed, supplements, earlier bedtimes, all the things people suggest when sleep starts to slip. None of it seemed to make much difference.

Then I discovered Eight Sleep.

For anyone who hasn't come across it, Eight Sleep is a mattress system with a built-in cooling pad that regulates your body temperature through the night. As someone who runs hot, the relief was immediate and real. I noticed the difference from the first night and I was sold. What came with it, though, was something I didn't fully appreciate at the time; a sophisticated app that tracked everything. Deep sleep, REM sleep, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, a full diagnostic on how well I had performed as a sleeper.

And, almost without realizing it, I became obsessed.

Every morning I would wake up, and in order to silence the vibrating alarm built into the mattress, I would pick up my phone and immediately be confronted with my sleep score. Some mornings it was great and I felt validated. However, the majority of mornings, I learned that I had missed my REM window or that my HRV was low, and as a result something subtle but real would shift in how I approached my day. Worse, I started going to bed at night with a quiet anxiety building; had I eaten too late, had I avoided alcohol, had I done everything required to earn a good sleep score?

What had been my pursuit of better rest had quietly digressed into a form of performance anxiety.

I had purchased a device to help me sleep better and instead I was getting a performance review as the first thing to greet me when I stepped out of bed.

A Surprising Discovery

In March of this past year, Eight Sleep removed all of those diagnostic features for anyone who wasn't a paying subscriber. Having already spent four thousand dollars on the mattress pad, not once but twice, I was not particularly interested in adding a monthly fee on top of that. So I kept using the cooling system and let the analytics go.

What happened next genuinely surprised me.

I started sleeping through the night.

Without the morning score to wake up to, without the quiet anxiety of wondering whether tonight would be a good performance, I simply went to bed and slept. The only measure I had left was the one I had started with; how did I feel when I woke up? And that single, simple question turned out to be more useful than every metric the app had ever given me.

I had been so focused on optimizing my sleep that I had forgotten how to actually rest.

I Had Seen This Pattern Before

Once I saw it in my sleep, I recognized it immediately because I had lived it years earlier in a very different arena.

In 2016, I stood at the starting line of the Hong Kong 100; a hundred kilometer ultramarathon with over seventeen thousand feet of elevation gain through some of the most demanding mountain terrain in the world. If you want the full story, it is in the final chapter of my book Start Up Santa, but the short version is that I attempted the race twice and what happened between those two attempts taught me something I carry with me to this day.

My first season of training was consumed with metrics. I tracked every run, hit specific targets, monitored my times, and measured my progress obsessively against a plan. And it sucked the joy out of every single step. Training stopped feeling like preparation and started feeling like a job I couldn't quit. I showed up to the starting line in January 2016 having hardly slept the night before, anxious about the physical exertion ahead, wound tight from fourteen months of grinding. The race was eventually cancelled due to a freak ice storm, but I had already learned something important; my obsession with optimization had turned something meaningful into something I was merely enduring.

My second attempt was different. I stretched out my training, made it enjoyable, and stopped measuring every step. I focused on the process rather than the metrics, on being ready rather than being perfect. And while that race remains one of the hardest things I have ever done (twenty-one and a half hours, a twisted knee at the forty kilometer mark, running through fog and darkness in the final hours), I crossed the finish line having genuinely enjoyed the preparation that got me there. The difference between those two seasons wasn't fitness. It was the relationship I had with the process.

The Fear Hiding Inside the Data

We live in a world that has made optimization feel like a virtue; track your steps, measure your heart rate, score your productivity, grade your habits, log your macros, rate your relationships. There is an app for almost every area of life and most of them promise the same thing: that more data will lead to better performance.

But there is a cost that rarely gets mentioned.

When we turn every area of life into a metric to be improved, we also turn it into something to be judged. And where there is constant judgment, there is almost always a quiet form of fear.

Not the dramatic kind of fear, but the low-grade, persistent kind; the anxiety of wondering whether we are measuring up, whether the numbers are trending in the right direction, whether we are falling behind some standard we set for ourselves or that someone else set for us.

Over time, the metric stops serving us and begins to own us.

My sleep diagnostics were producing exactly that: a nightly anxiety about future performance that created a negative spiral; one I couldn't see while I was inside it. My first season of ultramarathon training was doing the same thing on a longer timeline.

Roosevelt captured it simply: the only thing to fear is fear itself. What I’ve come to see is that anxiety is, at its core, a distortion of imagination. It’s the habit of projecting a future that is worse than reality requires and then behaving as if that imagined outcome is inevitable. Or, just as insidious, it takes a difficult moment from the past and quietly convinces you it will repeat itself again and again.

Where focus goes, energy flows; and when our metrics keep us living in a state of anxiety, they pull us toward scarcity and lack rather than toward the abundance and joy that is actually available to us.

The alternative is not to stop caring about progress. It is to redirect our imagination toward what can go right rather than what might go wrong; to measure ourselves against hope rather than fear, and to stay genuinely connected to the joy of the process.

The Question Worth Sitting With

I am not against measurement. The right metrics in the right context are genuinely useful; they help us course correct, stay accountable, and make better decisions.

But there is a meaningful difference between metrics that serve us and metrics that quietly begin to own us.

The test is simple; does tracking this number make me calmer and more confident, or does it make me more anxious and more self-critical? Does it free me to perform better or does it tether me to a standard that is always just slightly out of reach?

The Eight Sleep app failed that test for me. And when I stopped using it, I didn't perform worse as a sleeper. I performed better, because I finally got out of my own way. The same was true in the mountains of Hong Kong; my best performance did not come from the season where I tracked everything, but from the season where I trusted myself to show up and be ready.

We optimize for better sleep and create sleep anxiety. We optimize for athletic performance and overtrain ourselves into regression. We optimize for better productivity and create burnout. At some point, the measurement itself becomes the obstacle.

The most restorative night of sleep I ever had wasn't tracked by anyone. Neither was my best training run, my most joyful morning routine, or the most meaningful conversation with my wife.

A Few Things Worth Trying

If any of this resonates, here are two practical shifts that have made a real difference for me personally.

The first is what I now think of as a data detox; a deliberate decision to remove unnecessary metrics from areas of life where they are creating more noise than signal. This is not about putting your head in the sand or abandoning accountability. It is about recognizing that humans thrive in simplicity, clarity, and certainty; and that more data almost always adds complexity, uncertainty, and second-guessing. The question worth asking about every metric in your life is not whether it is interesting, but whether it is actually helping. If it isn't, let it go.

The second is simpler and perhaps more powerful. Our bedrooms are designed for two things; rest and relationship. Nothing more. With that in mind, I made the decision to turn our bedroom into a screen-free zone; no television, no laptop, no tablet, no phone, no digital watch. Anything that can ping, notify, or demand attention does not cross the threshold of that sacred space. That single change has made a more meaningful difference to the quality of my sleep and my marriage than any app or optimization ever did.

Sometimes the upgrade isn't adding something new. It's removing what was never supposed to be there in the first place.

So this week, sit with these questions:

Where in your life are you tracking something that is creating more anxiety than clarity?

Is there an area where letting go of the metric might actually improve the result?

What would it feel like to measure your progress by how alive and present you feel rather than what the number says?

If something in here landed for you, pass it along to someone who needs to read it this week; and if you're not yet part of the Full Spectrum community, this is the kind of conversation we have every single week, accomplished leaders working out together what it actually means to thrive beyond the balance sheet.

Share with someone who needs to see this today!

And follow Brad Pedersen and Vijay Krishnan for more LinkedIn content like this!

‍