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The Biology of Balance
When technology meets reality
Your sleep tracker says you had a perfect night’s rest, but you feel tired and terrible. Your friend’s Apple Watch shows a VO2 max score that isn’t the best, and yet they consistently outrun you. Welcome to the messy truth about biological wellness — where the numbers rarely tell the whole story.
I learned this lesson firsthand recently when my EKG revealed an irregular heartbeat. What followed was three days of wearing a chest monitor, collecting data during sleep and daily activities, until finally receiving a clean bill of health. My cardiologist’s advice? Use wearables to track heart rate — but not for daily comparisons. Instead, look for significant changes across months and years. It was an interesting moment that changed how I view biological data and wellness technology, that wearables are better utilized as long-term trending versus daily gratification.
We’ve turned wellness into a leaderboard game we never signed up to play.
The $100 billion wellness tech industry is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: that more data automatically equals better health. But what if there’s a different way to think about our biological well-being?
