After a year of being sober, Steven Bartlett had a glass of wine one evening – actually, he had three.
“It ruined three days of my life,” the Diary of a CEO podcast host said in an episode from December. “Because of the domino effect it caused.
“It meant that I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. Then I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after… because I felt really bad. I could track all of this on my Whoop… and I was like, oh my god, those three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect…”
It should go without saying that yes, consuming excessive amounts of alcohol is bad. But three glasses will not ruin your progress – and certainly not your life.
This sort of wellness catastrophising is hardly surprising from the man who believes it’s easier to work out seven days a week than four and maintains a group chat with friends where they remove the person who’s exercised the least that week.
It’s par for the course from Bartlett and his contemporaries, like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, who often share the extreme lengths they’re willing to go to in order to self-optimise: 4am wake-ups, strict diet and exercise regimes supported by cold plunges, saunas, peptides and more supplements than you could fill a hyperbaric chamber with.
More concerning is that Bartlett’s comments are symptomatic of a way of thinking where health is something to continually and obsessively optimise, where a night that might see you deter from your routine prompts anguish and self-flagellation.
When we are constantly go-go-go, our mind and body starts to shut down. “If we don’t get a proper life balance, psychologically and biochemically, we end up totally screwed,” says Clive Jones, a performance psychologist at Queensland Academy of Sport.
Jones points out the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion, identified by French researchers in a 2003 review. Harmonious passion is activated when we’re invigorated, excited and enjoying all the different things that we can engage in. By comparison, obsessive passion occurs when a person zeroes-in on a particular activity and in doing so, feels pressure to continue with it.
“Where there’s an obsession to just get better and every single element of life has to point towards that improvement or else – life stops being something to engage, and it becomes something to conquer,” says Jones.
“To get into a state of flow and performance, it’s a celebration of engaging life. Yet, often when we get an obsessive passion, there’s no celebration in it, it becomes a burden.”
As Bartlett alluded to by mentioning his Whoop band, we now have more information about our health than ever before thanks to wearables and digital health applications that allow us to track everything from our heart rate to our sleep, calories burned, steps taken and even the days we’re ovulating.
These technologies should be used as a tool to help guide healthy decisions rather than as a judge, says Dr Sayan Mitra, a researcher in digital health and lifestyle interventions.
Wearables have enormous potential to positively influence healthy behaviours, though some studies have shown people can become obsessed with the information provided to the point of it becoming counterproductive. One study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that a fixation on sleep data led to participants having more issues with getting a good night’s rest.
“They are most helpful when they support self-awareness and behaviour change without creating guilt or rigidity,” Mitra says. “For most people, it is better to look at trends rather than individual daily scores. One poor night of sleep, one missed workout or one day below a step target is not meaningful on its own because the broader pattern matters more.”
Part of what humans excel at is being flexible, adaptable and adjusting to whatever’s in front of us, says Dr Richard Keegan, clinical psychologist and honorary professor in sport, performance and exercise psychology at the University of Canberra. “We should be able to accommodate little variations in that, that’s what a healthy interpretation of good health would look like. Not ‘I’m only good at this narrowly defined thing’ – that’s what computers are for.”
The reaction to Bartlett’s comments on social media was swift; all of this self-optimisation and yet, is anyone actually happier? What happened to having fun?
Life is messy and inconvenient and sometimes, the best nights of our lives are the spontaneous ones that do, yes, involve a little bit too much of one thing. But when they are the exception rather than the rule, they’re an important part of an enriched life.
Research has consistently demonstrated that adults who engage in playful activities are better at coping with stress, show more resilience in difficult situations, experience more positive emotions and have higher levels of life satisfaction.
“Fun isn’t a luxury; it’s part of a healthy life,” says Dr Tim Sharp, psychologist and founder of The Happiness Institute.
“Positive emotions broaden our thinking, build psychological resources, strengthen relationships and help us recover from stress. Activities we enjoy are also more sustainable than activities we force ourselves to do. People are far more likely to maintain healthy behaviours when they’re pleasurable rather than purely disciplined.”
The pursuit of health and wanting to improve are important, but shouldn’t come at the expense of the other elements that make life joyful. “The research on happiness tends to suggest that actually, accepting and valuing the good things that we do have has far more benefit than striving and striving and striving all the time,” Keegan says.
As Sharp notes, “If you give up all the things that make you want to live, you might live a long life, but you’ll have no reason to.”
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