This one is going to be a highly opinionated and biased post. :P
A few months back, one of my friends went to a dietitian, and one of the recommendations was to have exactly 25 grams of chutney with a meal. I remember thinking.. WTF. Not because nutrition doesn't matter, but suppose yu end up eating 30 grams instead of 25. The stress of constantly thinking "Oops, I overdid it" might end up doing more harm than those extra five grams ever would.
That got me thinking. Are we overdoing tracking and measurements? Wearables, fitness trackers, sleep scores, food labels, calorie counters... it almost feels like we are heading towards paralysis by over-analysis. These days our watch tells us how well we slept, how stressed we are, whether we should train, whether we should rest, and sometimes it almost feels like it knows us better than we know ourselves. I even came across a LinkedIn post mentioning "Protein Chai." Not sure how true that example was, but it perfectly captures where we seem to be heading—we take something useful and somehow find a way to overdo it.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely believe trackers have their place. Take someone suffering from insomnia, for example. If they are trying different treatments, medicines, meditation, music, or changes in routine, then tracking their sleep for a few weeks makes complete sense. It helps identify what actually works. But once things stabilize, maybe stop measuring every single night and let your body take over again. The goal of technology should be to teach us something, not become something we can't function without.
Listening to our body—that's really what I wanted to talk about.
I'll use running as an example because I've lived through that grind. For many years, including the two full marathons I completed, I used nothing more than a simple digital watch with a stopwatch. I knew my running routes, tracked the overall time, and that was about it. I never chased a particular cadence with a metronome, never worried about staying in Zone 2 all the time, and never kept staring at my wrist every few minutes. Instead, I tried listening to my body. How were my muscles feeling? Was my breathing deep or shallow? Was I landing too hard? Could I push a little more today, or was it one of those days where I should simply back off? Those became my metrics.
Interestingly, I later heard David Goggins talk about something very similar. Early in his SEAL training and running journey, he relied much more on effort and feel than on technology. The heart-rate monitors and advanced gadgets came much later. Forget wearables—I am guilty of this too—but I have also seen people run entire marathons with headphones on from start to finish. Personally, I'm completely against that for my longer runs. For long runs - 10 miles and above, I prefer no music at all. I want to hear my breathing, feel my stride, notice if I'm getting tired, or if my form is slowly falling apart. Music, for me at least, drowns out that inner conversation. Of course, that's just my preference, and everyone is different.
The same thought applies beyond running. Want to eat healthier? Maybe the answer isn't another tracking app. Maybe it's simply eating less packaged food, cooking more meals at home, and including the ingredients yu actually want. Sure, get a health check-up every six months or once a year to make sure your vitals are within range. That's sensible. But we also need to trust that our bodies are remarkably good at adapting. Mindful eating is wonderful. Obsessing over every gram... maybe not so much.
I'll end with a completely different example.
Formula 1 cars have hundreds of sensors. Teams analyze thousands of data points every lap. They know tyre temperatures, brake temperatures, engine settings, wind conditions, fuel loads—almost everything. Yet if data alone decided races, every driver would perform exactly the same.
They don't.
The very best drivers constantly talk about feeling the car. Yu often hear commentators mention their internal gyroscope—their ability to sense grip, balance, weight transfer, and tiny changes that no dashboard can fully communicate. The data helps optimize the machine, but intuition still wins races.
Maybe it's the same with us.
In a world where social media has already taken over so much of our attention, let's not allow trackers and wearables to completely replace our ability to listen to our own body. Technology should improve our awareness, not replace it.
Sometimes, the most advanced sensor we have... is still ourselves.
