Metrics Are Making You Miserable

Metrics and self-tracking could be making you miserable. In recent years, we have seen the rise of tracking metrics such as sleep, mood, habits, steps, water intake, and so much more, along with the pursuit of maintaining streaks, closing your rings, and other ways of gamifying health and wellness habits.

However, if you struggle with perfectionism or are a high achiever. These forms of improving your physical and mental health could be causing you more pressure, guilt, and self-criticism than you realize. In this episode, I’ll be diving into why, along with how you can use digital tools more mindfully to support your health and wellbeing rather than sabotaging them.

Welcome to Calmly Coping. I’m Tati Garcia, a licensed therapist and coach here to help high achievers stop overthinking and finally feel calm, balanced, and confident from within. If that resonates, then hit subscribe. Let’s dive into the episode. It feels good to check things off a list to reach your goals.

To get a high performance review at work, reach your daily steps. Or beat your previous workout stats. These can all be positive motivators and help you experience a drive to continue striving forward. But what happens when you inevitably miss a workout? You don’t hit your daily step goal, or you forget to do your daily meditation and mess up your streak.

If you are a perfectionist or a high achiever, these things can result in feelings of guilt. Self-criticism, failure, and ultimately hinder your progress. A perfectionist is someone who sets extremely high standards or expectations for themselves and sometimes others, and feels a strong drive to meet those standards flawlessly.

It often shows up as a fear of making mistakes or being judged, difficulty with feeling satisfied even when things go well. Overthinking and over preparing for things, putting intense pressure on themselves to perform. Or avoiding tasks if they can’t guarantee doing them, quote unquote perfectly. At its core, perfectionism is usually about trying to feel safe, worthy, or in control by doing everything just right.

So when you don’t close your rings for the day. So for anybody who’s not familiar, that’s the. Phrase on an Apple watch for kind of reaching all of your daily wellness goals. You’re basically a failure and should just stop trying. At least that’s what your inner critic is telling you. That negative voice inside your brain that beats you up when you don’t meet your expectations or when you’re afraid of judgment or failure.

Research shows that being harsh or self-critical often leads to more avoidance and procrastination, especially after a setback. Let’s look at this in action. You have a goal to begin meditating more regularly, so you set a goal in the Insight Timer app to meditate for 10 days straight. You feel motivated and accomplished.

Every day you complete a meditation and add one more day to your streak, but then you have a super busy and stressful day at work. You’re putting out fires and rushing from one meeting to the next with barely enough time to pause or breathe. You come home and need to prepare dinner and want to wind down at the end of the day with your partner.

By the time bedtime rolls around, you’re too exhausted to do anything else but pass out. So this results in you messing up your streak and you feel guilty and like you’ve failed afterwards and maybe you even quit after this. Or maybe this creates the added internalized pressure to maintain this streak at all costs.

So you can avoid feeling this sense of guilt and shame. Again, this may seem like minor things, maintaining a meditation streak, meeting your steps, but when you have this internalized, perfectionistic way of thinking. It feels serious and it can feel really terrible, even devastating to some people, and I’ve been there before, and maybe you have too.

And you thought this was just you motivating yourself to maintain a habit and have discipline when in reality this was another way you were pressuring yourself to be perfect. And beating yourself up incessantly if you fell short of your expectations, because it’s not just about meeting your career goals or ambitions or being the best partner, parent, or friend.

This desire for perfection runs deep into all aspects of your life. So if you aren’t checking off these habits or meeting these goals. Who are you really? And even if these words aren’t exactly resonating for you, the message is the same. You need to push yourself hard and beat yourself up to feel good enough.

And missing a habit streak is yet another way of reinforcing the negative belief that you aren’t good enough. And this also feeds naturally into all or nothing, or black and white thinking. One of the hallmark cognitive distortions, present imper perfectionism. This sounds like thoughts such as. If my streak isn’t perfect, I’m a failure.

I should always perform at my best. One. Mistake ruins everything, and there are real risks that come with this type of thinking and perfectionistic behaviors. A clear example is what we see with calorie counting apps. Research has shown that tracking calories can reinforce rigid all or nothing rules around food.

Worsen disordered eating patterns, especially for those with perfectionistic traits. After using the Aura ring for more than two years consistently, which it is a tech wearable ring that tracks your certain health metrics, I recently decided to take a break. The metrics were incredibly useful for me in the beginning, understanding how much sleep I needed, how things like alcohol and illness affected my health metrics, keeping track of my stress and resiliency and more.

However, it turned into a crutch. I started using the scores to tell me how I felt and relying on this more than listening to myself. Once I started to notice this, I decided to take a break. Whether it’s temporary or permanent, I’m still not sure right now, but I wanted to get a sense of how this would affect my mental health to not have this tool or this measure.

I honestly felt free when I stopped wearing it. No more pressure or burden of achieving some arbitrary number of steps or calories burned or being negatively influenced by a low sleep score, even if I felt fine. And that brings me to my next point. Metric tracking can start to become more about going through the motions than about listening to yourself and your body.

You can become more focused on a number or a check mark. Then on actually listening to what you need or being fully present in the experience. And I don’t mean making excuses and falling off your habits and having that be listening to your body unless you need the rest, of course, which we all need and we need to realize that nobody is perfect.

What I do mean these things. Noticing how your body feels, what your breathing in form are like, what kind of thoughts come up, and how that is affecting your performance during your run, rather than continually checking your watch, wanting to improve your speed from last run, and counting down the tenths of a mile until it’s over.

Bringing a sense of curiosity to how you feel when you are more active throughout your day, whether that is taking moments to stand at your desk, doing household chores, getting a formal exercise in, or going on short walks during your breaks rather than trying to reach an arbitrary number of steps. And even one less than this number is failure.

Side note, I literally used to pace around my house at night to reach my daily steps if I didn’t for the day, embarrassing probably, but that’s how much I wanted to reach that arbitrary goal and see that crown for the day, which is the measure of getting above a certain threshold in the Aura app. Maybe you can relate.

Another way this can look is being flexible about self-care rather than rigid and knowing that one day of a missed meditation isn’t the end all, be all. Humans are imperfect. Streaks are ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and it is okay to miss a day. See what it’s like to practice some self-compassion.

Recognize. That life happens and ask yourself, how can I do things better or differently tomorrow? Ultimately, through apps and wearables, we are in the era of gamifying mental health and self-care. Why? Because this gets people to use these products ultimately making these companies more money. So rather than allowing our attention and mental health to be controlled by our devices, let’s take control ourselves.

Ask yourself if the tools you are using and the way you are using them are helping you. Or are causing you more stress, pressure, and self-criticism, and it may not be black and white. However, if the cons outweighs the pros, there may be something to explore. Then see if you can adjust your behavior to use these tools more intentionally so they add to your life and enhance your mental health.

Let’s talk about a few ways you can do this. Here are some examples. Experiment with letting go of streaks or step goals for a while. Anywhere from one to two weeks to months. You choose and reflect on how you feel and what you notice. You can also keep an eye out for tools that encourage you to practice self-care through positive reinforcement.

Or, and or no expectation of gamification. Some examples, I’ve never used this one myself, but many of my clients find value in the Finch app for practicing self-care. And it also makes it a community act because you can connect to real life friends. To encourage positive habits, I do often recommend the app.

How we feel to my clients to use for emotion identification and tracking a benefit is that this app is created by a nonprofit organization. Rather than a tech company trying to capture your attention and mine your data, or you can always use good old pen and paper tools like a journal planning or even guided journals.

Never get old. I personally use a strength training journal for my workouts and have recently started using a morning and evening routine journal. Along with just a blank journal to plan out my meals and take other notes. You can also take the positive aspects of a tool and minimize the rest. This looks like customizing it to benefit you.

So an example is that you may notice if you’re watching the video that I’m wearing a Garin smartwatch. I use this as a tool to track my active exercise. Such as timing and distance for my walks and runs. I also use the alarm function countdown timer, credit cards when I don’t have my phone and the weather, I keep it on do not disturb 24 7.

So I don’t get distracted by incoming texts or other notifications, and I don’t overly fixate on the metrics. I use what benefits me and leave the rest. And there are many days that I don’t wear it at all or I take it off after my workout. I use this in a way that benefits me. Rather than allowing the metrics to consume me, the reality is that technology is here to stay and is getting more and more deeply integrated into our lives by the minute.

But are we pausing to question how it’s affecting our mental health and overall wellbeing? I hope this episode helped you reflect on your relationship with tech, specifically metric tracking to help you positively transform your mental health and let go of the inaccurate and perfectionistic tendencies that may be holding you back.

Taking care of yourself is so important, and even taking one small step to improve the way you do that is incredible. One note for regular listeners, if you’re tuning in, I do record my episodes in advance and I am going to be taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, which has already passed by the time this episode’s coming out.

But what that means is there will be no new episode for next week because I’ll be taking this break. I’ll be returning to you with a brand new episode the following week. I hope that everybody is enjoying their holiday season, and thank you so much for sticking around. If you found this episode helpful, then I highly suggest you check out my episode on when Balance becomes unhealthy.

In it, I talk about how striving for perfection in your personal life can leave you more stressed than fulfilled, along with a new, healthier approach to balance that will help you feel more present and fulfilled. Click here to check it out. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and until next time, be calm.