Too Many Numbers

I bought an Apple Watch to understand myself better. Instead, it showed me something I didn't really like.

A few weeks ago I bought an Apple Watch.

I thought it would be good gadget to have, but honestly I did not need it at all. For years I had managed perfectly fine without it, and if I’m being honest, I never really understood the obsession people had with tracking every little thing they did throughout the day. I don’t even wear a normal watch. I didn’t care how many calories I burned or how many steps I had taken and I certainly didn’t feel the need to wake up every morning and immediately check how well I had slept.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me.

I thought it would simply be interesting to collect a little more data about myself. I spend a large part of my life looking at statistics in trading, so why not do the same with my health? Maybe I’d discover something useful. Maybe I’d improve my sleep. Maybe I’d build healthier habits.

For the first few days, that’s exactly what happened.

Every morning I’d open the sleep app before I’d even gotten out of bed. I’d check how many hours I’d slept, compare it to the previous night, look at my resting heart rate and then spend a few minutes trying to understand why one night scored an 89 and another scored a 76. It became a small part of my morning routine without me even realizing it.

Then something strange started happening.

I stopped paying attention to how I actually felt.

Instead, I started paying attention to the number.

If I woke up feeling rested but the watch gave me a mediocre score, I suddenly found myself questioning whether I’d actually slept well. If the score was high, I somehow felt more satisfied with my sleep, even if I couldn’t honestly tell the difference between that morning and the one before it.

The number quietly became more important than the experience itself.

Trading has trained my brain to think in numbers. For years I’ve measured almost everything. Win rate. Average R. Drawdown. Monthly return. Number of trades. Expected value. Statistics have become one of the ways I understand the world, and I genuinely think they’ve made me a much better trader because they remove emotion from decisions.

The problem is that not everything in life should be approached the way we approach trading.

Without even noticing it, I started treating sleep like another performance metric. More than make myself feel rested after the sleep - I was trying to wake up with a better score. If my sleep wasn’t improving, I wanted to know why. If my resting heart rate changed, I wanted to understand the reason. Even going for a walk became less about enjoying the walk and more about whether I’d close another ring before the end of the day.

It sounds ridiculous when I write it down.

But I know I’m not the only person who does this.

I think we’re living in a time where everything has become measurable, and because it’s measurable, we immediately assume it should be optimized. We optimize our productivity, our workouts, our diets, our finances, our calendars and our sleep and after a while you almost start feeling guilty when you’re simply living without collecting data about it.

The funny thing is that none of those numbers actually made me healthier.

Instead of listening to my body, I started listening to my watch. Instead of asking myself whether I felt rested, I asked my wrist. Instead of enjoying progress naturally, I started chasing another statistic.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this is exactly how I used to approach trading.

Years ago I was obsessed with finding the perfect system. Then I became obsessed with improving my statistics. Then I wanted a higher win rate. Then a bigger account. There was always another number that could be improved and every improvement immediately created another target.

That’s the dangerous thing about optimization.

It never ends.

There is always another percentage to increase. Another hour to save. Another score to improve. Another graph to make look a little better.

I’ve actually been thinking about selling the watch. Yes, for real.

The problem is that I know myself well enough to realize that I’ll never treat it as “just information.” My brain doesn’t look at numbers passively. It immediately turns them into goals and once something becomes a goal, I slowly stop enjoying it for what it is.

Trading already gives me more than enough numbers to think about every single day.

I don’t need sleep becoming another competition with myself.

Maybe not everything that can be measured needs to be measured.

Maybe not everything that can be optimized actually needs to be optimized.

And maybe sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is take the watch off, stop checking the statistics and simply trust that your body knows a little more than another screen ever could.

Bless you all.

Luke