Member-only story
The Dangerous Allure of the Quantified Self
Numbers can inform and motivate us. They can also sabotage our bodies and brains.
You can put a number on just about anything health-related these days: not just blood pressure and heart rate but also steps and movement, hours of sleep, time spent in front of a screen, and, yes, calories and weight. (Let’s just state upfront that measurements like weight and BMI are actually poor predictors of health, and tracking them is of questionable utility and unquestionable potential danger for some.)
In an ideal world, these markers of health would just be stats: a simple way to figure out where we stand and to track progress toward wellness goals. But in the real world, our brains love to categorize numbers as “good” or “bad” and to conclude that the value of those numbers says something about our own worth; we also see measurements as something we can control, which is a powerful promise when we’re feeling out of control.
These sinister forces — self-judgment and control — can sometimes team up to trigger us into a cascade of guilt, self-loathing, and, as shitty human luck would have it, unhealthy behavior. That might take the form of disordered eating and exercise, reaching for unhelpful or even dangerous drugs and supplements, or simply playing the classic, oh-so-toxic comparison game. “I’m ranked 12,421 out of 96,431 riders, which is roughly the 13th percentile, which would maybe feel good to someone else but just feels bad to me because there are 12,420 people doing better than I did,” writes blogger Maya Kosoff of her Peloton leaderboard obsession.
One smaller-scale but still very lame result of all this: Things like eating delicious food and having a fantastic ride on your stationary bike simply become less fun. Quantification undermines intrinsic motivation, making things that are supposed to be enjoyable feel more like work, according to an article published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
The upshot: Tracking things isn’t inherently bad but can easily go wrong or simply turn into kind of a bummer. If your tracking habits are working for you, great. But if, as registered dietitian Ellie Krieger wrote last year in the Washington Post, you’re ignoring your body cues, your numbers have an…
