My wife’s Google spy-watch broke for the 17th time not too long ago.
She seemed to think it was giving her all kinds of useful data for useful data-crunching.
I was and remain a skeptic.
It isn’t that I think numbers are useless. If you want to get a rocketship into orbit, numbers are pretty handy. I use numbers all the time for cooking, making coffee, and the rare occasions when I McGuyver up a solution to a ticking clock right before the commercial break.
Numbers are fine for what they can do, where they do them best.
It’s just that there are a great many parts of life and reality where numbers, measures, and quantities are not the right tool.
Quantities don’t get you to the vastly more important qualities.
Back in 2012 or so, in the depths of squatting to a max every day, I experimented with a measurement called Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
This ‘un is backed by a lot of credible The Science™ showing that HRV is a pretty accurate measure of the human body’s present stress-load.
If HRV spikes, you are presently adapting to a challenge to your system.
This can be emotional, mental, social, or physiological. The neat thing about stress is that it doesn’t matter what causes it. It affects your entire body, from your brain to your hormones and immune system, on down to individual cells.
I discovered three interesting things:
1- HRV spikes strongly correlate with feeling wrung out and what I called a “dead battery”. Feeling stressed out is a reliable indicator that you are, in fact, stressed out.
2- Elevated HRV, indicating elevated stress, didn’t have much impact on my daily numbers. What I could do and how my body responded to the work-load were on two different wavelengths.
3- There were at least two levels of HRV elevation and stress-feelings. One level was short-term and happened within a couple weeks of pushing hard. The other came later, after months of going hard. The first one can be powered through with determination and routine. The second one can also be powered through with determination, but I found it is more serious and might call for a real break.
Sounds useful, right?
So why am I skeptical of measurements?
Simple:
The HRV numbers never told me anything I didn’t already know.
I didn’t need a Silicon Valley spy device to quantify my health and send my dox to Google’s cloud in order to realize that I was putting serious stress on my body and mind.
I could tell that all by myself using the magical move of…
Paying attention to what is happening
I have the same thoughts about all the rest of this tech-gadget junk shoved down our throats.
I don’t need your wearable and app to tell me I didn’t sleep good last night after a couple shots of Wild Turkey and waking up at 4.30 in the morning.
People are so detached from their own bodies that it doesn’t even occur to them to hit pause for 60 seconds, calm their chattering monkey-minds, and ask “how do I feel right now?”
The disconnection of mind from body is then used to justify addiction to machines that tell you what you feel.
Think of the absolute insanity in that sentence.
“Dear robot, how do I feel?”
Why learn to feel into your body and become aware of yourself when you can pay a monthly subscription to give a Big Tech company the right to data-mine your life to sell you ads?
Which then separates you even more from your own experience and feelings of being in a body, leading to even more dependence on the numbers.
Your life is not a physics class or a factory floor. Stop treating it like one.
The only question I have in mind is:
Will this lead to the results I want, by making what I am doing easier or more effective?
If the answer is “Naw” then that thing does not exist in my world.
Health doesn’t quantify and the geeks who pretend it does are doing us all a disservice.
The ROI on simply learning to sit with, be in, and pay attention to your own body is near incalculable… and I expect that value to only increase as more of society willingly hands itself over to the unthinking machines.
Me, I will keep preaching the power of human experience, and teaching it to those with ears to listen (and the real desire and intention to learn).
If you’re sick of the quantifiers and measurers, you’re always welcome to come along with me.
Matt Perryman