Within You Without You
Using Metrics to Calibrate Health
The idea of calibrating our perception is one I refer to often in articles that I write for this Substack as well as in my Check Engine Light classes. Perception while wildly variable and unreliable is the lens through which we live life. It's essential to progress then that we have some sense of metrics outside of ourselves that give us more reliable information. That concept is essentially the basis for this whole Check Engine Light thing.
The flip side is as essential as objective metrics are they really what drive health and performance over the long term. At least not from the level of individual behavior. What really drives things is if the information we glean from those metrics has meaning for us. Does the data makes sense in our world? If there's a change in the numbers but we cannot corroborate those number with a change in the quality of our lives, who cares?
This is actually one of the big challenges that application software developers who design health apps run into. Even with all the dopamine smuggling, attention pilfering tricks it is still very hard to create sustainable changes in health behavior by displaying data regardless of the gamified magic that is used. If the end user doesn't know what this information means for them then it will be discarded like used toilet paper.
Nobody's Fool
This brings me to my next point. Long term changes don't come from the delivery of information. That is the lowest form of education. Real sustained change comes in the form of ownership of our own process. That doesn't happen unless the information I'm getting means something to me. Data be damned. Remember that if you're a provider who complains about "people" not valuing what's important when it comes to health and looking for gimmicks. We have to do a better job communicating how what we have solves problems they care about. Shout out to Seth Godin.
Legitimate education can be a road to solving this problem. Education though is not the delivery of facts to people. We all remember how it felt to sit through that class in high school. The teacher who delivered the information in the curriculum with nauseatingly placid demeanor. By the same token if you are taking on the role of student - it's not a passive one. Waiting for understanding to land on your shoulder is a road to nowhere. You have to be willing to try, fail, and try again if you want access to the highest quality results.
If you're a person trying to improve your health, that health is a set of skills that you develop over time. No person, program, or product can deliver it to you. Any that says they can doesn't understand what they offer or is lying to you outright. None of us are born with the skills we need to be healthier but they can be learned. The resources we use to learn them and how we interact with those resources can have a dramatic effect on the outcomes we get as well.
Outsourcing <-> Insourcing
Outsourcing as it's commonly used is the reliance on an expert or resource outside of an industry to perform or oversee a set of specialized tasks. When we outsource we hand off the responsibility of something to something or somebody else that might be able to do a better job than we can. We outsource lots of things in life. Our food production, our home building, automotive repair, heck damn near everything these days. Another key item that is most relevant to this discussion is the outsourcing of our health. We rely often on information from experts or even more commonly data from wearable devices that let us know how and what we should be doing. With this comes the assumption that these sources of information are reliable and sufficient measures of reality and more so than our flawed perception could ever be.
An issue with this is that very few of the direct to consumer wearables are accurate to the degree we believe and what's more, the intense focus on the data can lead to an increase worry over acute changes in the metrics. This isn't my opinion by the way. Some research has shown that tracking sleep can lead to an increase in sleep anxiety (Baron et. al. 2017). Additionally, over reliance on outsourcing can be difficult for individuals to reconcile with the legitimate demands of their individual lives as well as longer cycles of time that such devices may not account for. This dissonance can lead to both abandonment of the tracking tool and the associated health behavior that could have changed things for the better. Does that mean tracking stuff is futile and we should all throw our OÅ«ra rings, Whoops, and Fitbits in the garbage? No. We just have to know the limitations of relying to much on things outside of us.
"Insourcing" (Schraefel), on the other end of that continuum, is relying on our internal resources to give us information about where we stand and what course of action we should take. Insourcing while perhaps not as objective as other options calls on us to develop the knowledge and skills required to be more attentive to signals and habits that add to or detract from our own health. Insourcing and outsourcing do not stand in opposition to each other but instead operate on a continuum that allows us to move back and forth within. We know that reliance on perception alone is no bueno. If you ask a person who hasn't had a truly restful night sleep in ten years how they feel when they wake up they'll tell you that they're fine. They will tell you this not because they are fine but because the "fine" that their thermostat is set to isn't a stable temperature by normative standards. So if we can't quite trust the information we're getting from inside and we can't quite trust the information from wearables, what the hell are we supposed to do?
Tuning
M. C. Schraefel, a researcher at the University of Southhampton, United Kingdom has created the concept of "tuning". Normally when we think of tuning we think of tuning an instrument or maybe an automobile engine. Essentially, it's getting all the things in harmony so that the end function is improved by the cooperation of the parts. The process of tuning is also a dynamic one where you listen and you play a bit and then you adjust. You're also never done tuning. That's true for instruments, cars, and health.
When we tune our health it becomes an active process of listening to what's going on and making slight adjustments as we play or in the case of health, live. We make minor tweaks and adjustments that help us refine the sound we're getting from our instrument or the power we're getting from our engine.
This is where outsourcing can be a helpful part of the continuum. We can use external metrics that calibrate our internal sense of things so we can prevent ourselves from getting too far off track. That's like tracking your macronutrients for awhile to achieve a specific caloric goal for weight management. Once you are within the range for body composition you may not need to measure every single day but you may want to intermittently check back in to make sure you're not off the rails.
Without You Within You
A couple months back I was feeling a little sluggish. I was still exercising regularly but I noticed some movements felt a little slow. A did my yearly DEXA scan to check my body composition (outsourcing) to find that I'd gained 10 pounds of body fat since the previous year's DEXA. Hell no. Not this guy. I immediately started tracking calories. I've been tracking six days per week since then (I get one cheat day. I ain't crazy!). Now that I've lost that extra bacon off my gut I can track with less frequency and I eyeball things (insourcing). Especially if I maintain the same habits of eating and activity within reason. Â
If I want to maintain my current range of body composition then it will behoove me not to trust the same flawed game plan that got me 10 pounds overweight in the first place and have some reasonable way to calibrate my perception and stay in tune. The same process can be used with nearly any needle you want to move in health and performance. You just have to pick one thing you want to change and start moving the needle.Â
All of this together represents a real education in our own health. Not podcasts delivering protocols or books giving us lifestyle advice. Nothing is wrong with those things. They can inspire action but ultimately these things must be integrated into our own experience. In so doing we'll become more skilled practitioners of performance longevity. Over the long haul these practices lead to much deeper skills that will stand up to the rigor of life much more than any wearable or protocol ever will.
Thanks for reading,
Rob
For more on this topic check out this paper: