Dear Friends,
The first thing I do every morning, before I’m out of bed, is check my sleep.
I wear an Oura ring. My relationship with it is, I’ll admit, slightly obsessive. Before I’ve decided how I feel about the night, the ring has already told me.
Once in a while I wake up feeling more rested than it says I am. More often it goes the other way. I feel foggy, the ring says I slept well, and somehow I end up feeling better about the night than I did a minute earlier.
The number talks me into a better night than the one I had.
It has changed what I do, too. I don’t drink alcohol at all anymore. The ring wasn’t the whole reason for that decision, but it reinforces it. And I avoid late dinners like the plague, because a late meal shows up in my score every time.
Those are good changes. I’m keeping them. I’m keeping the ring, too.
But years ago, sleep researchers at Rush University Medical Center here in Chicago started seeing a pattern in their patients. People were coming in worried about their sleep because of what their trackers were telling them. Some were spending extra time in bed trying to improve their numbers, and sleeping worse for it.
Kelly Baron and her colleagues gave it a name: orthosomnia. The pursuit of correct sleep.
Mine mostly runs the other way. The ring reassures me more than it worries me. But the same thing sits at the center of it. A device’s definition of a good night has started to outrank my own.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about since.
A score is someone else’s definition of good. Usually a well-researched one. Often a useful one. But it’s borrowed, and the more often you check it, the easier it is to forget that you’re the one who was there.
The same thing is happening on a much larger scale.
The longevity conversation right now runs on scores. Biological age. VO2 max. Healthspan. Resting heart rate, glucose curves, sleep stages. Much of it is good science, and I take it seriously. A longer, healthier life is worth working for.
But optimization answers one kind of question: how well is the body running?
It has nothing to say about the question those extra decades will actually ask. Running toward what?
And a dashboard is persuasive. When the numbers look good, it feels like life is going well. That’s the same move my ring makes on a foggy morning. You can have every metric in range and still not know what the years are for.
I understand why the protocol appeals to people coming out of long careers. It has goals, measurement, visible progress. It feels like work, and work is the structure many of us know best.
It’s also possible to spend the extra years maintaining the body for a life that never gets designed.
That’s my case against optimizing the next chapter. Not against the habits. Against letting the habits become the plan.
The principle I come back to in this work is orientation before prescription: knowing where you actually stand before deciding where to go. And where you stand includes your own read. How you actually feel when you wake up. What a day was worth, whatever it scored. Whether the life the metrics are protecting is one you chose.
No device reports that. You have to ask.
I’ll check the ring again tomorrow morning. It will tell me how I slept. It won’t tell me what the day is for.
That part is still mine.
Warmly,
Cara
founder, Good Morning Freedom
Future Identity Strategist
P.S. If you want a clearer read on where you stand, one that comes from your own answers rather than a device, the Future Identity Snapshot is a 14-question reflective assessment built for exactly that. goodmorningfreedom.com/future-identity-snapshot