The Unhealthy Pursuit Of Optimal Health

In this episode of The Midlife Mentors we’re talking about health optimisation.  

Today we find ourselves living in a obsessive health optimisation culture where we're tracking our sleep, monitoring our HRV, counting steps, taking supplements, cold plunging, fasting and trying to optimise every aspect of our lives.

Twenty years ago most people just wanted to lose a bit of weight and feel healthier. Today, health has become a performance metric. And yet despite having more information than ever before, many people seem more anxious, overwhelmed and confused about their health than ever.

So have we made health too complicated? Today we're talking about optimisation culture, wearables, supplements, longevity and what really moves the needle when it comes to living a longer, healthier and happier life.

Because sometimes the healthiest thing you can do isn't add another habit. It's to get really good at the basics. Let's get into it.

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Transcript

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The Midlife Mentors: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Midlife Mentors with me, James. And me, Claire. How are you?

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The Midlife Mentors: What are wein up to, Claire? I don't know!

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The Midlife Mentors: A little bit shell-shocked again this week. It's, it feels like that at the moment, doesn't it? Yeah, it's been a bit of a whirlwind week. I mean, I've been out and about quite a bit. I had a lunch in Westminster.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah. Doing some work there for the prevention is the New Cure podcast, which is fun. Yeah, it's amazing. I love that. I got to catch up with the Old Boys Association of my school on Thursday. The Old Boys. The old… he was like, do you want to come along? I was like, I think the… the answer is in the name, actually, the old boys, not the old boys and one girl. No. And then, yeah, caught up, caught up with a friend.

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The Midlife Mentors: last night, and just been busy. Yeah, rolling in late. Coaching workshops late. 10 o'clock. It's late. 10 o'clock. Two nights in a row, mister! I know. If anyone's watching on video, yes, I am in a polar neck.

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The Midlife Mentors: You know why I'm cold today? Just, it is the middle of summer, but I'm chill, I'm kidding. Oh, you couldn't go one episode without mentioning the weather. I think you did last week. I don't think I mentioned the weather last week. I fancy an award for that. If anyone wants to send me a little an award for not mentioning the weather last week, you can. And drumroll, you finished another chapter of the book. Oh, I did!

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The Midlife Mentors: So, one more to go. Oh, dear, I'm very excited that I've only got one more chapter to go. But we are excited. But then we've got… then we've got the whole rewrite, which all…

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The Midlife Mentors: Come after the editor, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other thing I did, actually, this week was go down to Battersea Power Station and record a podcast with Ted's Health, which is the testosterone replacement therapy brand. Lovely, lovely Dr. Johnny Andrews. Johnny, hello. Lovely to go down there and sit on there, and we covered, like.

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The Midlife Mentors: whole range of topics. When's that coming out, do you know? I'm not sure.

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The Midlife Mentors: But one of the things we talked about, I thought we're going to cover today, actually, we were talking about, have we made health too complicated? And this specifically, I guess, is around this whole health optimization thing.

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The Midlife Mentors: supplements and wearables and the whole culture around it, and I guess what spurred the conversation then, even though I was talking to Claire, was, Diary of a CEO. Stephen Bartlett. Stephen Bartlett. I don't like seeing… I'm not a massive fan of the media ripping into people, so,

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The Midlife Mentors: We're gonna say this, but with a little bit of compassion, aren't we? Yeah. Aren't we, James? So, in case you missed it, he basically said on his podcast that he'd had a couple glasses of white wine, and then he felt terrible for 3 whole days. He said he's brewing, I haven't heard it, actually. Brewing 3 days for him. Brewing. I think largely a result, actually, he was reflective on it, of all the data he looked at afterwards, all his health data he tracks. Now, I want to say, Stephen.

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The Midlife Mentors: come for a proper 1990s night out, and then you can know what it feels like to write off three days. Or not, because I'm alcohol-free over here, so we're coming at this from two different angles. Listen, yeah, I think it's amazing that less people are drinking, and that actually people are speaking up about how…

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The Midlife Mentors: alcohol actually does ruin the next day, because it sure did for me. So, I'm not gonna lay into him too much, but the media seems to have really got hold of it.

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The Midlife Mentors: And saying, oh, you know, he was like, is there anything more sickening than hearing about Stephen Bartlett's, health optimization, and how it was ruined after just a few glasses of wine? And I just… I don't know, I don't think that's fair. But I suppose if you're in the public eye, you just get used to that. Yeah, I think it's interesting, because, you know, health optimization has become a thing. It has. A subculture that's come into mainstream culture, you know, all of our phones are tracking various health

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The Midlife Mentors: data, which we may or may not look at, but of course, we have various

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The Midlife Mentors: straps, rings, other wearables, tracking everything from sleep to heart rate variability, we have glucose monitors, so we have a lot of data, and this is what we're talking about on the other podcast. We've never…

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The Midlife Mentors: in any time in history had so much health data available to us, which, at one level, is immensely empowering. It gives us, like, tremendous agency to take charge of our health, and particularly, you know.

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The Midlife Mentors: Make huge steps in preventative health for ourselves, but on the other hand.

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The Midlife Mentors: do we have enough medical knowledge to interpret the data? Do we understand what the data points mean? Do we understand the interplay of the data? Because I'd say human beings tend to be very reductive, and so we can often, like, try and simplify this down and go, oh, this says this, X says this, so that means Y.

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The Midlife Mentors: And that might not always be as straightforward or the case. Yeah, and also contradictory to, does it give… it gives us more agency over our health.

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The Midlife Mentors: Does it, though, because it breaks down that…

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The Midlife Mentors: human intuition that we have around our health as well. So I'm not entirely sure. It's almost like we're giving agency away to a wearable, or a device, or something like that. We're saying, you figure it out, you look at it, and you tell me, rather than, hmm, how does that make me feel? I think it's a blend… listen, I think we're gonna… we're gonna both agree on this podcast that it's a blend of both. Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: But, I kind of felt, when I had a whoopstrap, I have said this in a couple of podcasts before, we haven't done anything on this. I think when we had a whoopstrap, that was, like, 5 years ago.

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The Midlife Mentors: And, what I noticed, James and I were actually giving them to test and trial, so I don't think we were paying for them, which was very nice of them to give them to us.

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The Midlife Mentors: I wouldn't have gone out and bought one, so we must have been sent them. Anyway, we had… we had these whoop straps, and I was honestly… I mean, James tends to be…

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The Midlife Mentors: I know you won't mind me saying this, with stuff like that, it can be… become very obsessive and kind of quite dominated by it, but I even found myself

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The Midlife Mentors: getting up in the morning, and I know that I'm not the best sleeper, but then I'd look at my watch and realize just how bad a sleep I had been, and then it would just ruin my day. Honestly, it was mainly the sleep thing. It was like, oh, you're not gonna have as much energy now for your workout that you're just about to do, you're probably gonna struggle throughout the day. The psychology that played into that piece of information for me

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The Midlife Mentors: was huge. Yeah. And then after a while, I was like, right, I'm taking this bad boy off. And you did too. Yeah, and we're going to dive into that, because, yeah, we want to keep this balance. Like, it does give you so much data, but on the other hand, it can be overwhelming, it starts to drive psychological issues as well. But how did we get here? How did we get to this point, the rise of optimization culture? Well, I think… I think the obvious answer is tech, right? Suddenly.

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The Midlife Mentors: you know, go back 20 years, if you wanted to get a health marker, you have to go to your GP. You might then require a hospital visit, and so on and so on. Now, you've got devices telling you everything, you know, like, literally second by second, which is great. I think…

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The Midlife Mentors: we've had the rise of biohacking, so on the extreme end, we've got the tech bros doing complete blood transfusions and checking out their blown marrow and stuff like that. But even on a lower level, you know, biohacking has become a bit of a buzzword, and people will talk about, you know, MCT oils in their coffee and cold plunging and stuff like that. Which, by the way, I'm actually gonna shame James now. I love it! I love it with MCT oil in my coffee.

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The Midlife Mentors: It does give me a boost. Yeah, MC2 oil, I just found that in the cupboard the other day, I was like.

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The Midlife Mentors: What's this? Mr… I don't really like biohacking? Well, I wouldn't say that's biohacking.

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The Midlife Mentors: Obviously, the rise of more and more… I did start putting it in my coffee as well. It makes it lovely and creamy. And of course, social media, right? So we get the chance to compare and track our progress. And of course, we have other apps as well. You could argue things like, Strava, other tracking apps available, you know, where you can see your performance on a run, on a bike ride compared to someone else's.

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The Midlife Mentors: It's all fueling this kind of rise, of course, and we've got celebrities feeding into it as well. So, there's a whole thing there about social comparison.

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The Midlife Mentors: But I think the issue is the benchmark keeps moving. I want to come into that as well, because here's the interesting thing about the data that we're compiling.

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The Midlife Mentors: Obviously, different manufacturers measure things in slightly different ways. One might have standardized units, e.g. a calorie for a measurement of energy. If you were to wear, say, 4 different devices, at the end of every day, they're going to give you 4 different sets of readings. They all have slightly different calorie counts, different heart rate variabilities, so…

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The Midlife Mentors: I think an issue number one is understanding, like, what is actually an accurate benchmark for my data? And there was, like, been lots of tests on this, where people… Yes. …running 5K, and then on one device they have run 5K, another they've done 6, another they've done 4. So, it's just quite interesting on the whole data side, I guess, about…

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The Midlife Mentors: how…

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The Midlife Mentors: accurate is it? What's the efficacy of that data? Yeah, and so I just wanted to talk a little bit, actually, about when this, health optimization might be

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The Midlife Mentors: teetering into obsession. And I think it's so easy for us all to do this. Listen, like, we're all addicted now. Us human beings, we're all addicted to that… that dopamine here. We're…

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The Midlife Mentors: If you've got a mobile phone, there will be an element of addiction to you, because, you know, when those notifications go off.

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The Midlife Mentors: Can you not look at them? That's an addiction. If you are sat there, and you look on your phone for one minute, and then half an hour later, you're still there looking at cat videos, you've got an addiction. So we're all hardwired, actually, to have this kind of craving now of distraction and dopamine.

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The Midlife Mentors: But one of the things I think is quite worrying about wearables and all this kind of helpful automation gadgets is when you start…

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The Midlife Mentors: maybe having anxiety, so some examples might be that you relate to, anxiety when you miss a workout, then your watch or your Oura Ring starts having a freakout, or…

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The Midlife Mentors: you're seeing that you haven't got as many steps in that day. Like, honestly, I can't tell you how many people have told us that if they've seen they haven't done their 10,000 steps for the day, even if it's midnight, we actually had

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The Midlife Mentors: One person say this.

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The Midlife Mentors: it was a bit… she'd been out, and it was past midnight, but she hadn't got her steps in, so she was walking up and down the stairs in her house, up and down, up and down, up and down, after midnight, even though she was exhausted. That's not… that's not psychologically healthy, guys. No, I would say, I think one of the… one of the key issues that we see observing time after time is that people become servants of the data.

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The Midlife Mentors: And start to drift away from the actual reason that they're tracking, what their ultimate goal is. You know, I remember someone saying to me, like.

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The Midlife Mentors: they'd listen to a podcast with an influencer. It was a time… do you remember when everyone was wearing continuous glucose monitors?

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The Midlife Mentors: And this is a couple of years ago, interestingly, just… I'd say just before GLP-1s were really hitting the market. Yes! I saw so many people wear them in the gym, but they were wearing them for ages, and they were, like, checking them over and over. So, but the interesting… the narrative we started to get along with those is that a glucose spike is bad, insulin… insulin spikes are bad, we must not have… well, actually, it's a natural process, it's helping break down the food that we ingest and give us energy.

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The Midlife Mentors: And we're meant to have insulin spikes, but people kind of got obsessed with trying to…

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The Midlife Mentors: minimize their insulin spikes. And someone says to me, like, oh, you know, I heard on a podcast that if I do 20 bodyweight squats before a meal, that will help lower my insulin spike. And you're like, what? I'm like…

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The Midlife Mentors: Well, what's your goal in wanting to lower your insulin spike? And then they just look totally confused. They're like, well, just to lower it. I'm like, but why? What's the ultimate goal? And they're like,

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The Midlife Mentors: would it help me lose body fat? And, like…

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The Midlife Mentors: I don't know, would it? You tell me, you're the one who wants to do it. And they don't know, they just heard this thing, like, oh, insulin spike bad, if I do squats, it'll lower it, but like, but why? They don't even know why they want to lower it. That's so true, it's like taking everything as red that they might hear from an influencer on Instagram. One of the other things I heard as well around the

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The Midlife Mentors: the glucose monitor that's got the name of a female lady. I'm not going to say the name here. They were all wearing that glucose monitor, and then going on the app.

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The Midlife Mentors: And having their, sample sent off, And it…

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The Midlife Mentors: I heard from a few women I was working with after they'd been using that was actually it made them incredibly excessive about food, their diet, what they were eating, to the point where it re-triggered some really unhealthy eating behaviors, eating disorders, and that wasn't, like, a one-person story.

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The Midlife Mentors: And I did a bit of research around it, and more and more people started coming through on social media, on the internet, but even in my own world, that I spoke directly to, that were saying, actually, it started making me really obsessed about

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The Midlife Mentors: looking at that glucose spike, thinking… feeling really guilty around it, thinking I've done something bad… Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: And then… and then spiralling into this really negative emotion around food. It's… it's just fueling an unhealthy relationship. Yeah, so listen, let's talk, like, why would you have a continuous glucose monitor, right? Well, if you're diabetic or pre-diabetic, it's… it's, I argue, essential. It's actually, you know, can be a life-saving device. That becomes super important. There's a medical condition there.

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The Midlife Mentors: The other ways you might want to do it is, like, you should wear it for a two-week period to test what foods

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The Midlife Mentors: do give you an insulin response, right? Because we know, like, obviously, if you eat a double chopped chip cookie, you're going to get a big insulin spike, we know that, but everyone is biologically different. You might suddenly find that, oh, wow, I didn't know that a particular grain or a pulse gave me a spike that I didn't know before, and then you can adapt your diet accordingly. But that's what it's designed for. It's not to be designed to be worn for weeks on end, and you're tracking, like, every time you do exercise, every time

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The Midlife Mentors: you eat something, every time you drink something, you're looking at the response for it, and that's kind of where we ended up with a lot of… and then those feelings, you're right, those feelings of guilt around, oh, my insulin spiked. Well, it's meant to. Yeah, and I feel like some of these things are really, really good if you've got an issue with your gut, for example. You know, if you've got IBS, or you're having flare-ups and things like that, it's really good, of course, to perhaps go to a nutritionist.

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The Midlife Mentors: And… or doctor, and get some more tests, and really start investigating.

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The Midlife Mentors: But if you haven't got those things.

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The Midlife Mentors: it's… to a degree, it's like, if it's not broken, don't fix it. And I'm not saying don't be aware of your… again, this is the balance, that it's very individual for everyone, and I'm not saying that I get it right, or any of us are really getting it right, but what I would say is, when it starts tipping into, like, looking for a problem, or looking for something that you might be doing wrong.

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The Midlife Mentors: That's when I feel like it tips into a balance of just being very unhealthy for your spirit and your mind. Well, this is what I mean, about people not understanding. So, in one way, it can be really empowering, right? We get agency over our health.

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The Midlife Mentors: by being able to look at the data and go, oh, if I do this thing, then I get this response for it, and then we can moderate our behavior. So it can be really helpful for building healthier habits that are aligned with our goals. But where it becomes a problem with tips over, is

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The Midlife Mentors: there's so much data, and we don't know how to interpret it correctly, we actually start becoming a bit of a servant to the datum the other way around. Yeah. And we're letting it drive us, like, oh, I must do this thing, I must do that thing, oh, it didn't… I didn't hit my target on this.

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The Midlife Mentors: I think it comes down to understanding

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The Midlife Mentors: What you're tracking, like, really understanding what you're tracking.

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The Midlife Mentors: And why you're tracking it, what's the goal? Like…

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The Midlife Mentors: what's my heart rate variability? I don't know. I don't… I'm not really bothered, doesn't matter. Does it fluctuate? Of course it does, like, anyone's, but it doesn't bother me, I just get on with my life. Now, listen, if I'm a pro athlete going into the Olympics, that's gonna be a very important measure for me. I'm gonna use it to, like, you know, know when to train harder, pull back.

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The Midlife Mentors: I'm not a pro athlete in the Olympics. Yeah. I don't need that, and I think that's where people are just getting overloaded with it, and then they're making lifestyle choices based off the back of it. 100%, and I think, just for me, I had enough self-awareness, I have enough self-awareness when it comes to stuff like this.

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The Midlife Mentors: that, you know, I had disordered eating, for many, many years.

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The Midlife Mentors: And I just know that if I feel good now, it's a premise of if I feel good in my skin, or if I don't, then I know what to do, but it's about getting that… we are going to talk about this, but it's about getting those basics right before I start looking at anything else. It's like, I know that

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The Midlife Mentors: Back in the day, before longevity hacks and optimization and biohacking, before all of that, it was… there were simple premises to look and feel healthy.

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The Midlife Mentors: And so, when you add all these other bits in, there's just this real sense that I could become too obsessed with them, and move away from those basics, start feeling guilty, start doing things for the wrong reason. At the moment, I eat that 80-20 rule, I eat things, 80% of the time that are healthy for me, other 20% I don't.

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The Midlife Mentors: But it's… I've got a balance in my life, and that makes me feel very, very grounded, but I think when people start using these… this outside data, I just…

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, I think we, like, pull away from our sense of self too much. I was gonna say, actually, as well, and there'd be a tendency to focus on, like, the…

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The Midlife Mentors: the small things that we think are gonna make a difference, but really don't, instead of focusing on what the research says. So we get people, you know, like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna do ice baths every day… Oxygen chambers, infrared lights… A monthly colon cleanse, or whatever, or yeah, I sit in front of an infrared lamp, but hold on.

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The Midlife Mentors: What's about your sleep? Like, the research says the most important thing is sleep. Solid, good 8 hours, good sleep every night. Exercise, strength training, cardiovascular fitness, nutrition.

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The Midlife Mentors: Make sure you're getting enough protein, you're not having whole foods. Not having too much sugar. Not having too much sugar, too much processed food. Not having too much food. You know, these are all the essentials to get right, that sometimes I think, like, focusing on other data points, people will kind of think, I can subvert the need for these things.

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The Midlife Mentors: And we even get people cheating on wearables, don't we? I was remembering this, there's, you can get people, like… Yes! You can find people to run your Strava routes for you, who are fast runners, wearing your wearables, so that it looks like you've done a really fast time. There's been people being caught out by that. I mean, guys, does this not sound

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The Midlife Mentors: Absolutely exhausting, like…

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The Midlife Mentors: We are dysregulated on an extraordinary, never-be-seen-before level, us human beings, because of all the tech, because of all the pressure. The world we are living in right now is more pressurized and more stressful than ever before. Adding this to the mix…

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The Midlife Mentors: shouldn't be stressing you out more, and if it is, we've really got to be asking ourselves some big old questions there. Yeah. And the other thing as well, like, moving away from data and how we use, move, fuel our bodies.

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The Midlife Mentors: of course, like, connection and purpose, right? Having relationships… listen, loneliness, I say this every time, loneliness, loneliness…

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The Midlife Mentors: is a bigger mortality risk as 17 cigarettes a day, every day. So, you know, having relationships, having communities to lean into is so, so important for your… not just for only your well-being, but your longevity. So, who's… who's going to be happier

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The Midlife Mentors: And have a better longevity, so someone who's sitting at home on their own, fiddling with all these data points, or someone who's out there meeting people

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The Midlife Mentors: and having, like, a fulfilling life, and having a sense of purpose. The data suggests, actually, the latter. Someone in the Mediterranean, let's say, that has… Blue zones, they don't wear wearables. Exactly. They're probably looking at us guys, going, what on earth are you doing? You're running around like hamsters caught in a wheel.

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The Midlife Mentors: and you're tracking it all, then you're getting stressed because your wearable's telling you you're stressed. I mean, where does that go? I know. It's…

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The Midlife Mentors: it's almost a version of insanity, really. If we're not using this, and we're not, like James said, they're controlling us right now, and making us more stressed, we need to be able to redress the balance, and think, okay, what am I trying to get from this? How can it help me? Same with mobile phones. Same with social media. Like, what am I getting from this, and what's it distracting me from?

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The Midlife Mentors: I think the question to ask yourself is, do you trust your body less now than you did before you bought the wearable? Mmm, amen to that. Like, seriously, do you? Because I didn't.

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The Midlife Mentors: when I was wearing that whoop strap, I was way, like, I was relying on, you know, where my heart rate was, how… how many calories I'd burned, and I was just like, this just doesn't feel right to me. I felt like I was becoming very disconnected from myself.

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The Midlife Mentors: Really. And I think that is another thing, and I'm gonna throw something else into the mix here. So, when is this data used for? Well, I think we're gonna see shortly, you know, in preventative health, like, amazing, you can walk to your doctor.

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The Midlife Mentors: and this is where we need to get the standardized measurements in, right? But imagine the problem at the moment with when you have a medical

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The Midlife Mentors: test is that you're in a clinical environment, so we can respond differently if we're having something like our blood pressure, our heart rate, because there's people in white coats with clipboards, we can get more anxious, more nervous, perhaps, so it's not a true reflection of our state. That happens to me. Yeah. If you go to your doctor and go, oh, look, here's the last 100 days of health data with, like, my heart rate, my blood pressure, of course.

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The Midlife Mentors: That is hugely useful, and of course, we're going to start to be able to feed that into AI models, they'll be able to predict, you know, where we might have lifestyle issues coming up, where we can make healthy adjustments. But the flip side of that is, how much are we going to let that drive our behaviors and adjustments, and also.

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The Midlife Mentors: the big elephant in the room, what's happening to that data? We're already hearing that people have done a DNA test in the past to find out things like their ancestry. That has now… those companies then since been acquired by venture capital firms, and that data has been sold on to financial firms, and it's now being used to vet individuals

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The Midlife Mentors: for jobs, for loans, for mortgages. Frightening people. Yeah. So yeah, like, we're not saying that there aren't benefits to this, so let's just kind of go, the benefits are, you know, it does increase your awareness, it will create behaviour change. For those people that are very sedentary, it's going to be a really helpful thing just to… to give them that accountability and that motivation. Especially if you're in a group.

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The Midlife Mentors: you know, in a group environment, and you're sharing that information, that's great! That's great.

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The Midlife Mentors: And they have saved lives as well. There's been incidents where it's, like, given warning of heart attacks, or people have had heart attacks, and it's alerted the authorities. So I'm gonna say a very 90s word here. We're not dissing. I haven't said that for years. We're not dissing! Don't be dissing me with your disrespect. I don't know whether that was just a UK thing. You're whack. Yeah, that was just a UK thing. If anyone's from our friends over in America or anywhere else, dissing was like, we're not putting it down, so

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The Midlife Mentors: We're not saying wearables are…

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The Midlife Mentors: are pointless at all, not in any way. We're saying, look, they are very, very helpful.

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The Midlife Mentors: But, the risks are that we have that data overload, we get this health anxiety, we might start thinking things are happening that aren't happening, you know, and we're outsourcing, above all for me, on that spiritual level, that body-mind-soul connection level, we're outsourcing our intuition of what

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The Midlife Mentors: Of looking at…

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The Midlife Mentors: how we feel, like, consciously. So not just looking to something to tell us how we feel, but us consciously sitting with that and going, how does it make me feel? My own brain, my own heart, my own body.

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The Midlife Mentors: my own mind. So, yeah, and James said that really, really important question. I think it's… it's good to say again. It's like, do you trust your body less now than you did before you bought the wearable?

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The Midlife Mentors: Are you looking for more things that are going wrong?

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The Midlife Mentors: Is there a hypochondriac, kind of, coming through there? And because we can measure so much now, are you trying to optimize, like, on too many data points? Because, you know, here's the truth, when we adjust one thing, it's going to affect something else.

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The Midlife Mentors: people can get caught in this, what we call the hedonic treadmill, right? Which means you're always trying to optimize something, which means you're never actually reaching the destination of being fulfilled and happy, because there's always another target to go for.

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The Midlife Mentors: And that in itself can lead to anxiety, even burnout with the data. Oh, I've had burnout, 100%. It's like, I'm just not doing enough. I'm not… I'm not doing enough. This is what my wearable is telling me. I've not done enough, so, like, sometimes that translates as, I'm not enough.

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The Midlife Mentors: Like, I haven't done enough, therefore I'm not good enough, other people are better than me, I'm comparing myself, and then I just feel crap.

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The Midlife Mentors: We actually had this from a well-known language app, right? And I imagine if this was translated to health data. So, duo Bingo. Oh, you named it! It's quite good. They gamify language learning, and it is actually really good at helping you learn, but when you miss sessions, you get this angry little owl on your phone, and first of all, he looks really sad, but then you get all these, like, guilt-trippy messages, and then he's like, I guess we've broken up.

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The Midlife Mentors: now, and then he gets really angry, and I just thought.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, I don't know if there is a nagging health app out there yet, but perhaps there's a market for one. I think they all nag, slightly, I do. Yeah, but they can drive these things through. It's like, oh, obviously, natural… I've heard this as well, people, like, disconnecting their wearable when they do certain activities, because they don't want… they don't want the wearable to, in invert commas, know.

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The Midlife Mentors: Oh my goodness, what kind of… yes, I've got the angry owl, he's actually gone black. You know the big app thing that it puts on your phone? It's larger than… You've been… you've been barred from it, is what I got told by the owl. It's larger than all the other apps on my phone, so he's, like, massive, and it's a black

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The Midlife Mentors: glaring owl, but I have actually had to move onto a different page. Well, there you go. Stop getting me. Listen, I think at midlife, listen, we know midlife can bring health challenges. I think tracking some data can be helpful, it can help you adjust healthier habits, but I'd stick to the basics and know

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The Midlife Mentors: What that data is, what it actually means, like, do some research and reading about it, don't just listen to the latest influencer.

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The Midlife Mentors: Understand and understand why you're tracking it, but also don't let it run your life completely. Yeah, because I think the reality is, you are all going to relate to this. At midlife, time…

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The Midlife Mentors: becomes more precious. We're super stretched, but it also just becomes more precious. What we do with that time

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The Midlife Mentors: is more important. It feels more important.

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The Midlife Mentors: And energy becomes more valuable as we're going through all these hormonal shifts and changes. Another thing around this, these wearables, you know, us, us late, and men, but us ladies, we're going through perimenopause and menopause, and if we're looking at a wearable going, keep on pushing through, keep on pushing through, we're not listening to our body and those hormonal changes. We're at a different stage of our life now, so maybe the wearable that you wore 5 years ago just isn't working for the stage of life that you're

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The Midlife Mentors: at right now.

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The Midlife Mentors: So energy becomes more valuable because we don't have so much of it, and health does matter more. You know, we might… we might be wearing these wearables, or getting a little bit obsessed about this, because someone close to us, has a health scare, or you might have lost a loved one, or something like that. So, again, there are reasons for doing this. We're not kind of saying it's a terrible… but just… yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: our health does matter more, but getting the basics right, that James has spoken about already, is

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The Midlife Mentors: paramount. Before you do anything else, it's paramount that you get these simple basics that have kept our ancestors alive. So, I want to recap on that, Claire, because I say this is the thing, before you start diving into data and tracking all these variables, like, let's nail what does the research say actually matters.

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The Midlife Mentors: enough good quality sleep. Yeah. Like, at midlife, we need to be strength training to, you know, hold on to that muscle mass, keep our bone density. We want to be doing some form of cardiovascular exercise, you know, whatever works for you to keep our heart and health, heart health good.

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The Midlife Mentors: We want to be managing our diet, like, you know, good, whole food diet, lots of protein, minimized sugars, processed foods.

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The Midlife Mentors: we want to be investing in meaningful relationships, we want to have a sense of purpose out in the world. You know, those things all put together are going to move the needle more than just willy-ly tracking data that you don't really fully understand. Yeah, because, you know, what if the goal, what if you actually really accept

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The Midlife Mentors: that the goal isn't necessarily to become like that person on Instagram that you're following. I mean, what are the compromises you are going to have to make, and that person is making, in order to be like that? You know, do you want to live your life like that? Because actually, every choice we make does come with a

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The Midlife Mentors: with a compromise in life. You know, we look at every area element of our life, and the goals that we go for. At some point, there will be a compromise that we have to make.

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The Midlife Mentors: So what if your goal isn't simply to have…

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The Midlife Mentors: Is simply to have, like, enough health and energy and vitality to fully engage in your glorious, beautiful life, rather than optimizing, optimizing, optimizing!

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The Midlife Mentors: Yes. Remember, health should support your life, not become your life.

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The Midlife Mentors: So my question that I'm going to finish with is, like, what's one thing you're currently doing for your health that genuinely improves your life?

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The Midlife Mentors: And then, what's one thing you're doing, just because you feel you should do, because you've heard about it, or you're doing it, but you don't really understand what you're doing? Let us know, drop us a message.

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The Midlife Mentors: team at the midlifementors.com, wearable manufacturers, send us some stuff, and we'll do another one saying how good we think it is, or not. No, no. Well, you probably won't now, but I just… no, I'm not… I'm steering clear of those things. That's not for me, but it could be for you, but just make sure you've got the balance right, friends, because otherwise it's just… I'm sure you're all very stressed in one way or another in your life, and we don't want to add

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The Midlife Mentors: more stress to it, so please just make sure that you're using them appropriately. I'm sending you so, so much love, and hope you enjoyed the episode. Bye!