Death By Intensity and Does Data Matter

We are a society obsessed with data: smart watches and Oura rings, blood tests and continuous glucose monitoring devices, even full body MRI scans in apparently healthy individuals. But, does all this information actually change our behaviour or is this supererogatory of data simply sustaining anxiety and neurosis in already anxious and neurotic people?

Contrarians in the medical community have begun to push back against the use of prophylactic testing which has not been shown to reduce morbidity or mortality, but often leads downward into the dreaded interventional cascade. This is challenging stuff not merely to the medical orthodoxy (increasingly motivated to follow conflicted guidelines primarily designed to CYA) but also to a public that has mistakenly come to believe that more, rather than less is necessarily better without comprehending that every action has – to quote Isaac Newton – an equal and opposite reaction. There is no type of monitoring or data collection that does not have an unintended consequence as a corollary.

My own rule of thumb when thinking about these things is simply to ask: “Will the resulting information change my behaviour? Or the treatment offered?” If no-one, least of all myself, can elucidate a clear and concise answer to this question a priori, there is simply no point collecting that data. Much of the data we are driven to collect is actually pretty piss poor. Using Oura rings to assess sleep, HRV to judge recovery, blood tests that simply capture one snapshot in time. Rather than wasting our time with data, we should optimise what we can: eat plenty of protein, do as much walking as possible, pick up increasingly heavy objects and put them down, foster supportive social relationships.

To some extent, we’ve all been wooed by data, big data. Data on sleep, and recovery, heart rate variability, blood tests, and scans. All we can see is data, data, data and surely with more data we’ll make better decisions. The only success I’ve seen from big data is how well big companies have been able to use big data (mostly collected from our internet searches and social media brag pieces) to convince us all to spend big on something we don’t really need, want, won’t change our behaviour and has no measurable improvement upon our lives. Don’t fall for it.

Saturday and Tuesday were intensity days. No smart watch data needed. On Saturday, I cycled down for the Park Run and what a sweaty affair that was, hot already at 8 am and 700% humidity. Tuesday was fast paddle day, a 10% increase on the last fast paddle day. The Park Run is only five kilometres which pretty much anyone who is not near death can survive, while 13 kilometres fast left me feeling noodle like and fatigued. I had data, but it made not a wit of difference.