You Are Not a Productivity System: The Mental Health Cost of Optimization Culture

If you have spent any time on social media I’m sure you’ve heard terms like biohacking, morning routines, and peak performance. You’ve seen ads for rings, watches, and apps that can track all sorts of metrics. You’ve seen articles on how to optimize your life, your day, your every minute. And I’ll admit I’ve fallen prey to it - the ring, the watch, the app… I’ve done it all. And you know what? It didn’t make me more productive, it made me anxious as shit. 

We live in a time of optimization culture. There is a belief that every aspect of our lives should be measured, improved, and more efficient. As a therapist I am obviously a fan of self-improvement, but we have to ask ourselves, at what cost? From what I’m seeing, it seems to me, that optimization culture has crossed into territory that actively damages mental health. 

I say at least 10 times a week in sessions, you are not a robot. So why are we trying to function like them? To quantify our wellness or lack thereof. Optimization implies that we are not currently enough as we are. The very thing that we as therapists are actively trying to work against. It’s okay to want to improve yourself. In-fact it's a wonderful thing most often, but that doesn’t need to start from a place of believing that who you currently are is inherently flawed. 

I see first hand every day what happens when we begin to tie our self worth to productivity and achievement. And let me tell you, the mental health outcomes are not pretty. We begin to see rest as a thing that needs to be earned, or worse yet, only as “recovery” to boost our productivity later. We begin to feel guilty for unproductive time, which undoubtedly will lead you to burn out. We begin to reduce ourselves to data:  how many steps we took, our sleep score, our stress levels. These metrics create anxiety and obsessive monitoring, and when we lose the connection to self we also lose our ability to intrinsically motivate ourselves. We begin to rely on the outside data to keep us going. And by far the thing that worries me most deeply as a therapist, we begin to have difficulty finding meaning in stillness, relationships and play. We begin to lose our identity outside of our outputs. 

The irony of all of this is that we know overworking leads to burnout and burnout leads to less motivation and less motivation leads to less productivity. Not to mention that chronic stress impairs the very cognition that optimization culture prizes. 

Instead we need unstructured time to let our brains rest. We need to return to the belief that often “good enough” is “good enough.” We need to reclaim rest, play and spontaneity. We need to prioritize community and connection over individual performance metrics (sometimes a glass of wine with a friend is more important than your sleep score). We need to move towards more values aligned living. 

Ambition and growth are human nature, but optimization culture has distorted them. It’s time to audit the metrics you’ve adopted and ask  yourself do they serve MY life, or someone else’s idea of one? And a final reminder from your local therapist, you are not a robot, you were never a system to be optimized.