Digital Health Paradox
I wake up feeling great. Stretch, make a coffee and glance down at my wrist to see a red score telling me I’m only 42% recovered. Instantly, the day ahead changes shape. My schedule looks laden with treacle as I prepare to trudge through commitments armed with the knowledge I didn’t rest as well as I think I did.
Suffice to say the algorithm can override our physical reality.
Step counts, rings and readiness of the cyborg dashboard are a double-edged sword: helping and hindering.
When we outsource feeling to technology, it feels like advancement. Undoubtedly there are many benefits, but today we want to zoom out a little to see what we lose in the transference of experience.
Value Capture Trap
The technology undoubtedly has utility. Meta-analyses from recent years [1/ 2/ 3] draw the clear conclusion that the gamification of wellness increases physical activity.
Human health requires more than movement, though. When we look at the intersection of wearable technology and the nervous system, we must consider how psychological load adds to our baseline level of capacity.
Related to this is C. Thi Nguyen’s idea of value capture, a phenomenon that occurs when a complex, rich human value is shrunk down into a metric. Fitness is a perfect example. The real value emerges from the changes to strength, health, fitness, ability and shape. When wearables enter the equation, the metrics trump the value.
If the watch bugs out and fails to record a session, the effort feels suboptimal.
When data points or maintenance of streaks replace the merit, we prioritise nebulous data over internal betterment.
The same applies to people learning languages with apps like Duolingo. It’s more productive than doomscrolling, sure, but the maintenance of a 200-day streak means next to nothing if you can’t order a sarnie in Spain without resorting to pointing.
Tech is a powerful tool for building habits. But it mustn’t supplant the biological value at the core of our actions.
The Motivation Crowding Effect
This leans into Self-Determination Theory, a widely cited framework from the year 2000 that separates human drive into two distinct camps: extrinsic (external rewards) and intrinsic (internal satisfaction).
Gamification relies heavily on extrinsic motivation. It rewards you with a digital badge for taking ten thousand steps. The immediate behavioural spike is undeniable.
Further, the theory outlines three innate psychological needs required for motivation: competence, autonomy and relatedness (connection).
When the desire to exercise consistently arises from a commitment to an app rather than our own will, movement satiates an algorithm rather than a soul. The external metrics crowd out the intrinsic physical feeling. We outsource our capacity to a device.
The danger here lies in the motivation crowding effect. Authors Frey & Jegen extensively mapped this phenomenon across many examples. Its application in this context emerges from the distinction between crowding out (rewards that diminish our desire to do something) and crowding in (incentives that support internal motivation).
Essentially, be wary of how motivating/ restrictive the gamification and tracking of human biology can become. Habits built solely on external rewards will falter when we don’t adequately establish internal drive.
Interoceptive Blindness
The more we tip the balance away from feeling and towards data, the more we blunt our interoception: the brain's ability to accurately perceive the physical state of the body from the inside out.
It serves as a critical biological skill for nervous system regulation. As we increasingly outsource our physical state to algorithms, we risk developing interoceptive blindness, the inability to understand what our bodies are telling us. We wake up, ignore our own physical sensations, and check a screen to dictate our state.
Side bar: This forfeiture of trusting our gut in favour of something purporting to be more intelligent than us is a common thread in our musings, check out ‘In Defence of Friction’ for more.
Digital dependence degrades our capacity by adding unnecessary layers to our biological load. Our system reacts to constant measurement by maintaining vigilance. We burn baseline stability worrying about arbitrary numbers on a screen. The pursuit of the metric can, if left unchecked, diminish the value of the behaviour it was designed to monitor.
Reclaiming the Internal Signal
The more we own our biological signals the more in control we become of our capacity. Technology can certainly help, but the gamification and tracking can easily swell from assistance into dependence.
We build capacity by meeting real demand and recovering back to baseline. Over-optimisation is a massive source of strain that can masquerade as productivity whilst actually taxing our wellbeing.
Our internal signals are there for a reason. The external ones are there for attention.
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