How Wearables Affect Your Mindset and Long Term Health Tracking | Dr. Joana De Calheiros Velozo | Be Well Moments

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Are wearables helping you understand your health or making you feel more stressed?

This clip explores how our relationship with daily health scores can shape how we feel and why long term trends matter more than single-day data.

This discussion focuses on the mindset behind using wearables, why subjective sleep quality often predicts wellbeing better than objective scores, and how even small changes in reported data can alter mood. Sarah reflects on her own experience of becoming overly focused on sleep scores and explores how relying too heavily on metrics can distance us from our internal signals.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers
improve their health and well-being.
When I think about wearables, I've had like, an interesting
journey with them. Then we all want to feel better,
right? And we want to live better, and
we want to have more happier content lives overall.

(00:24):
But when wearables came out, I struggled with them because I
would then obsess over them. Yeah.
And if I had a bad sleep score, it would make me feel terrible.
And sometimes I would sleep really well or I thought I'd set
really well. So when the mindset's really
interesting and I'd look at my wearable and go, oh, I haven't.
And then I'd be more tired. And so I had this love hate

(00:44):
relationship. And then I spoke to Brian
Johnson, who I'm sure many people are aware.
He's been on the show. So has his son Talmud, and so
has his Co founder and CMO Kate.And they're all obsessive about
wearables and analysing every inch of their data.
So if there's like an extreme person to connect to in this

(01:04):
area, it's them. And they always say, well, it's
really important to know where your data is.
And I agree with that. I do think, you know, getting a
blood test like once a year, seeing where your minerals are
and things like that, having a baseline.
But you can tip into obsessiveness.
And I find it interesting that that can also shape your health
if you're constantly. So how do we How can we have a

(01:28):
compassionate, caring, relatablerelationship with wearables?
Like what's that landscape look like?
Yes, that's a question. I mean, I'd like to go go back a
little bit what you said about your sleep score, because it's
such an important thing in that,you know, a lot of the research
has actually shown that how you feel your sleep is actually more

(01:51):
meaningful for your health and what your objective data says.
So it's actually very troubling that you're seeing a negative
score changes how you're perceived at sleep and then
we'll have a negative impact on your health.
And actually we see that changing the score by just about
5% has a direct impact on your moods, which is really quite,

(02:13):
quite important. So we, we really don't take that
lightly at all. And like we've spoken quite a
bit at length, your mindset willreally shape how your body
responds to things and will really then shape the outcome,
the impact that it has on your on your health.
So we need to be quite cautious about what variables are are
telling you. And I think there are ways that

(02:38):
you can have a wearable without making it obsessive, without
making it addictive, without it disempowering you from yourself
actually, because I think with alot of wearables are doing right
now is actually distancing you further from your body, right,
because it's almost you become over reliant on what it's saying
and you stop actually paying attention to what you feel.

(02:59):
So that's, that's more harmful than it is useful.
Ways in which you can mitigate that is by well, there's several
ways, but one I think is important is to stop focusing so
much on the now actually. So, so I think what's really
fantastic about wearables is that they allow for this long

(03:23):
term passive muttering. And actually what you want is
this long term tracking. It's not so much about what is
happening right now, but it's about how you are doing over
time. So it's a lot more about trends
than it is about daily scores, right?
What you want to know is are yougoing through a period in your

(03:44):
life in your life that requires more attention or are you going
to appear in your life where everything's fine?
So that's the first thing we really want people to zoom out
and not worry so much about these day-to-day fluctuations.
As in a bad sleep won't wreck your day and it won't wreck your
life. It's, it's normal, no worries
about it. And actually it's very healthy
that you go through these ebbs and flows, right?

(04:06):
If you were always feeling fantastic, then you're fantastic
would be your normal and you would need something else to
feel better actually. So be comfortable with these
ebbs and flows. When it becomes problematic is
if you are in this chronic stateand that's where you need to
zoom in a little bit more. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is scores are actually quite problematic.

(04:30):
And I look at scores a little bit like T-shirt sizing.
It's a bit, I guess, and it's very manipulative.
So I don't know that you know, but in, in, in Europe, for
instance, we added like XXS instead to kind of give people
this perception that they have smaller sizes than they actually
are, right? So T-shirt sizing can be very

(04:50):
manipulative, right? It's also trying to say
something scores are a little bit like that as well.
And we need to be cautious aboutit because while it may seem
that it is an easy way for you to interpret your data and to
get to understanding what the body is saying, it's actually a
barrier between you and what your body is saying, right?

(05:12):
Because there's a whole layer that's kind of masking what's
really happening. And that layer, a lot of things
can go into it. So it's not a very
straightforward thing, right? The score is very arbitrary
value, right? And you don't really know what
goes into it. It's a series of things that you
don't know how much each of themweighs.
So instead of doing that, we want to empower you.

(05:35):
And the way that you do that is by giving the data as is
actually. So while a sleep score of 90
seems fantastic, you knowing that you slept 7 1/2 hours and
that's the amount of time that you feel good is also very
meaningful. Or that you didn't wake up a
single time tonight as opposed to previous nights where you

(05:58):
woke up four or five times. You know those things.
Data that is contextualized is much more empowering, right?
What you want is people to see their heart rate and understand
their heart rate. 82 beats per minute.
My average is normally 74. I'm a little bit high, maybe I'm

(06:18):
a little bit stressed. What can I do?
So really recognize what the body is saying for what it is
rather than over interpreted it.I think what's the most powerful
thing of that, which was really interesting when I spoke to
Doctor Andy Galpin on here, who's been on recently.
He's the human performance expert because he was saying
like every wearable is different.
Like you're not really sure if that technology and how it's

(06:40):
going to be used. And so you're going to be
getting lots of different mismatched scores.
The most important thing is the long term data, like
understanding like over the week, how has that looked?
Over the months, how has that looked?
And I, I think a lot about that in relation to weight gain and
weight loss and your weight stability.
If you're constantly weighing yourself every day, you're going

(07:01):
to have water retention, you might be dehydrated, menstrual
fluctuations, All of these things are going to make your
weight fluctuate up and down. Like you never say the same
weight every single day. Yeah, If you're giving yourself
a mean average and you're looking this over like the
month, the next month, the threemonths, like is your weight
stable? That's a really good indicator

(07:23):
of health. And I think this is how we
should be tracking with our wearables.
A lot of people post like 100% sleep score last night.
Brilliant. But like, how was it looking at
the three months feels like the more compassionate way and also,
I guess like the more reliable data because if you're also HRV,

(07:43):
which is your heart rate variability, which we did speak
a lot to Andy Galpin, I'd say goand listen to that episode.
You want to know more about it. He was like, if your HRV is
going up and down so erraticallyconstantly, then that's actually
an indicator that something's going on, you know, rather than
it just being, maybe you are naturally more on the low side,
but are you stable? Exactly and.

(08:05):
I think a lot of data isn't always translated in that way,
so it confuses and then the irony is it stresses out the
user where all of a sudden people are worried because
something's plummeted, which weirdly adds more stress.
Yeah, yeah, beautiful describe. Thanks so much for listening to

(08:28):
hear the full episode. There's link in the description.