Somewhere between the biohacking podcasts and the recovery protocols, we started treating the body like a startup that needed better management. Sleep became a performance metric. Eating became fuel optimization. Movement became exercise, which became training, which became a data stream: steps counted, calories burned, heart rate zones color-coded in an app that grades your night's sleep on a scale of one to a hundred.
I gave myself a forty-three last Tuesday. Not because I slept poorly; I slept the way I have always slept, which is imperfectly, with one arm under the pillow and a tendency to wake at 3 a.m. and lie there listening to the house settle. But forty-three is the number the app assigned, and for a moment, standing in the kitchen in my socks, I felt the number land in my chest like a small verdict.
That is the moment I want to examine. The moment the body's experience was overridden by the body's score.
The Body as Vehicle
The language of optimization reveals its assumptions. We talk about the body as something we "have" rather than something we "are." We "use" our bodies. We "maintain" them. We put things "into" them (food, supplements, oxygen) and expect things "out" of them (performance, energy, longevity). The body, in this framework, is a vehicle. The self, the real self, is the driver.
Drew Leder, the philosopher at Loyola University Maryland, wrote about this disappearance in "The Absent Body." He argues that the body, in normal experience, recedes from awareness. You do not feel your liver working. You do not notice your spine holding you upright. The body becomes present only when it goes wrong: the pain, the ache, the disruption. Optimization exploits this disappearance by treating the absent body as a machine running in the background, a machine that could be running better if you just installed the right upgrades.
But what if the body is not a machine running in the background? What if the body is the foreground, and the mind's narration is the background process?
What Optimization Costs
I want to describe what body optimization feels like from the inside, in the body, where it matters.
There is the morning stretch that is no longer a stretch. It is a flexibility protocol, six movements held for thirty seconds each, timed by an app that chimes when you can stop. The stretch used to be a conversation between my body and the floor, a question (how are you today?) answered in sensation (tight here, loose there, that left hip again). Now it is a prescription filled at 6:15 a.m., and the conversation has been replaced by compliance.
There is the difference between eating by schedule and eating by signal. Eating by signal means the stomach sends a low, warm tug somewhere around 12:30, and you eat. Eating by schedule means the meal-prep container says it is time, and you eat whether the stomach has asked or not. The first is a relationship. The second is logistics.
There is the run that used to be a run and is now a training session. I used to run because my legs wanted to run: a restlessness in the calves, a desire for speed that had no metric. Now I run in heart rate zones, monitoring the watch on my wrist, and if the heart rate drifts above zone two I slow down, even when my legs want to go, even when the hill is calling for effort, because the algorithm says aerobic base building requires restraint.
In each case, the body's signal has been replaced by an external instruction. The body wanted to stretch slowly; the app said thirty seconds. The stomach said not yet; the schedule said now. The legs said faster; the watch said slower. Optimization does not listen to the body. It manages the body. There is a difference, and the difference lives in the jaw, which clenches slightly every time the external instruction overrides the internal signal.
Optimization does not listen to the body. It manages the body. The difference lives in the jaw.
The Wellness Trap
Carl Cederström and Andre Spicer, in "The Wellness Syndrome," argue that health optimization has become a moral imperative. The optimized body is not just a healthier body; it is a better body, and by extension, a better person. If you are not sleeping well, you are not trying hard enough. If your recovery score is low, you are failing at self-care. The body's natural variability, its good weeks and bad weeks, its unexplained aches and inexplicable bursts of energy, is reframed as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be lived.
I have felt this moral pressure in my bones. The guilt of a skipped workout is not about fitness; it is about the kind of person who skips workouts. The shame of a sleep score of forty-three is not about rest; it is about the kind of person who cannot even sleep correctly. Optimization turns the body into a report card, and every low score is a character failing.
But I want to push further than Cederström and Spicer, because I think they are right about the problem but incomplete about the mechanism. The moral dimension is real, but the deeper issue is perceptual. Optimization changes how you experience your own body. You stop feeling and start measuring. You stop listening and start tracking. The body becomes a set of numbers, and the lived experience of having a body, the warmth of the shower, the weight of the blankets, the ache in the shoulders that says you carried too much today, recedes behind the dashboard.
The Question That Will Not Resolve
Here is where I have to be honest about my own complicity, because this essay would be dishonest without it.
I built a practice called somatic attention. I write about listening to the body. I teach, through these essays, a kind of body-first awareness that prioritizes sensation over narration. And I have to ask: is somatic attention itself an optimization project? Am I just replacing the sleep score with a different metric, a subtler one, one that measures attentiveness rather than heart rate but is still, at its core, an attempt to make the body perform better?
I do not have a clean answer. The honest answer is: sometimes. Sometimes I catch myself monitoring my own body awareness the way I used to monitor my step count. Noticing whether I am noticing. Grading myself on presence. Turning the practice into a performance.
The difference, I think, and I hold this lightly, is in the direction of the arrow. Optimization points from the outside in: here is the standard, now make your body meet it. Somatic attention points from the inside out: here is what the body is doing, now let me witness it without correcting it. But the distinction is fragile, and I cross the line more often than I would like to admit.
Back to the Kitchen, 6:15 a.m.
I want to return to the moment in the kitchen. The sleep score of forty-three. My socks on the tile. The small verdict in my chest.
What the number did not measure: I had dreamed about my mother's garden, the one she kept before the move, with the roses that grew up the trellis and the mint that invaded everything. I woke slowly, with the scent of mint still in my nose, which means some part of my brain had been building a garden all night. I lay in bed for a few minutes and listened to the rain on the skylight, and my body felt heavy in a way that was not tired but settled, sunk into the mattress like a stone in a riverbed.
None of that registered on the dashboard. The dream, the scent, the weight, the rain: they are the body's experience, and they have no metric. They cannot be optimized. They can only be had.
I deleted the sleep app that morning. The phone sat on the counter, unburdened, and my wrist was bare for the first time in two years. The skin underneath was pale, with a faint tan line, like a body emerging from under a bandage.
The rain was still falling. My socks were still warm. The coffee was starting to smell like itself. And the number was gone, which meant the only score left was the one my body was already giving me, in a language that does not translate into digits.
