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I'm an engineer by trade. My brain doesn’t see a person as just a collection of muscles and bones. I see a complex, biological system. Every system has inputs, outputs, and data. That’s why I was so excited when my client, Eric, finally got his Garmin watch. He’d been complaining about feeling like a zombie for months. He’s a high-performer, but his battery was constantly hitting zero by noon. Memorial Day is coming up. He has two daughters, 7 and 9. They’re at that age where summer is everything. They wanted him in the pool, throwing them into the air, and staying up for the fireworks. Instead, he felt like he was running on a laptop with a broken charger. We sat down in my office to look at his first week of data. Eric looked tired. He looked like a guy who was winning the ‘Money Game' but losing the ‘Life Game.' “Tony, I don't get it,” he said. He handed me his phone. I looked at the blue glow of the Garmin app. He spent $1,000 for a watch to tell him why he was tired, and all it gave him was a jagged lie.
The graphs were supposed to show a steady climb of Body Battery overnight. Instead, they looked like a jagged mountain range. There were these weird gaps in the data right after 7:00 pm. Then, at 2:00 am, the line would just go flat. He was wide awake when the rest of the world was dreaming. “It looks like you’re dying at dinner and resurrecting at midnight,” I told him. He didn't laugh. He just looked at a picture of his girls on his lock screen. In engineering, if a system isn't working, you don't guess. You look for the bottleneck. Eric thought he had a stress problem. I told him he had a mechanical glitch in his sleep architecture. I know exactly what you’re thinking, because Eric thought the exact same thing…. He manages a massive P&L and a complex household. He's tried the “sleep hygiene” checklists. He bought the expensive mattress. The idea that he just needed to “journal before bed” or drink chamomile tea sounded insulting to him. But this isn't about meditation or bedtime routines… This is about mechanical efficiency. You can lie to yourself about how well you handle stress, but you can't lie to the algorithm. Eric had the numbers, but he didn't have the context. We were looking at a ghost in the machine, and we had to find out where it was hiding. On Saturday, I'll reveal the “Couch Tax” that was secretly destroying his data… a mistake almost every Dad makes…rats.
P.S. Jagger is finally starting to sleep through the night again (we had some rough ones), which means Courtney and I are finally feeling human again. Hope you have a restful weekend ahead. |
