By Nicholas Wooters, Co-Founder of Coya
On a recent (now viral) episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast, host Steven Bartlett described the effects of having a few glasses of wine after a year of not drinking, sharing that it “ruined three days of his life because of the domino effect it caused.” According to Bartlett, it messed up his sleep score and his dopamine system, and he podcasted worse as a result.
This particular admission has since sparked a heated debate online around optimization culture and the central question, has the pursuit of optimization gone too far? Has it made us more resilient, or more fragile? Does increased awareness into our personal metrics chart a direct path to anxiety and overwhelm?
As the co-founder of a company that sits squarely in the optimization and performance space, this call appears to be coming from inside the house. At Coya, we work with wearables, bloodwork, biometric data, and coaching to help our members understand what’s driving (or undermining) their health, and what to do about it. We exist to serve individuals or groups that hope to move their health and their habits forward, with the added “under the hood” insight that wearable tech provides.
So, we are in the business of optimization – but a sustainable, lived-in version of it. Our approach is anchored to the foundational habits practiced by many of the most long-lived populations across the world. These blue zones haven’t unlocked exceptional health outcomes through obsessive optimization. They got there through integration — health that wasn’t a separate category of life, but woven into the texture of it. That’s the thing worth imitating. Not the exact diet or the specific movement patterns, but the underlying architecture: purpose, connection, simplicity.
Health was never supposed to become something you perform, relentlessly curate, or burn out chasing. Information and awareness were never meant to snowball into overwhelm and neurosis. It’s not about creating the perfect and most elaborate (or rigid) protocol, it’s about creating foundational daily habits that can actually fit inside a human life for the long-haul while measurably improving your health.
That’s the whole promise underneath the data and the tooling: resilience. If you know your body well enough, you can build a version of yourself that holds up well enough to perform even when conditions are far from perfect.
Your ability to perform should be consistent – not conditional. Life is a variable thing, there will be travel days that pressure test your habits (and patience), seasons of life that feel long and challenging, dinners out that are meant to be enjoyed fully, celebrations that might warrant a glass (or few) of alcohol.
These moments of deviation shouldn’t leave you in a spiral, nor should they destroy the underlying infrastructure you’ve worked hard to build. A perfectly tuned system that cracks the moment life refuses to cooperate isn’t a perfectly tuned system at all – it’s a brittle one. And brittle things reliably break.
If there was one thing I could blast across a billboard in every major city, it would probably be this: You cannot optimize, supplement, or biohack your way out of a fundamentally unhealthy or unsustainable lifestyle. This is where I think optimization culture often misses the mark – glossing over the tried-and-true basics to fixate instead on the margins.
If I’m being honest, I actually resent the term “biohacking”. It is, by definition, something I want nothing to do with. Because in health, there is no real shortcut. All the peptides, supplements, tools, and protocols in the world won’t transform your health in the absence of the foundational habits that underpin your outcomes.
Sure, there is real optimization to be found at the fringes — but you have no business chasing it until the foundation underneath is built and reinforced. We have a phrase for the alternative: majoring in the minors. It’s reaching for the newest supplement or hack instead of admitting you’re sleeping five hours a night. It’s buying the recovery tool instead of confronting the chronic stress that’s wrecking your recovery metrics.
Move the big rocks before you go collecting pebbles, because the pebbles, however shiny, can’t do the big rocks’ job. And the big rocks tend to be almost embarrassingly (and at times, frustratingly) unglamorous: the boring consistency, the earlier bedtime, the regular movement, and the home cooked meals.
They might not be the things you can easily “add to cart” – but they are where the real ROI tends to live. It’s also where long-term adherence becomes truly possible (something so many health programs tend to miss). An unsustainable protocol isn’t an effective one. The only changes that really matter are the ones built to stick, and that is born from simplicity and clarity, not rigidity and overwhelm.
My grievance with the term “biohacking” can also be tied back to the feeling I’m left with when watching some of the major players in the space, like Bryan Johnson. Some of what he shares genuinely interests me, but I also feel entirely disconnected from the man who was hiding from the sun under an umbrella at the Enhanced Games the other week. The more extreme protocols he follows strike me as more stringent than aspirational – indicative of the kind of uncompromising regimentation that seems part and parcel with over-optimization culture.
I am simply not interested in extending my life for an extra five years at the cost of spending twenty years on the sidelines, afraid to experience life beyond what is strictly optimal. I think Gary Brecka is interesting too, and shares some great advice — but I’m not about to wedge a hyperbaric chamber into my living room, crowding out the couch where I actually sit and talk to the people I love.
The kind of performance we reach for at Coya is meant to be hardy and, perhaps more important than that, it’s meant to enrich an ultimately balanced (and thoroughly enjoyed) life. That version of performance is built by understanding your body well enough that you can deviate from ideal conditions and still show up, or easily regain your stride. It’s built from habits rooted so deeply in who you are that when life asks you to choose between locking in and letting go, you can make that call with ease and peace of mind instead of panic.
That is the difference between fragility and performance.
So, why involve wearables and bloodwork and coaching at all?
Because data without context is often just noise, and coaching without data is just generalized advice. It’s the combination that turns information into action that actually sticks. The trouble only starts when a number quietly gets promoted from indicator to arbiter — when the metric stops informing your decisions and starts governing them, overriding what your body is plainly telling you.
A score was never meant to become the thing you optimize for. It’s meant to help you understand your own baseline well enough that you can step away from it — for the dinner, the trip, the season that asks for flexibility — and find your way back without a metric-induced spiral.
Used as intended – and paired with the necessary context – your data isn’t a leash. It’s a map you eventually internalize well enough to navigate without staring at it. The technology surfaces the signal. A coach helps you interpret it, put it in context, and fold it into a life you actually want to live.
The best performers, in the end, keep the main things the main things. They use their data to understand themselves, not to audit themselves. They build a foundation durable enough to survive contact with a real, imperfect life — and that durability, not the perfection of any single metric or protocol, was always the point.
So as the optimization fatigue debate wages on, I think it’s worth remembering that the critique was never really about wine, wearables, or sleep scores. It’s about what happens when the data becomes the thing you’re optimizing for, rather than a tool that informs how well you’re actually living.
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