Why Striving for Full Optimisation is Making Us Miserable
By now, I'm sure many of you have seen the clip. Steven Bartlett — entrepreneur and host of the Diary of a CEO podcast — shared that three glasses of wine had "ruined his life" for three days. Not a week-long bender, or a bottle a night, but just three glasses at a social occasion, after a year of sobriety, sent his sleep tracker spiralling, disrupted his eating, and left him unable to perform to the standard he had set for himself.
He wasn't exaggerating for effect. He meant every word. He genuinely believed that being at his absolute optimum at all times is worth more than being present and enjoying the moments that make up a life.
And that is exactly what I want to talk about.
The World We're Living In
We are living through a collective obsession with self-optimisation. Wearable tech tracks our sleep cycles, heart rate variability, and stress levels minute by minute. Influencers document their morning routines doing their cold plunges at 5am, red light therapy and meticulously logging calories. Hustle culture has quietly morphed into biohacker culture, where the goal isn't just to work harder but to perform better as a human being.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Who wouldn't want to sleep better, feel healthier, be more focused?
But there's a dark side to this pursuit that we aren't talking about enough, and as a psychotherapist, I see it in my therapy room regularly.
When Self-Care Becomes Self-Surveillance
There is a meaningful difference between taking care of yourself and monitoring yourself at every moment of the day.
Steven Bartlett tracked his broken sleep on his Whoop watch (a device he, notably, owns shares in) and concluded that three glasses of wine had a "hidden domino effect" he must have been living with his whole life. What struck so many people when the clip went viral wasn't the observation itself. It was the framework behind it: that life is something to be optimised, that any deviation from your daily routine is cause for alarm, and that feeling less than your best for a few days is something close to catastrophe.
The backlash was swift. People took to X writing about "everything I hate about this sterile self-optimisation culture that seems to have forgotten the whole point of living." Another simply noted that "he podcasted worse" and let the absurdity of that sentence speak for itself.
But behind the jokes is something genuinely important. When we turn living into a performance metric, we pathologise normal human experience. We strip away the joy of what it actually means to be human, to be present for the moments that matter, the dinners that run too long, the conversations that go somewhere unexpected, the laughter that makes poor sleep feel entirely worth it.
What Optimisation Culture Is Really Costing Us
From a psychological perspective, the drive for full optimisation maps uncomfortably closely onto patterns I see every week in clients struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, and harsh self-criticism.
Here's what happens in the mind when we commit to a standard of relentless self-improvement:
Every "slip" becomes evidence of failure. When your baseline expectation is peak performance every single day, a poor night's sleep, a spontaneous dessert, or an unproductive afternoon isn't just an off day. It becomes data confirming that you've lost control, that you're somehow failing at life.
Pleasure becomes threatening. When enjoyment like wine with friends, a lazy Sunday, or a skipped workout starts to feel dangerous to your "system," you stop being able to experience it freely. You're always calculating the cost. That is not wellness. That is anxiety wearing a productivity badge.
Social connection gets quietly sacrificed. If you pathologise three glasses of wine enough times, you stop going to the dinner. You decline the invitation. You stay home and optimise. The very conditions that wellness culture claims to address -anxiety, depression, and isolation get quietly and efficiently worse.
Your nervous system never gets to rest. True recovery, both physical and psychological, requires periods of doing less, not more. A nervous system in constant self-monitoring mode cannot genuinely regulate. Rest that comes with a sense of guilt or inadequacy isn't rest at all.
This Isn't About Wine
To be clear, I'm not here to defend excessive drinking, or to argue that health doesn't matter. It does.
Steven Bartlett's underlying observation that alcohol affects sleep and cognition more than many of us realise isn't wrong. If noticing that leads someone to drink less and feel better, that's a genuinely good outcome.
But there is an enormous distance between informed awareness and rigid self-optimisation. One leaves room for flexibility, for context, for the beautiful messiness of being human. The other does not.
The problem isn't the observation. It's the relationship with imperfection that the observation reveals. A single night of poor sleep is not evidence of an unhealthy lifestyle. Sometimes the short-term gain from genuine connection and shared humanity over a glass of wine, at a table with people you love, is more nourishing to your mental health than two extra hours of sleep could ever be.
How This Shows Up in the Therapy Room
I want to share something from my clinical work. A story I hope will feel familiar, even if the details differ from your own.
I worked with someone who, on paper, was an extraordinary high achiever. She had the successful career, the house, the relationship, basically everything that society tends to use as a shorthand for doing well. And yet she was crippled by anxiety. She was terrified that if she took her foot off the pedal for even a moment, she would lose it all. That people would see through her, realise she wasn't really that smart or capable, and that the life she'd built would crumble.
So what did she do? She worked late every evening. She was in bed by 10pm and up at 5am for her workout and morning routine before cycling to the office ahead of her 9am meeting. She was withdrawing from social plans because they didn't fit her schedule, she worried that if she was tired the next day, she wouldnt be able to deliver that presentation properly.
She spent hours on social media watching other people's lives, convinced they were all succeeding effortlessly at every aspect of existence. This client wasn't optimising her life. She was running from it. She was so terrified of letting go, of allowing a single imperfect moment that she had stopped actually living. She was surviving on adrenaline and self-discipline, mistaking exhaustion for control.
In therapy, we gradually helped her discover something she hadn't allowed herself to believe: that if she loosened the reins just a little, life would hold. She wouldn't instantly lose her job, fall apart, or suddenly become the person she feared she secretly was. As she began to allow moments of imperfection, rest, and genuine connection, something unexpected (or not so) happened. She started to enjoy her life. She began living by her values, not just chasing a moving goalpost of achievement.
A Different Kind of Self-Care
In my work as a Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist, drawing particularly on Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), I often work with people who are already extraordinary at pushing themselves. What they haven't yet learned is how to be on their own side when they fall short.
Self-compassion is not the opposite of high standards. It is the foundation that makes high standards sustainable.
When we hold ourselves with the same warmth we'd offer a good friend — when we can have three glasses of wine, sleep badly, and simply move on without completely berating ourselves, or telling ourselves we have failed in some way, we are practising something deeply important: the capacity to be human without turning it into a problem to be solved.
Research consistently shows that self-compassion is associated with greater resilience, better mental health outcomes, and, perhaps paradoxically, more sustained motivation than self-criticism. The inner critic does not make us better. It makes us more exhausted, more rigid, and ultimately, less able to enjoy the very life we're working so hard to build.
The Climate We're Living In
It's also worth naming that we are living through a genuinely difficult time. Collective uncertainty, economic pressure, political instability, and the ‘always-on nature’ of digital life mean that the baseline level of stress most people are managing is already high.
In this context, adding the demand to also optimise every biological system can tip from aspiration into overwhelm. We don't need more ways to fall short of our own standards. We need more permission to be imperfect, inconsistent, and still fundamentally okay.
You are not a machine to be fine-tuned. You are a person with a nervous system shaped by evolution, a history shaped by experience, and a life that is not only allowed to include rest, pleasure, and the occasional bad night's sleep, but that genuinely needs these things to flourish.
A Final Thought
I don't think Steven Bartlett is the villain of this story. I think he is a very visible example of something many of us carry privately: a belief that we must always be performing at our best, and that anything less deserves scrutiny and correction.
What I'd gently offer — whether you're tracking your sleep, your calories, your productivity, or your mood is this:
Notice when your tools for wellbeing have started to feel like a stick rather than a hand on your shoulder.
That's often the moment when the most important work isn't more optimisation.
It's compassion.
Eszter Kiss-Toth is a London-based Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist (CBT) specialising in self-criticism, low self-esteem, anxiety, and perfectionism. She works with individuals and groups online using evidence-based approaches including CBT and Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT).
Ready to take the first step? Book a free 15-minute consultation | therapywitheszter.co.uk