Some of the executives I meet arrive at our first consultation armed with an extraordinary amount of information about their health. They can tell me how many minutes of deep sleep they had last night, their heart rate variability, their recovery score and whether their watch thinks they’re fit for their age.
Yet many are exhausted, struggling to concentrate or finding it increasingly difficult to recover from the demands of their working week.
They have more health data than ever before, but often very little understanding of what is actually happening inside their bodies.
When an estimate becomes a factÂ
Wearable technology has made physiological monitoring accessible to millions of people, and there is considerable value in that. Tracking activity, identifying patterns and encouraging healthier habits can all contribute to better health and performance.
The problem begins when we confuse an algorithmic estimate with a clinical measurement.
Take sleep tracking. The different stages of sleep are identified in a laboratory using polysomnography, which records electrical activity in the brain, eye movements and muscle activity.
A smartwatch or ring cannot measure these signals directly. Instead, it uses information such as movement, heart rate and temperature to estimate which sleep stage someone is experiencing.
A 2024 study comparing three popular wearable devices with laboratory sleep testing found they were reasonably effective at distinguishing sleep from wakefulness, but noticeably less reliable at identifying individual sleep stages.
I’ve seen executives become concerned about their lack of deep sleep, only for subsequent clinical investigations to tell a different story.
The precision of the numbers creates an impression of certainty that the underlying technology cannot always support.
When tracking becomes another source of stressÂ
In 2017, researchers described a phenomenon they called orthosomnia, where people become so preoccupied with achieving ideal sleep metrics that the tracking itself contributes to anxiety about sleep.
Someone may wake feeling reasonably refreshed, check their device and discover they’ve received a poor sleep score. Suddenly, they’re questioning how well they slept and whether they’ll have enough energy to get through the day.
For an executive already managing considerable cognitive demands, another dashboard to monitor and another score to optimise can become an additional source of mental noise.
Technology intended to improve our health can sometimes make us feel less confident about it.
The missing piece is understandingÂ
In my work advising CEOs and senior executives, I am far more interested in understanding why someone is exhausted than in what their wearable says about it.
Two executives may report similar sleep disturbances, afternoon fatigue and difficulty concentrating, yet the underlying contributors can be very different. For one, disrupted sleep may be the primary problem. For another, metabolic dysfunction, hormonal changes or nutritional deficiencies may be contributing. Often, several factors interact.
Understanding these differences requires a detailed clinical history, appropriate investigations and an appreciation of the individual’s physiology, lifestyle and working environment.
Blood tests, body composition assessments, laboratory fitness testing and formal sleep studies can all provide valuable information when clinically indicated. But even these measurements have limited value without appropriate interpretation.
The point is to work out which information matters, what it means and what can be changed.
Information alone doesn’t change behaviourÂ
There is another limitation to the quantified approach to health that is easily overlooked.
Knowing something about our health doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll do anything about it. A smartwatch can tell an executive they’ve slept for five hours, but it cannot persuade them to stop answering emails at midnight.
And while a device may detect physiological signs associated with stress, it cannot resolve the demands, habits or circumstances contributing to that stress. These are behavioural and sometimes organisational problems, not information problems.
I wear a smartwatch myself and find it useful for monitoring exercise. But I don’t treat its estimated VO2 max or sleep-stage measurements as definitive assessments of my health.
The value lies in using the information appropriately, not becoming dependent on the numbers.
CEOs are accustomed to making decisions from complex information. They understand that data quality, context and interpretation matter. Their health deserves the same scrutiny.
Before investing in another device or monitoring another metric, it’s worth asking whether the information is reliable, whether it reveals something meaningful and, most importantly, whether it will change what you do.
Health data should earn its place by improving how we live, work and lead. Otherwise, it is only more noise.
Written by Alessandra Edwards.
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