I didn't get healthy. I got a new business to run.
I wore a sleep tracker to bed last night and woke up three times to check my score.
Three times. To check how well I was sleeping. The number wasn't even bad. I just needed to know.
This is what I do now. I track everything. Sleep quality. Resting heart rate. Steps. Water intake. Something called heart rate variability that I couldn't have defined two years ago and now check before I check the weather.
I told myself this was the opposite of my old life. When I ran my logistics company I treated my body like it was rented. Ate gas station food at my desk. Slept four hours if the routes were bad. Ignored a shoulder injury for eight months because I didn't have time to not have a shoulder injury. I was a machine running on caffeine and stubbornness, and I was proud of that. Which tells you everything about how broken I was.
So when I got out and started over, I decided I was going to take care of myself for real. Eat clean. Move every day. Sleep like it mattered. And for about three months it was genuine. I felt better than I had in a decade. My body was actually thanking me.
Then I bought the tracker. Then a second one. Then I started logging every meal. Then I found a protocol for cold exposure. Then I found a protocol for gut health. Then I was spending an hour every morning reviewing my numbers and adjusting my inputs like I was managing a supply chain.
The thing I was doing to my body stopped being care somewhere around month four. It became operations.
I didn't get healthy. I got a new business to run. One that doesn't even pay.
That's the trap. You leave the thing that was eating you alive and your brain immediately starts scanning for something new to manage. Not because you need it. Because management is the only skill your nervous system trusts. Control is the only gear you have.
And it's invisible at first. Because the inputs are good. Vegetables, movement, eight hours of sleep. The inputs look so obviously healthy that you don't notice the energy behind them is exactly the same energy that had you checking Slack at midnight and driving to the warehouse on a Sunday to make sure the trucks were parked right.
It's not wellness. It's the same obsession in a different outfit.
You know this. Maybe for you it's not health. Maybe it's your morning routine that now takes ninety minutes and has seven steps and feels like failure if you skip one. Maybe it's your finances, tracked across four apps to the penny, even though you have more money than you've ever had and nothing to spend it on. Maybe it's your content, where you started out just saying what was true and now you're studying analytics and testing hooks and treating your own honesty like a conversion rate.
Nobody stages an intervention for the guy who's really into wellness. Nobody worries about you when the thing you're overdoing looks healthy from the outside. Your friends think you've figured it out. Hell, you think so too. Meanwhile you're just white-knuckling a new control panel.
A guy I surf with here in Ericeira is maybe 60. Brown and lean. Clearly in good shape but not in a way that looks like a project. I asked him once about his routine. He looked at me like I'd asked him what color his breathing is.
He swims. He surfs when it's good. He walks to the market. He eats what his wife cooks. He sleeps when he's tired. No tracker. No protocol. No numbers.
He's not performing health. He's living in his body. I've been hovering above mine, watching it from a control room, making sure all the readings look right.
I turned off the tracker last week. Not forever. Not some dramatic declaration. I just wanted to see if I could fall asleep without grading the experience.
Took me forty-five minutes. I lay there in the dark with nothing measuring me and my brain kept reaching for a number that wasn't there. It felt like driving without instruments. Like sitting in a quiet room after years of noise.
I spent ten years running a company I believed would collapse without constant monitoring. Then I spent two years treating my body the same way. The thing that needed to change was never the company or the sleep schedule or the morning protocol. It was the part of me that can't be inside an experience without checking whether it's working.
I don't know my sleep score from last night. Slept better than I have in months.
— Best, Jose
