Pedro A. Brêtas
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I built a wellness AI. Then I realized metrics lie about what matters.

How UX decisions shape (and deform) our inner lives

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The threshold between what we measure and who we are. (All conceptual images in this article were generated by the author using AI.)
The threshold between what we measure and who we are. (All conceptual images in this article were generated by the author using AI.)

Leia em português

This text is part of a trilogy on design, AI, and narrative:

Creating an AI to Slow Down in a World Obsessed with Performance
Why I Built Amia
I Built a Wellness AI. Then I Realized Metrics Lie About What Matters
The Hidden Cost of Metrics (you are here)
The Risks of Doing What’s Necessary
Design in the age of language interfaces

For eight months, I lived according to a number on my wrist. I had one of the best sleep scores in the world: the algorithm gave me an extremely high score and positioned me at the top of a global ranking. I was the “model user.” Optimized. Winning at rest.

The realization that something was wrong didn’t come from a philosophical insight, but from an ordinary evening. Red wine on the table, friends around, food more seasoned than usual. Instead of inhabiting that moment of connection, my mind was calculating the damage: “My score is going to plummet tomorrow.” I felt a pang of guilt for living an experience that didn’t “perform” well on the graph.

Smartwatch displaying the number 98 on a wrist, illustrating the constant quantification of life through metrics
The score that decides if you lived well.

I spent months in this loop of Biometric Anxiety, being simultaneously the rat and the scientist. From magnesium threonate to ice-cold morning baths, from running apps to breathing protocols. The end of this obsession was forced: a shoulder injury made me stop. And it was only when I removed that “contraption” from my wrist — without choice, constrained by pain — that I could see the obvious: I wasn’t training for the Olympics.

The irony was perfect: I used an uncomfortable device every night to optimize my sleep. The problem I thought I was solving was exactly what I had created. The forced pause revealed the voluntary obsession.

I realized we’ve become consumers of ourselves, transforming life into a permanent scientific experiment.

Who this text is for

This text is not about those who need metrics to build routine, to quit smoking, to get out of a sedentary lifestyle, to manage to wake up on time. This text is about a more subtle problem: what happens when organization becomes obsession, when optimizing becomes the only meaning left.

It’s about those who have reached the point of feeling guilty for living, because living didn’t perform well on the graph.

The invisible weight of never arriving.
The invisible weight of never arriving.

The Great Lie of Insufficiency

I believe this need for constant optimization has roots in a social wound: what Lynne Twist, in her work The Soul of Money, calls “the great lie” of scarcity.

For many of us, the first thought of the day is automatically: “I didn’t sleep enough.” The second is usually: “I don’t have enough time.”

Even before our feet touch the ground, we already feel inadequate and behind. We spend an enormous amount of time calculating what we have and what others have achieved, comparing our reality with fictional visions of perfection.

The market responds to this wound with a seductive promise: if you optimize every area of life, you’ll finally be fulfilled. But constant optimization doesn’t generate fulfillment; it generates an anguish of never being enough.

Performance as validation

Worse still: it’s not enough to be healthy, intelligent, or productive. You must publicly demonstrate that you’re at the peak. Life becomes an increasingly artificial competition, where what matters is not what you feel, but what others see. The badge for “100 consecutive days of meditation” is worth more than the 10 minutes of genuine silence you had on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s a strange inversion: the public proof that you meditated matters more than the private effect of meditation. The symbol replaces the experience.

In this scenario, performance dashboards end up generating the Observer Effect: the phenomenon where the act of measuring an experience alters the very nature of the experience. It’s Goodhart’s Law applied to inner life: when a metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good metric¹.

The worst part is that no one is forcing us. We ourselves become the relentless boss, the manager who transforms every moment of quietude into an optimization opportunity. It’s a servitude that doesn’t feel like servitude, because it comes disguised as freedom.

You open the meditation app for the 99-day streak, not for the silence your body asks for. The metric becomes more important than the reason.

It’s like trying to measure the beauty of a poem by counting syllables: you can get the number, but you completely lose the meaning.

I’m not alone in this. A 2024 study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that one in five smartwatch users experiences “intense anxiety” in response to device notifications. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen showed that many people treat fitness tracker data as if it were medical advice, generating unnecessary fear and anxiety.

Another study with college students found that 70% of fitness tracker users engage in “compensatory behaviors” to reach daily goals — such as increasing exercise the next day or reducing food intake. In a survey of 200 women, 60% reported that their days were “controlled by the device.”

Writer David Sedaris took this logic to the extreme: he reached the point of paying a fan $20 to walk two kilometers wearing his smartwatch while he went to a literary event, so as not to break the streak. It’s the perfect absurdity: outsourcing your own movement to maintain the illusion of consistency.

The Problem Isn’t Lack of Stimulation

And here’s the problem: we live in a digital world built entirely on immediate rewards. From the moment we pick up our phone in the morning until the last scroll before bed, we’re immersed in systems designed to give us constant hits of instant gratification.

The news feed delivers a post that entertains us. The notification lights up the screen and triggers the urgency to check. We post a photo and watch the likes climb. We respond to messages and feel the satisfaction of “inbox zero.”

Each interaction is a small burst of pleasure, quick, intense, fleeting. And at the end of the day, we feel exhausted, but without knowing exactly why.

What’s missing isn’t more stimulation, we already have that in abundance. What’s missing is that deeper sensation: of purpose, of internal coherence, of walking toward where we really want to go. That life isn’t just happening, it’s making sense.

But it would be dishonest to blame only the metrics. They cast light on a void that preceded them. The void comes from before: from lack of community, from absence of rituals, from productivity pressure that makes us treat each minute as a resource to be managed, instead of a moment to be inhabited.

Why It still matters

So why does it still matter to refuse these metrics? Because as long as the graph decides for us, we’ll never be able to name what’s really missing. We need to displace the anxiety to finally be able to look at it.

Every design uncertainty holds an unexplored possibility.
Every design uncertainty holds an unexplored possibility.

The Designer’s Dilemma

This question stopped being merely philosophical when I started building Amia — an AI designed for deep introspective conversations. When it came time to materialize these conversations into an interface, I found myself facing a decision that every wellness product designer confronts:

how to show progress without deforming the experience?

The obvious temptation was to follow what the market has proven works: dashboards, evolution graphs, self-knowledge scores, consistency streaks. It would be familiar to the user. Easier to explain to investors. Proven.
But I found myself facing the same contradiction this article explores:

how do you measure internal coherence without reducing it to a number?
How do you reward vulnerability without incentivizing it as a means to an end?
How do you gamify introspection without transforming it into yet another performance?

When design becomes part of the problem

I made dozens of prototypes. I tested versions with emotional depth badges. Each test left me more uneasy. I was trying to fit a fundamentally qualitative experience into a quantitative structure. And I knew that, by doing so, I would be transforming Amia into yet another optimization tool — exactly what I was trying to avoid.

There’s a weight to this that cannot be ignored. As designers, we are not neutral. Every interface choice is also a declaration about what matters.

When we put a number on the screen, we’re saying: this is worth measuring. When we create a streak, we’re defining: this is progress. These are decisions that seem technical, but are profoundly human.

And the person on the other side believes it. Because they’ve been trained their whole life to believe that numbers don’t lie, that metrics are objective, that dashboards show the truth. But truth about what? About who you are? Or about how much you performed for the algorithm today?

As designers, we can easily become part of a cycle: we create tools that teach people to constantly measure themselves, these people come to expect metrics for everything, and then we validate this behavior by creating more metrics. If I choose wrong here, I won’t just have made a product that doesn’t solve the problem — I’ll have reinforced the idea that you need to accumulate points to deserve feeling good about yourself.

The search for another form

But perhaps there’s an alternative. A way to structure the experience that doesn’t depend on metrics, but isn’t a complete absence of structure either.

An approach that privileges pattern recognition instead of point accumulation. That works with emotional territory instead of measuring distance traveled.

The answer I found doesn’t come from positive psychology or the neuroscience of well-being. It comes from how we’ve always made sense of human experience: through stories. Narrative as a method of organizing inner life.

It’s through narrative that we transform vague sensations into tangible recognition. When a user manages to articulate “ah, this is Sunday night anxiety” or identify “this pattern repeats every time I avoid a difficult conversation,” no metric was calculated, but something fundamental happened: they gained orientation in their own experience.

From a design perspective, the difference is structural: metrics create vertical hierarchies (more is better, going up is progress). Narrative creates horizontal maps: it doesn’t tell you whether you’re better or worse, but it shows you where you are and how the elements of your experience connect. And a map, unlike a ranking, is navigable. You can revisit, recognize patterns, trace alternative routes.

But narrative brings its own risks. And we need to name these risks before proposing any alternative.

In the previous article, I shared why I’m building Amia. Here, I explored the hidden cost of metrics in our inner lives. Next, I’ll explore the alternative: narrative — and its risks.References

This text is part of a trilogy on design, AI, and narrative:

Creating an AI to Slow Down in a World Obsessed with Performance
Why I Built Amia
I Built a Wellness AI. Then I Realized Metrics Lie About What Matters
The Hidden Cost of Metrics (you are here)
The Risks of Doing What’s Necessary
Design in the age of language interfaces

To continue the dialogue

Thank you for accompanying me in this reflection. This text is part of an ongoing investigation into design, AI, and narrative that overflows into practice at my studio and in the tools I build. If these ideas resonated, I’d love to continue the conversation.

Where to find me: Pedro Brêtas and pedro@reinostudio.com

Projects: Reino Studio and Fale com Amia

References

Note: The anecdote about David Sedaris is publicly known through interviews and his work, but doesn’t have a specific academic reference required.