2. Performance emerges from the whole system

3. Capacity as a negotiation with ourselves, our biology, and the world

4. What does capacity building look like?

A recurring pattern I am seeing among wellness seekers is that the harder they try to optimize their health, the less effective their routines become. As one domain strengthens, another buckles under pressure. Something clearly is amiss.

First, performance starts becoming inconsistent. Tasks that once felt easy feel effortful. Each week starts at a slightly lower baseline than the previous one. Over time, the minor, inconsequential stressors you ignored suddenly become powerful enough to dictate your mood, energy, and effectiveness. Less patience, less presence, less give.

The paradox: this happens while tracking wearable data, optimizing sleep hygiene, nutrition protocols, and training schedules.

Not that the pursuit to perform at our best is misguided or excessive. After all, we are wired to adapt, grow, and (pleasantly) discover how much potential we hold. But when effort outweighs the cost of optimizing, should it still be considered performance? And at what point does ‘growth at any cost’ stop being growth?

Because even though your point of view depends on the person you aspire to become, in matters of health, ambition cannot negotiate with physiology. And this is what I am deeply concerned about with the optimization culture: the assumption that ambition and effort can override one’s limits.

The missing variable - Capacity

Let’s examine this:

Two people following the same 8-week training protocol. One notices improvement in ten days. The other is still struggling at week six. Same time investment, same protocol, same trainer.

Why is the outcome different?

You may have an intuitive understanding of what went wrong. And you know that the difference is not just in effort.

This difference reflects the interaction between capability and capacity.

Capability is what you can do - your skills, techniques, strategies, discipline.
Capacity is the extent to which you can reliably express your capabilities - your bandwidth to meet demands at any given moment.

The current health optimization trend assumes that better outcomes require just better capabilities. Which is true. Actually true! Willpower, skills, and effort are undoubtedly necessary for high performance. But beyond a point, they cannot compensate for inadequate capacity.

When living a pressure-cooker life, especially when already dealing with a health issue, demands often exceed capacities. You are capped as much by your capability as your capacity. Optimization becomes the wrong prescription in this case.

Optimization addresses local deficits, while performance emerges from the whole system.

If you examine your typical day, it more or less follows this pattern:

You wake up. The morning is productive. It arrives with a window of clarity. Then post-lunch, you energy and attention dips. You push through. And retire from the day exhausted and ready to crash.

“I need more energy, more stamina,” you say. So you add more training, more tracking.

• Low nutrients? Take supplements.

• Low VO2 max? Train better.

• Feeling stressed? Add breathwork.

• Too many tasks? Better task management tools.

And yet, while

• your nutrition and exercise lends you energy, you remain sleep-deprived and physically under-recovered

• your supplement stack is in place, you feel emotionally broke

• your breathing exercises calm you, you cannot detach you from your work at home

• you time-box, the number of critical decisions pile up each day

Because, we all have our unique global capacity shaped by our physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual, social capacities. Some have formidable memory, some can execute in sleep, some can handle emotions like a sage, while others possess excellent physical duress.

If you are busy optimizing one aspect in a silo, the others get compromised. Worse, none of this can be tracked accurately on your wearables or blood work. You get what you desire, but not what you need.

Take, for instance, an executive with an elevated HbA1c who is seeking help to improve metabolic health. He is prescribed a daily routine: structured exercise, planned meals, consistent monitoring, and dedicated recovery practices. One that looks good on paper, yet fails in practice.

Why? The protocol demands more capacity than is available.

To fit in morning exercise, the executive now has to wake up at 5:30 am instead of his usual 7am. He compresses his sleep window and his recovery time.

At work, he braces himself before every meeting with his cantankerous boss. In the middle of a high-pressure project, it does not help that he has to make more critical decisions. His work requires more emotional regulation from him and provides little opportunity to recover.

And when he feels he is losing grip, that inner voice takes over - “I can push harder. After all, I have done this for so many years; I can handle this too.” Until he cannot. By avoiding downtime, he is inviting further breakdown.

Because peak performance and peak health are states, not plain goals. And they are determined by your tightly interconnected biological system constrained by what is within and without you. And that one needs to respect and work with these (protective) constraints rather than overpower them.

In the example above, the executive’s routine is centered around building capability first, so he ends up knowing and doing more. But notice what else it does: it demands more capacity than is not available. The executive’s state isn’t a failure of willpower; it is the physical cost of his mental model and choices that assume high attention, energy and overall capacity despite evidence.

A weekend sauna routine or a retreat will not completely undo his daily heist either.

We negotiate our capacities with ourselves, our biology, and the world around us daily.

Systemic Rhythms

Our basic functioning depends on key rhythms like circadian cycle, sleep-wake time, cortisol release, neuro-endocrine cycles, and in women, menstrual cycle (read more).

Your morning cortisol mobilizing your energy, post-food insulin release shifting metabolism, pre-menstrual phase changing how you feel physically and emotionally are a just a few examples to show how your capacity window shrinks or expands based on key biological cycles.

In general, it is safe to say that during upregulation (uptime), you feel more energetic, have more neuromuscular and cognitive power and better stress resilience. In downregulation, your system spends more time on repair and clean up. How far do you think working against these natural flows help you build yourself?

Environment & People

Ever felt how the mere presence of that work colleague drains you? Or, how some people leave you feeling better?

Your physical and social environment is capable of modulating your stress response and capacity in real time.

When you spend long periods in an unpredictable, threatening, or hostile environment, your physiology and immunity shift. Over time, this dynamic can activate gene patterns like the CTRA (Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity). The longer such conditions persist, the more your brain begins to anticipate threat to the point where even a neutral social gesture can feel unsafe. To what extent do you think breathwork offsets this fear?

What regulates you as an individual cannot fully compensate for an environment that continuously generates stress.

Identity

Think of a time when you were absorbed in something because you genuinely loved it. And when you were reluctant to do something you felt averse to, simply because it was ‘not you’.

Your values, your preferences and your beliefs act as a predictive filter. By influencing how effortful something feels to you, how rewarding it seems, and whether you persist when things get tough they shape your capacity too. This is why contradictions between who you think you are and what you want show in your habits.

As you would have experienced at some point, an optimization-centric approach misses these nuances unless clubbed with expertise.

From optimization-focused approach to a capacity-building approach

Time and again, I see those with a better overall capacity gain an edge that upskilling cannot compensate for solely.

Though, not every plateau or decline is a capacity problem. Some of what is described above results from genuine skill gaps, poor strategy, low motivation or an illness that only treatment, rest, and time can resolve.

You can workout in your downtime, or you can be highly productive at 2am. Rhythms are one contributor to capacity, not the entirety of it. But correcting baseline rhythms is foundational to better capacity management. Otherwise, the payoff withers gradually and without adequate decompression, recovery becomes costlier.

I am also not suggesting eliminating social stress. A purely supportive environment that protects us can also shield us from the very stressors that drive adaptation and build capacity. Remember how some of your greatest period of growth arrived when your were stretched!

And identity does not cause lower capacity the way insulin deficiency does for diabetes.

My point is not trading discomfort for predictability and comfort. After all, every cell begins its life by being torn apart in two. My point is to ask whether your routine, your environment and your demands are creating more friction, exceeding your adaptive reserve or preventing sufficient recovery.

Because when body and mind capacities erode without a stopgap, metabolic dysfunction takes the form of an illness, physiological fatigue presents as motivational exhaustion and cognitive overload shows up as judgement lapse and blindspots. Navigating difficult situations and changing old habits feel 10x more effortful.

Instead of “whether this routine is effective?” better to ask “does this routine and my environment deplete me faster than it restores?” Otherwise, your training will have the same effect as that tap filling your tank with an open faucet elsewhere.

What does capacity building look like from here?

Firstly, rule out whether you have a medical problem at the outset.

The symptoms of inconsistent performance, persistent fatigue, emotional volatility despite genuine effort could be a symptom of hypothyroidism, anemia, sleep apnea, insulin resistance, early depression or something else. I have watched people spend months doing complex routines when what they needed was a simple test. So a baseline assessment and diagnostics is a good place to begin with.

Be realistic, be easy on yourself and understand your context.

It is easy to admire elite performers and imitate their routine. What is conveniently ignored is the invisible support system that act as capacity shield: a private chef who buys and cooks the food, a personal assistant who handles their administrative calendar, and domestic help managing their home. This removes friction and clears the path between intent and execution that willpower alone cannot substitute for.

So trying to wake up an hour earlier to workout while still doing 100% of the household chores, managing midnight work emails, or packing school lunches, and then trying to force-fit routines without the scaffold, is a recipe for system-wide failure.

Also, data interpretation needs contextual nuances. Most commonly used biomarkers such as VO2 max, HRV or HbA1c reflect both capacity and capability. But the same reading that reflects good capacity can reflect bad capacity depending on your where you are. A simple rule of thumb is how quickly these biomarkers bounce back. The quicker, the better your capacity.

Thirdly, accept that capacity accumulates slowly.

Capacity is not easy to measure or interpret clearly. It lacks the immediate positive feedback of tracking your reps, hitting your targets the validation your self-effort brings! Which is why chasing optimization feels rational, productive, and oh so good — because it largely is!

But capacity building can temporarily disappoint the achiever in you because it asks of you to

• create and protect rest and recovery windows

• decelerate, pause and reconsider more effort

• accept slower progress, especially in struggling domains, while your foundation repairs

If this conflicts with your way of life and how you see yourself, capacity-building is bound to feel like under-performance or inefficiency in the short term.

Capacity requires structure, pacing and friction management

Better capacity needs better load redistribution through structure, pacing and friction management.

1. Structure

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of stress-recovery cycle. Map your days, your peaks and lows to choose the sequence of tasks accordingly. Add compulsory buffer periods and empty spaces as they serve as shock absorbers. Maintain hard boundaries around strategic choices you will execute in any role (personal or professional).

2. Pacing

A quick dipstick test to decide if you need to slow down or ramp up is to see whether small changes have started breaking your rhythm consistently. A/B test your demands and load, and check your pace to see how it correlates with the outcomes. Or choose upfront the capacity you will put in maintenance mode while the other is being tested.

For example, switch from high-intensity or heavy resistance training during high-pressure work sprints to Zone 2 cardio or low-resistance functional movement. During a heavy decision-making week, scale down physical routine to a maintenance or recovery state.

3. Friction

Before you add a new habit to your life (Capability), first identify the structural friction you are willing to remove to make room for Capacity.

Design the minimum viable version of that new activity/habit for low days. Or decide on a bare minimum change that you will tolerate. You may look to prioritize the easiest path between initiating and maintaining your habit that works even on low motivational bandwidth.

When times change and you are in a better form, you can add friction and load again by exploring and pushing outside your comfort zone. This calibrates and tests your real progress.

Ask “During my average week, could I do 70% of this without super willpower?”
If the answer is no, then you are fighting yourself. And I mentioned in earlier post how this is akin to mounting an autoimmune attack on yourself. The plan designed for your best week, cannot be your real one. Instead build habits that can be repeated across any level of your capacity.

Michelangelo described what went into creating his famous sculpture David - “It’s simple. I just removed everything that is not David.” Capacity-building has a similar logic: to not add more to the point of straining the system but just what is needed.

I have maintained that long-term health (or lack of it) is a lagging indicator. Health and performance are outputs of the same underlying capacity: to absorb demands, recover fully, and adapt. Invest in that capacity, and performance will compound.

A meaningful improvement in sleep quality, alignment in social environment, and identity-behavior congruence does not just improve one area by 10%. It raises the ceiling across every area at once.

It is an exciting time in health now! Take advantage of the access we now have to more health data and more precise measurement tools. Learn to work with your subjective feelings to work alongside and combine with this data, you will will becoming better at knowing when to honour the data or yourself. That judgment remains one of the most valuable skills because no other object or person can experience your physiology for you.

There will be times when your available capacity will be committed to things beyond yourself - navigating a crisis, caring for a newborn, grieving a loss, or simply getting through a demanding period. During these periods, shift your objective from building more to preserving what you already have. Focus on maintaining your health, reducing unnecessary demands, and recovering whenever you can.

If such an episode were to arrive, by systematically building capacity, your worst days will still be better than most people’s average. Your performance will not collapse under a bad week; your judgment will remain available under load. Over five to ten years down the line, this will outperform strength built entirely on capability and willpower.

More on this in the upcoming posts.

Disclaimer: The body-mind-meaning framework reflects my own clinical pattern recognition from practice. My intent to share observations and reflections is to bring more clarity on health. At no point do I intend this to be a medical prescription. Should you need more help, I encourage you to seek qualified professional advice or reach out to me with your questions directly.

1. The signals at the point of diminishing returns

2. Recovery & Supercompensation

3. Planning your Recovery

I recently met someone who lives a life most people spend years designing. Now they are contemplating a break.

“I feel more like a zombie and less like myself. I follow my routine, work out, and manage my time well, but can’t feel the energy to continue anymore. The spark is gone. Maybe I need a break from all this.”

I see this often. Ambition provides the initial push and then something begins to slip – focus, emotions, judgment, meaning in work. The instinct is to protect productivity by doing more - more information, new routines, and better tracking that offer resolution at the level of intelligence, even as fatigue keeps lingering on Monday mornings. And when all of this is still not enough, the next thought is a break.

If you are the person who has tried many protocols, reads the research, and is still feeling off, this post is for you – you have been treating the wrong thing because the root cause of your problem lies elsewhere.

So what has your Sunday evening been telling you and how long have you been explaining it away?

Energy vs Capacity

In physics, kinetic energy moves and potential energy holds.

Similarly, energy moves our potential and capacity holds our potential. Energy powers your day; capacity determines how much action your system can sustain each day and recover from it repeatedly.

With low capacity, your days will look just fine, but you will not be able to handle more changes or level up. Ecology has a term for this - carrying capacity - the maximum load an ecosystem can sustainably support.

Optimising your kinetic energy: daily tasks, goals, routines – does not directly resolve the structural capacity problem. The distinction also explains why sabbaticals sometimes work and sometimes do not.

• Productivity and task management organise your workload.

• Wellness routines — better sleep, cleaner nutrition, consistent movement — are necessary, but not sufficient.

• Biomarkers and wearables give you data about what has already happened to your system. They do not tell you why your system is not recovering from the things it correctly measures.

• And a break without understanding why the system broke down is a pause before you resume your old patterns. (I elaborate further in this post)

Even if two people have identical habits - sleep well, eat better, move often, and work well - one can feel depleted despite ‘right’ habits, whereas the other thrives.

Why?

Because one is building capacity. The other is drawing structural reserves without restoring them.

How?

For this, remember a year that you felt was the “most challenging year of my life.” A year when everything felt too new, too soon, or too much. Imagine what all happened in that year to make you call it challenging.

Chances are you lived through the stages of stress that Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) neatly maps: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.

First, the alarm or shock of the new stress activated your limbic system’s fight-or-flight reflex. You may have believed in your resilience and understood why you felt stressed, yet you felt the discomfort. Your knowing, your awareness could not exempt you from feeling the stress and did not resolve your tension.

Eventually, in the resistance stage, you began to accommodate and adapt to the change. What you did in this phase laid the foundation of your evolution (or de-evolution). If you continued pushing past your limits in a calibrated way with adequate recovery, by the end of that phase, you felt you have unlocked a better version of yourself. But if you kept persevering on thinning reserves without support, you would have felt a bone-crushing exhaustion – a phase you never planned for but had to face reluctantly.

How long that stage lasts depends on many factors - your baseline capacity; magnitude, duration, and frequency of stress; your mindset and emotional reserves; past experiences; external help and resources; and your environment.

Look at the uncanny resemblance of the above graph with what economics explains as the law of diminishing returns – how beyond a point additional input yields less or degraded output (in this case injury, fatigue or burnout).

The same law that governs economic productivity governs a biological system’s productivity too.

Can you predict whether your effort is going to bring you growth or diminishing returns?

The signals at the point of diminishing returns

Once pushed past capacity, you will naturally feel slowed down as your system is reorganizing to a lower equilibrium - at the level of Body, Mind and Meaning – as low energy, low mood or low meaning.

Body

You feel you cannot push high-intensity exercises that were once tolerable, frequent illnesses, even minor ones like flu, waking up tired after 8 hr sleep, and a crash after exertion that doesn’t get better with rest. As if the body stops being a resource and starts feeling like a liability.

Mind

Declining cognitive capacity looks like slow decision-making, inability to act even after deciding, poor focus, losing thoughts midway, or brain fog. The more insidious version: cognitive performance theatre. You are executing the motions of clarity — attending meetings, answering questions, making decisions — without feeling clarity underneath any of it. You perform competence for long enough that even you stop noticing the gap between what you produce and what you are actually capable of.

While eroding emotional capacity shows up as volatility - a reaction too large for its trigger, a flatness where feeling used to live. Anxiety that attaches itself to whatever is nearest. A fuse that has, without announcement, grown very short. Or the persistent ruminating thoughts of an emotional shock.

Meaning

The most insidious and underestimated erosion is that of meaning, of “Why am I doing this?” or “Is this even worth it?”

According to a report, only 11% of high-purpose employees report frequent burnout, versus 52% of low-purpose employees.

From my experience, the weakest capacity erodes first and the strongest capacity keeps absorbing this load until it gives in. For a while, this compensation masks the true state of the system, then it hastens the collapse exponentially. Which is why one of my preferred capacity indicators is how you recover after a break, how you feel after a weekend, on a Sunday night or Monday morning. Another is when your wearable device readings do not add up to your state.

Your missing edge: Recovery

You already see the sheer volume of ‘overcome your stress’ and ‘change your relationship to stress’ self-help content out there. What remains conspicuously absent is the concept of recovery. But,

Capacity = f (stress tolerance, stress load, recovery)

Selye’s model partly explains why novel growth cannot occur during early stress. While moving through a demanding life may have felt overwhelming in the moment, it was in the aftermath of that chapter that you grew for the better.

This is what positive adaptation looks like because you outgrew your old capacity in a way that linear growth could never have allowed for.

Intentional, structured, sequenced, and timed recovery that starts soon before exhaustion appears can steer your growth trajectory in ways modulating or reframing stress can never.

Athletes have known this for decades: growth happens beyond the training window in the recovery window.

Sports science formalised this through the principle of supercompensation - a process by which your system rebuilds slightly above its previous baseline after adequate stress and adequate recovery. Because we cannot time the next stress perfectly unless you are training physically, timing recovery — not too early, not too late — builds supercompensation that creates a compounding ‘staircase effect’ of progressive improvement.

In my experience, the professionals most in need of recovery are consistently the last to receive it. When the reckoning arrives — in the form of a health crisis, a relationship breakdown, a business loss — rebuilding becomes more expensive. Like Sisyphus condemned to the futility of effort without accumulation, strain without supercompensation, and the push without the gain.

Positive adaptation is always available to you. The question is are you ready to allow for it?

Planning your Recovery

1. Allowing for a recovery state

When you have been hardwired to believe that visible outputs create rewards, genuine recovery feels unproductive.

Recovery asks for dropping short-term output. Few professional environments will not accommodate it. Some colleagues will not understand it. These are genuine costs, and minimising them is not being honest.

Another aspect is that when you have learned to remain switched on for a very long time, a relaxed state may feel absurd and hence, unsafe (remember the alarm stage).

This persistent low-dose alarm stage and vigilance are further maintained by modern forms of rest: the phone notifications that fracture attention; the half-watched content that provides stimulation without resolution; and your brain keeps predicting what’s next.

True capacity expansion relies on parasympathetic rebound—the body’s ability to transition smoothly out of a sympathetic-dominant fight-or-flight state into an anabolic, restorative state.

This is why in my own client survey, almost 88% identified taking the first step towards change after making a decision as their greatest challenge — not making the decision itself. This knowing-doing gap is partly held back by your nervous system state.

This is why most people’s instincts and recommendations fail. Rest and downtime are not recovery.

What genuine recovery requires is a reduction in this anticipatory burden. For someone in chronic high vigilance — as most high performers are — this shift does not happen automatically.

Physiologically, the nervous system needs to register that the threat has passed. This is why, in my practice, the indicator I weight most heavily is how someone feels after rest. If rest is not restoring, something upstream requires attention — and that upstream problem is almost never solved by more rest or sleep alone.

And though the idea of letting go of control is difficult, the more you value your ambitions, the more you need to focus on recovery.

A common rationalisation I hear is “This is just a hard period. I will be better once this passes.” If you have been justifying so for more than a few consecutive months, the weekend is not the unit of recovery you need.

Taking a few days off at the first sign of under-recovery can pull you back from the edge.

Moving into recovery state is usually initiated by a combination of activities like breathwork, NSDR or light movements along with sleep hygiene, nutritional care, and guided support. More on this in the upcoming posts.

2. Constraint-centric recovery

This is where Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints is useful: every system has a single binding constraint that determines the throughput of the entire operation.

If you consistently improve inputs — sleep, nutrition, supplements, systems — without ever asking where the actual bottleneck is, optimising everything else is theatre.

Prioritise intervention based on the major depletion. If,

• biological → regulate rhythms, reduce hyperarousal, restore body’s sense of safety

• cognitive → reduce task switching, close unfinished loops

• meaning-related → restore coherence and agency and seek experiences that produce emotional metabolization and resolution.

The sequence and proportion of recovery matter as much as what is chosen. Trading recovery in one domain for another leaves the system partially unrestored. Physical rest without cognitive pause or spiritual engagement without physical recovery is a partial resolution.

3. Timing your recovery

Ever wondered why you plan your goal timelines but ignore your recovery timelines? Why you schedule what you will produce, but do not schedule when you will need to stop?

The point of recovery is to make the next push far stronger by allowing capacity to grow. The other extreme, playing too safe, means you forgo the evolution that stress can bring and plateau (or worse, shrink) your potential.

We work in balance.

After pushing your limits to the breaking point, you need to step away into a recovery state, as shown here by the Goldilocks principle.

The framework that governs elite athletic development — macrocycles across a year, mesocycles across months, microcycles across weeks — describes the rhythm that high-functioning professionals require and almost barely receive.

You experience these cycles even if without conscious awareness. Think of a time when you had it all followed by a time that nearly took away much from you - a sort of natural build-recovery cycles that was beyond your control.

Another point is to cut yourself some slack on trial and errors. It is okay if, in the early phases, you are not able to identify your limits. Especially if you have been depleted for a long time. Severe or multi-year depletion takes longer to resolve than a few weeks of better practice. The degree of background load — unresolved health issues, emotional history, environmental stressors — significantly affects recovery rate. Anyone promising a fast turnaround from deep depletion deserves scrutiny.

These nuances cannot be fully captured by biomarkers and wearables. This is where professional guidance is not optional; it is part of the plan.

Sustained capacity growth is rhythmic, not episodic. You don’t chicken out and avoid the struggle – you just stop repeating it at damaging cost and move ahead more confidently.

If you are wondering that this is physical recovery-centric then I have a clarification. Your capacity to manage emotions, make better decisions or find meaning also go through similar ebbs and flows, though not experienced as neatly and symmetrically as the above images often feel something like this

That is the nature of life and the essence of living. However, with better awareness, tools and support, few bumps and dips can be avoided saving you time, energy and other resources for things you truly love.

Your need for grit, resilience, mental toughness, optimism, motivation, performance, and productivity is all in the service of a better adaptation to uncertainty and stressors.

What returns with better capacity is your renewed ability to access progress at your own terms and a better quality of decisions, deeper relationships, the ambition you carry for the work you believe you are here to do, and the compounding growth of a career that should have decades left in it.

Every recovery break is a great time to build and grow resources that convert strain into strength.

If you have run out of the capacity to access what you already have, the good news is that it is fixable. But it requires a different kind of attention and desire than the one that got you here. Are you ready to commit to that desire?

To identify your capacity constraints, you may take this quick screener. You can also talk to me here.

Disclaimer: The three-domain body mind meaning framework reflects my own clinical pattern recognition from practice. My intent to share my observations and reflections is to bring more clarity on health. At no point do I intend this to be a medical prescription. Should you need more help, I encourage you to seek qualified professional advice or reach out to me with your questions directly.

But most metrics (whether personal or professional) are designed to maintain the continuity of a narrow systemic scope. By narrowing attention on achieving a narrow set of goals, metrics may lead to outcomes that are locally optimal but globally incoherent.

In health, this incoherence matters more because metrics don’t just shape behavior—they shape physiology as well. What is repeatedly optimized for becomes what the body adapts to.

As someone who has witnessed the negative impacts of metric-obsessed behaviour on health and quality of life, this article is an attempt to explore a deeper question: what is worthy of measurement and how do we measure it without distorting the very thing we value?

The chain reaction of optimization

When metrics become the reference for actions, trade-offs are structured in favour of them. Alongside intended outcomes, unintended consequences show up – sometimes immediately visible, but often delayed or obscured.

Consider when productivity is set as the dominant goal. Output is not just limited by the number of tasks or number of hours but also by real biological constraints like attention span, physical capacity, metabolism, etc., that determine how long one can persevere through the demands of the job. When faced with time pressure, a common reflex is to trade-off rest and recovery for more working hours – a trade-off that may alter future performance significantly.

Or when multi-tasking becomes a survival necessity in the high-growth phase and decision-making and working memory limits constrain attention and accuracy, trading strategic pause for continuous execution can sustain short-term velocity while accumulating latent error. The cost of errors accrued arrives later in the form of rework or cleaning up the mess.

Why Rational People Opt For Narrow Choices

A. Active Inference

None of this is surprising to most people. The more interesting question is why we keep choosing against our better selves, knowing the long-term costs.

One useful lens comes from the theory of Active Inference (developed in the works of Karl Friston, Thomas Parr, and others). Our brain works like a prediction machine that aims to minimize prediction errors, i.e., surprises (because surprising states are tagged as incompatible with survival).

The sequence goes like: -

The brain experiences reality (sensation) – sensations are inferred (perception) – perception is used to predict outcomes (prediction) – prediction guides action (action) – actions that aim to minimize surprising outcomes are repeated (behaviour).

Following this logic, metrics become the inference anchors against which future outcomes are predicted. And accordingly, you (implying your brain model) shape actions that increase the probability of achieving these metrics.

Given this pattern, if a metric is assigned high significance (weight), adapting to that metric - even at the expense of others - stops looking like an irrational choice. Additionally, reinforcement learning compounds this effect. Each time you are rewarded for achieving metrics-aligned success, like a Pavlovian brain, you keep reinforcing the behaviour – though not always for maximizing reward, sometimes to minimize uncertainty.

Especially, in time-constrained high-pressure environments, attention tunneling narrows focus to the most salient signal - the metric itself. Everything else drops out by constraint or choice.

Unless a strong situation forces a course correction — through internal reflection or negative externality — diverging from the predicted path feels risky and destabilizing.

This is why, despite being aware of the long-term harm, one feels hand-tied (or rather brain-tied) by their situation. One simply cannot out-think behaviour change.

B. Narratives as a load and a coping mechanism

Most self-honest people experience the tension and skepticism of “why am I doing this?” or “Something feels wrong about this.”

As this dissonance widens, so does the gap between what the metrics ask of and what one must suppress, distort, or override to remain functional. This is when our narratives step in. They function like cognitive load managers to justify trade-offs.

As described earlier, the person inundated with tasks and fatigue may adopt stories like:

“I can absorb this.”

“Momentum matters more than precision.”

“I chose this path.”

“I’ve worked too hard to step away now.”

Such narratives preserve continuity of identity and agency. They are cognitively efficient heuristics (short-cuts) that reinforce our working patterns and reduce the cost of constantly gathering more information, re-evaluating goals, and questioning one’s behaviour and self-concept.

Whether such narratives are healthy or unhealthy is a function of context, how often they are used, which part of reality they attempt to explain and what realities they obscure. Regardless, sometimes narratives enable adaptive endurance and resilience-building, even if temporarily.

In this trade-off, one side emerges victorious not just by metric-design and priorities but also by narratives. More often, that side is the status quo.

What begins as a mental pattern may eventually cost biologically.

When Optimization impacts Health

When left ignored and unresolved, these patterns compound, and choices that repeatedly override physiological and psychological limits increase allostatic load.

Allostatic load refers to the wear and tear on the body resulting from chronic stress or an ineffective response to stress. Think of it as a deferred health cost incurred by prolonged, or overbearing stress that is repeatedly suppressed, postponed or rationalized away.

A low allostatic load indicates greater buffer capacity to absorb load, recover, sustain or push through limits without affecting observable performance.

Realistically and evolutionarily, some amount of stress is useful for enhancing learning, optimizing growth and maintaining function (eustress). Healthy coping during acute, time-bound stress usually strengthens resilience against future stressors. Narratives that help maintain objectivity in the face of stress, along with regular physical activity, emotional wellness and social support, facilitate adaptations that fuel growth and evolution through stressful periods.

But as Yerkes–Dodson Law illustrates, this benefit operates within limits. Performance improves with stress arousal only up to an optimal point; beyond it, further stress produces diminishing returns.

When left ignored and unresolved, such behaviour overrides physiological and psychological limits that increases allostatic load (moving to the right side of the curve).

Habits forged under pressure like extending work hours, multi-tasking, overestimating recovery capacity and ignoring recovery time gradually normalize the neglect of restoration.

Because short-term metrics often remain stable over the course of internal strain and outputs are registered as ‘success’, the damaging behaviours continue and compound.

The damage appears outside the metric’s frame and therefore remains invisible and does not show up early. By the time damage surfaces, the signal is noisy – expressing through:

• Biology: altered biomarkers, sleep patterns, metabolism, hormones or illness

• Psychology: emotional volatility, motivation issues

• Cognition: diminished working memory, attention, reasoning

For those who identify with “But I thrive under pressure!” the question becomes: ‘Do you thrive in health, in performance or in status?’

Stress and struggle can be meaningful, and the question then becomes ‘When does stress shift from chosen to structural and non-consensual?’

The Bio-psycho-social Drift: From Metric to Culture

As we have seen, the impact of optimizing a metric is not restricted to the metric itself.

Path dependence in decision science suggests that once a decision style is reinforced consciously or unconsciously, it becomes structural. Flexibility declines as updating patterns is a slow, energy and attention-intense process that stressed system struggle with.

What gets repeated shapes identity and one’s relation with people and culture.

If identity fuses to what is measurable, it shapes a recognizable archetype the high-functioning unwell person — outwardly productive and responsive, inwardly deteriorating.

At a systemic level, the effects compound. A system recalibrates its metrics (and hence, expectations) based on the visible outputs of its participants. Participants adapt to these expectations, reinforcing a culture of self-sacrifice that no single actor explicitly chose yet many collectively sustain.

This is how metrics, when removed from their context, hide internal costs and reduce multi-faceted human experience to a low-dimensional behaviour.

In many ways, metrics pose a risk of selective blindness, despite being efficient in the short-term. Locally optimal, globally not.

This echoes with Goodhart’s law - “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Towards a Better Question (and Therefore, Better Design)

In all of this, my point is that metrics are not inherently harmful, ineffective or misguided.

Metrics can bring clarity, improve performance and quantify competence, especially for focused, time-bounded goals. It is the manner and context within which they are used that determine whether they liberate as a feedback or imprison as an identity-defining constraint.

Metrics can level-up performance when they allow for:

• high autonomy with minimal ego-traps

• clearly drawn and respected boundaries

• use as feedback rather than judgement or fear triggers

• rest and recovery treated as foundational inputs

• reversible decisions wherever possible

Metrics become captors when they:

• collapse complex realities into single-dimensional optimization

• expect health and identity to absorb uncertainty and trade-offs

• ignore regenerative capacity while extracting output

Building on the concept of double loop thinking by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, questioning needs to move beyond which metrics is chosen to what underlying values the metric represents. And by how much the the explicit goal (e.g. effectiveness or being healthy) diverges from implicit values (e.g. narrow efficiency).

Therefore, evaluation needs to extend beyond metrics to a broader contextual understanding of:

• Why was the metric selected?

• What behaviour it implicitly rewards and punishes?

• Under what conditions it fails?

• What blind spots does it allow for by design?

Expanding the feedback

A few operational possibilities emerge to tackle metrics-driven myopia, in my opinion.

1. Explicitly tie metrics to embodied wellbeing to ensure that screening, tracking and optimizing does not erode long-term functioning.

2. Use health audits that track beyond ‘what was achieved’ to ‘what was spent internally to achieve it?’

Such audits may assess domains of health such as:

• Recovery capacity (sleep, decompression, reversibility of fatigue)

• Boundary integrity (control over time, attention, and commitments)

• Coping patterns (stimulants, suppression, over-control)

• Narrative load (the stories that justify continuity)

• Lifestyle flexibility (the ability to pause, renegotiate, or exit)

This orientation was shaped during my time working on a Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) project alongside oncologists and healthcare professionals in Europe. I learnt how, despite being highly subjective, PROMs can influence the disease experience which in turn influences outcome.

This also builds a compelling case for incorporating n=1 assessments that complement linear metrics by revealing where strain accumulates, how functioning is sustained, and which trade-offs remain invisible at scale.

My hope is that instead of building lives around metrics, we build metrics around lived capacity. And to that we move from a tool of compression to a tool of orientation that restores self-agency.

Because what we measure should not replace what we actually value.

1. The Autoimmune Attack

2. Becoming a Stranger to Yourself

3. Falling for Harmful Narratives

4. Retuning Immunity

When someone says, “My body has betrayed me. I don’t know who I am. What am I supposed to do?” or “I feel like I’m at war with myself,” or “A part of me replays every wrong I have done, trying to find that one mistake that has led me here,” I hear more than pain or sickness — a more insidious symptom I’ve come to weigh as much as the physical suffering: the collapse of a person’s story about themselves.

Because during a crisis, your psychological defenses, designed to protect you, often turn inward and begin attacking your identity.

The Autoimmune Attack

Long before any crisis shakes the foundations of self, your mind builds the scaffolding of your story, something I call Narrative Immunity, by constructing coherence, preserving continuity, and reinforcing identity.

Like your immune system that protects the body, your narrative immunity protects the psyche by creating stories you tell yourself about who you are.

“I am a good mother.” “I am a competent professional.” “I am strong and resilient.”

By offering predictability, this narrative buffers against minor psychological disruptions such as failing at a task or enduring a personal conflict, and provides reassurance: “Things make sense. We are safe yet.”

Through the intricate pathways of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), your brain, behavior, and immune system are constantly stabilizing this self-narrative which helps regulate stress, limit systemic inflammation, and balance immune response.

In a way, your story keeps you healthy by acting as a biological regulator and becoming your medicine.

But when a crisis hits, especially when you are least prepared, the overwhelm injures this narrative.

Suddenly, your new reality may no longer match your existing narrative. While your story says, “I am strong and capable,” the body replies, “I can’t get out of bed.”

A disruption so strong triggers the collapse of your scaffolding, pushing you into a survival mode and further damaging your body, mind, and identity. The amygdala (your fear center) hijacks your nervous system and floods the body with stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. Your prefrontal cortex, the sophisticated, logical, narrative-building part of your brain, turns mute. The result - you can’t think clearly, can’t plan, and can’t gain more clarity about yourself.

Unlike a predator in the woods posing physical danger, this threat is existential. When the threat is abstract, your mind’s defenses, in a state of panicked overdrive, scramble for an explanation.

This vacuum created by the death of an old story is filled by the mind’s need for a new one. The easiest, immediate, and most available explanation becomes you.

In desperation, your defenses turn inward, mounting an autoimmune attack attacking the very identity they were designed to protect.

How You Become a Stranger to Yourself

The Initial Fracture

A crisis, whether a diagnosis, an accident, or sudden life disruptions, breaks the architecture of your identity, and shatters your autobiographical narrative.

When the story you’ve been living no longer makes sense, your past, with all its glories and certainties, suddenly feels foreign - like it belonged to someone else. The future, and its landscape of possibilities, becomes a terrifying, unreadable fog.

In place of lived roles and identities, ghost structures as reminders of who you used to be remain. I mentioned in my earlier article highlighting health is a state of coherence. In this stage of role collapse, the coherence ceases.

Someone who used to feel “I am a good mother” may no longer feel like a ‘nurturer’.

A skilled professional with an injury no longer feels “I am a competent professional.”

Complicating this further, the mind begins to reason: “If I am supposed to be competent, but I am failing at everything, then my understanding must be wrong. I was never truly competent to begin with.”

This internal bombardment creates the most corrosive of emotions: intense shame. The crisis is no longer an external event that happened to you; it becomes an internal indictment of who you are.

You start internalizing the failure, creating toxic shame that feels inescapable because you cannot escape yourself.

Instead of a compassionate objective voice, “I felt sick because of stressful times,” the mind attacks with “I am sick because I am fundamentally lazy and undisciplined, and here are examples from my past that prove it.”

This chronic self-attack and rumination trap you in a spin cycle of endlessly replaying your perceived failures. It’s the mind picking at an emotional scab, preventing the formation of a new narrative skin.

Like being locked in a room with your own worst enemy, who also happens to have access to all your memories and insecurities, rumination robs the brain of the calm and reflective state needed to build a new, healthier narrative.

Identity Erosion

"If I'm not that, then who am I?"

This erosion of identity magnifies your emotions about your perceived inadequacy. Bouts of anger with periods of deep self-loathing topped off with anxiety attacks, on just about anything - doctor’s appointment, to lost time, to existential terror of being a “nobody.”

The emotional isolation of shame makes you want to hide from the world. But you also experience what existential thinkers like Viktor Frankl called ontological isolation: the soul-crushing feeling that no one can possibly understand the bizarre, liminal state you inhabit. You don't belong to the world of the healthy, but you don't feel fully sick, either. A lonely exile between worlds.

Friends and family pushing well-meaning but toxic positivity (“Just be grateful! Look on the bright side!”) or simplistic wellness hacks (“Have you tried yoga? Meditation?”) only worsen the internal vacuum.

When these ‘fixes’ fail to fix a deep identity crisis, it further strengthens the internal narrative: “See? I am so broken that even this can’t fix me.”

The Downward Spiral and Its Lasting Consequences

A fractured narrative left untreated spirals downward, creating compounding crises that can last for years, long after the initial health event.

• Physiological Deterioration

  Years of biological stress (as described above) directly contribute to cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, digestive issues, or chronic pain.

• Psychological Fall

  A temporary state of identity crisis progresses into burnout, chronic depression, persistent anxiety disorders, or even Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). The inner critic becomes a permanent architect, creating deep neural pathways that make self-flagellation the brain's default response to any setback.

• Learned Helplessness

  The self-attacking narrative paralyzes you. Why apply for a less demanding job if your core identity is now ‘incompetent’? Why try to be intimate with your partner if your identity is ‘a burden’? Inaction becomes the logical conclusion of your toxic new story.

Retuning Immunity

Reading this, if you recognize your own story, I want you to know that this internal critic, however brutal, is just a desperate, misguided survival mechanism.

This small act of awareness is the crack from where the light enters. Acknowledge it as a ‘symptom’ rather than a ‘verdict’.

Simply naming the self-attack as a confused protective response is the first step to disarming its power. From here, a new framework can begin (which I will write about in the upcoming weeks).

Until then, here is a reflection for you:

In moments of crisis, past or present, what story have your defenses told you about yourself?

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“You are okay, you have no problem, it’s all in your head.”

If a doctor, a loved one, or even that little voice inside tells you this, they are wrong. Because even if something is in your head, it is a problem.

If you feel sick, then you ARE sick. Your reality deserves to be met with curiosity and compassion.

If you become anxious at the slightest bodily change, feel relentlessly unwell, or suffer from vague aches, it may point to something beyond the physical.

In medicine, we obsess over clear causation and neat categorizations to make treatment more manageable. In the absence of clear causations, when there is a mismatch between symptoms and signs, when lab results look normal, and standard treatment doesn’t work, one who expresses their discomfort gets called out as ‘too difficult’ or worse, a ‘hypochondriac’.

More often, this mismatch points to real symptoms shaped by your perceptions. And these experiences firstly, require acknowledgment and then, their own unique solutions.

Case

A consultant came complaining of recurrent flare-ups of back pain. After a battery of tests, including an MRI that showed a minor disc bulge, everything seemed common for his age. Nothing in his physical routine explained the consistency of his pain.

His previous doctor had reviewed his reports and declared, “Nothing to worry about the small bulge, the scan seems fine. Probably, it is in your head,” before sending him off with a prescription for a painkiller and physiotherapy.

But the pain persisted. It would recur erratically, taking him hostage for a few days before subsiding into a dull, nagging presence followed by stretches of no pain for weeks.

So we did something different. He began self-tracking:

The state of the pain

• Intensity: How severe is the pain?

• Frequency: How often does the pain flare up?

• Location: Where did it begin? Did it move or stay in the same location?

• Context:

1. WHEN did it start?

2. WHAT was I doing just before the symptom arose?

3. WHERE was I?

4. HOW did I feel emotionally in that moment?

The State of Emotions

• What do I feel just before, during, and after a pain flare-up?

• How safe do I feel in my body?

• How on-edge or activated do I feel recently?

The Automatic Response

• "When my symptom first appears, my immediate thought is..."

• "When this symptom flares up, I typically..."

What came up made it clear that his pain did not flare up after physical activity. It usually showed up on Sunday afternoons, exacerbated by the evenings, peaked for a day or two, and then eased by mid-week. When the pain flared, his first thought was, “Here we go again, another bad day.” His immediate action was to pop a painkiller and push through the work.

The Science of Perception

Along with biology, your experience of health is shaped by perception. Perception, in turn, is shaped by neuroception and interoception.

Neuroception is the nervous system’s subconscious surveillance system, scanning and sensing for safety and threats, matching new signals to past experiences.

Interoception is your conscious awareness of internal signals, such as your ability to feel your heartbeat, your hunger signals, the tension in your shoulders, or the flutter of anxiety in your stomach.

Let’s trace the typical journey of pain.

1. A signal of pressure originates from the nerves around his minor disc bulge, compounded by the muscular stress of long sitting hours (through what is termed as biological pain pathways).

2. This signal travels up the spinal cord to the brain.

3. The brain registers it as a data point - a neurochemical signal.

4. It pattern matches this signal with past experiences,and integrates it with emotions, memories, and beliefs.

5. The brain then interprets this entire signal subconsciously - neuroception.

6. Finally, it constructs the experience of pain, which is relayed back as a conscious, physical sensation of felt pain.

Now, let’s look at David’s pain signal journey.

1. His brain registers the first few episodes of back pain.

2. The signal was paired with his past experiences of stressful work days, integrated with emotions of worry, memories of suffering through pain while working, and his belief that “this pain means another tough day.”

3. In this chain of interpretation, the brain flags the upcoming week or assignment as a ‘threat’ to his wellbeing and survival.

4. Finally, the processed experience is relayed back to his body. A protective neuromuscular reaction kicks in, tightening his back muscles to brace for the week, amplifying the minor signals into debilitating pain.

This creates a vicious feedback loop. Triggered by a predictable cue (weekend), his nervous system became hypersensitive to minor signals by misinterpreting them and magnifying the pain.

The cycles of pain become a signal about his work environment, over and above the state of his spine and back muscles.

Thus, anything in your head doesn’t remain in your head; it somatizes.

Perception’s role in the spectrum of illness

Japanese wisdom says Yamai wa ki kara (病は気から) - "sickness and health start with the mind." This points to the phenomenon that symptoms are not just biological, they are perceptual too.

To be clear, if you injure your leg, get an infection, or have a severe allergic reaction, it is quite apparent that perception has a secondary role to play. Perception may modulate the experience of suffering, but not the underlying pathology. In such cases, the cause and effect are relatively direct. At the other extreme, in conditions like psychosis or schizophrenia, perception is the root of suffering.

But most of us are living in the vast, complex territory in between - the land of chronic lifestyle-related illness.

In acute and genetic conditions, the logic is linear - if symptom A is caused by a problem B, then solving for B will solve for A.

However, chronic or ‘functional’ diseases rarely have neat, direct, and linear causes.

In such cases, rarely is 1 & 1 = 2. The ‘&’ in the equation could be a plus, minus, division, multiplication, or even an exponent. Which means 1 & 1 could be 0, +100, or -1000. Truly independent variables are the exception, not the rule.

Minor disc bulge ≠ Minor Backache

Rather, Minor disc bulge & muscle weakness & (Poor posture & High Stress & Negative Beliefs ) = Chronic pain

This is how perception shapes symptoms and health outcomes.

It is no coincidence that emergent diseases are now categorized broadly with overlapping systemic issues that defy tidy definitions.

Building Awareness for Agency

Many people think that if the mind can influence their symptoms, they can sign up for meditation, yoga classes, and weekend retreats, hoping these tools will work their magic.

While these tools are powerful, without building self-awareness, you will not know what really needs to be corrected, let alone how.

Being aware is about distinguishing between signals. Just like learning a new language, learning about internal signals at first seems like noise. Slowly, you begin to recognize words, phrases, and eventually grammar, tone, and context. To be able to learn and decode the language of your internal states is what interoception is about.

Here is a 3-step process to initiate building interoception:

Step 1: Observe the state of the physical symptom

• Describe the sensation, the intensity, quality, and the context in which it arises.

Step 2: Understand the state of your emotions

• Name the feeling just before, during, and after the symptom.

• Check your threat levels, i.e., how safe do you feel in your body?

• Notice your energy - Are you on the edge, revved up, or feeling shut down?

Step 3: Identify Your Automatic Response

• What is your first thought when the symptom appears?

• What is the first thing you do after the symptom appears?

Approach this as a data gathering process, and just like David, you will begin to understand your internal signals. As you become more fluent at reading your internal states and signals, you will communicate with your doctors more effectively, receive better treatment, and consequently, feel more satisfied with your care.

Your health is an ongoing conversation between your body and your brain, colored by your entire life's experience. By learning to listen with compassion and curiosity, you discover your agency.

An important note: This approach complements but does not replace a rigorous medical work-up, medical consultation, and prescription medicines to create the stability needed to address underlying lifestyle factors. Awareness is a powerful tool, but toxic optimism is not.

Check out this space for more info on neuroception and interoception in the upcoming weeks.

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1. How the Body Listens and Reacts

2. The Boundary

3. The Boundary Audit

4. AI and the self

‘A person is a person through other persons.’

This ancient Zulu philosophy, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,’ which suggests that we are shaped by the people around us, also implies our biological blueprint.

Our health is not just a solo internal job. It is forged at the boundary between the self and the world.

And herein lies the paradox of health being both fundamentally personal and structurally social.

We often think illness comes from something broken within the body, or the genes. But evidence continues to show that people impact physiology as powerfully as what we consume.

The body does not just break down because of what's happening inside. It dysregulates when its relationships to the outside become unsafe, unsustainable, or invisible.

The Body Listens and Reacts

Your immune, nervous, and threat surveillance systems (limbic system in the brain) are constantly listening to your conversations; monitoring through touch, tone, neglect, presence; and recalibrating physiology with every interaction to match what they perceived in your world.

In the presence of meaningful connections, our body perceives the environment as safe and responds by

• releasing feel-good hormones (like oxytocin)

• improving vagal tone (resilience)

• sharpening decision-making capabilities

• regulating physiological responses to alleviate stress, fear, and inflammation

But when one experiences negative social connections arising out of trauma, disconnection, or relational conflicts, the nervous system appraises the environment as dangerous even when it is safe. This heightened sense of threat activates self-defenses and leads to misinterpreting even neutral social cues as hostile.

As our ability to engage socially depends on our perception of the environment, a social person becomes more outgoing, and a lonelier person withdraws further to the point of isolation.

This social stress is far from an emotional response. It turns on a specific immune response called CTRA (Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity) that:

• increases pro-inflammatory gene expression and immune response that damages its own cells

• decreases antiviral response and antibody-related gene activity

Historically, the CTRA was a lifesaver. A protective survival response to anticipated physical threats, it shifts the focus of the body’s immunity to protect from imminent environmental dangers, causing physical injury.

But as we have evolved to tame the nature around us, our primary threats are no longer physical but sustained psychological stressors.

A woman who never says no.
A man who carries his father’s anger in his chest.
A child who survives trauma by disconnecting from her own body.

New problems, old software.

The trauma experienced years ago can still alter your health today, long after the trigger or the adversity has passed. Feeling chronically misunderstood, lonely, or unsafe can instruct your body to prepare for a fight that never comes.

CTRA that once ensured our survival now makes us vulnerable to chronic low-grade inflammation, compromised immunity against pathogens, poor wound healing, auto-immune conditions, and higher susceptibility for other chronic diseases.

The Self, The Others, and The Boundary

Now I am not saying remove or overhaul your challenging social environment.
A supportive social environment that removes challenges and shields you from the necessary stressors that drive adaptation also suppress capacity-building. Remember how some of your most pivotal moments of growth came from you working under pressure through necessity or meaning-making.
The point is not comfort versus discomfort.

The issue is whether your social demands are exceeding your adaptive reserve, and whether your environment permits sufficient recovery. Those conditions can coexist with high challenge.

The approach is to enquire beyond whether this person is comfortable? to “does this person deplete faster than it restores?” Otherwise, you will feel like filling your tank while being drained by an open faucet elsewhere.

At the micro level, we are made of cells bounded by cell walls. This boundary is beyond an inert wall. It is a place of constant negotiation, discerning what enters and what must stay out for survival and evolution. Nutrients are welcomed, while toxins are refused.

At the macro scale, we are no different.

Just as our cells have a cell wall, we too need to have personal boundaries that are semipermeable to the influences around us.

A pain, a palpitation, or a sleepless night could reveal something unseen: a porous boundary.

Take, for example, a woman with autoimmune symptoms of aching and swollen joints, fatigue. When she tells me she’s done “everything right” and yet feels exhausted, I gently ask about her marriage. Her voice trembles as she describes how her boundary has been violated for years. Her body is saying no when she cannot.

Her body kept the score.

Weakened boundaries in life can let in the toxins of stress, shame, and suffering, opening a gap for diseases to emerge.

But here’s the good news: boundaries can be rebuilt.

A cell cannot survive by completely shutting off; neither do you.

Just as the cell discerns, you too can.

By intentionally choosing supportive relationships that signal safety, you can rewire your brain and body to heal and thrive.

This Oxford Rowing Study shows how when rowers trained together felt lower training pain attributing to synchronized social activity and shared physical goals that trigger a surge in endorphins (happiness hormones). A good environment can be a great source of joy, growth, meaning and in some cases, an effective placebo too.

Defining the Boundaries

If you recognize yourself in these stories, here’s good news. To rebuild your boundaries, the first step is awareness, using what I call a Boundary Audit.

By mapping relationships as supportive, co-regulating, and resource-providing (parasympathetic) or draining, conflict-ridden, and threat-inducing (sympathetic), ask

• Who do I feel safe with?

• Where do I feel unseen or unheard?

• What relationships leave me feeling more whole?

You may recognize a difficult colleague, a partner who triggers old wounds, or the loneliness that lingers after social media interactions.

Or a compassionate friend, a loving spouse, or a supportive boss.

Whoever comes up, this audit is not about blaming them but owning your choices. Once identified, you can consciously create new rules of engagement.

And for those unavoidable negative relationships? You can still change how you experience them by reframing the situation and your interpretation of it, commonly called cognitive appraisal.

In a culture obsessed with ‘self’ and ‘hyper individualism,’ one may end up choosing health as a solo pursuit.

But we are permeable social beings acting out from mental shortcuts. Hence, awareness is key.

To be healthy is to master the art of permeability, to be aware of what to let in and what to keep out.

So, allow yourself to ask, what would have to change to come back into a healthy relationship with others, and with yourself?

Watch this space as I explore the biology of your boundaries and the science of your connection in the upcoming weeks.

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1. Health as coherence among body’s rhythms (Case of routine checklists)

2. Rebuilding Coherence with Body Rhythm Mapping

3. Re-tuning Our World

4. Health as a state of alignment (including actions)

5. Health as a coherence in Body, Mind and Meaning

6. Fixes that become Flaws

Case

"I do everything right, why do I still feel off?"

Lately, I have been hearing this frustration far too often from patients and peers alike.

Whether erratic sleep, unpredictable energy crashes, or symptoms flaring up without warning, many keep experiencing persistent symptoms despite no apparent cause, wondering whether they are fundamentally flawed.

Take Kay, a driven professional who, in his own words, felt “utterly drained and perpetually foggy.” With normal lab reports and desperate for a solution, he embraced a familiar checklist of interventions:

• A protein-rich breakfast

• Ashwagandha and multivitamin supplements with breakfast

• A 15-minute deep breathing exercise late in the afternoon

• Gym post-work

• Melatonin, 30 minutes before sleep

A month passed, and nothing much changed. “I thought I was doing it right," he said with a sense of defeat.

By throwing solution after solution at the most obvious problem in front of him, he was trying to give it his all with these one-point fixes.

But these fixes weren’t cutting it because true health is an ongoing state of coherence among the biological rhythms.

And when your inner rhythms no longer align with one another or the world around you, you experience a loss of this coherence. And you experience symptoms that are difficult to explain or diagnose, because they are pointing towards a system-wide problem, not just an organ.

The Rhythms Within: Your Body's Hidden Orchestra

Our body is like a grand orchestra, perfectly tuned and performing a symphony every single day.

Just as each instrument - the strings, brass, or percussion - plays its unique part to contribute to a harmonious whole, every system within you - nervous, immune, endocrine - works in concert to maintain this state we call ‘health’.

And just like an orchestra, your body has its own intricate rhythms wherein:

• Pulse rate represents the beat

• Respiratory rate represents the tempo

• Circadian rhythm governs structured timing

• Hormonal surges, like early morning cortisol spike, represent the accentuations

• Heart Rate Variability (HRV) reflects the syncopation, your capacity to maintain a balance between the sympathetic (‘fight-or-flight’) and parasympathetic (‘rest-and-digest’) system

All of these are timed to perfection by the master clock - the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the brain, which synchronizes with environmental cues called "zeitgebers" (time-givers): light, food, and social interactions. The master clock also co-ordinates with peripheral clocks in organs like the liver and gut, driving the cellular rhythms.

When these rhythms play in synchrony, a state of coherence emerges. You wake up feeling well-rested; energy flows naturally, and there is a sense of clarity, ease, and being in tune.

But under the pressure of stress, trauma, or a crisis, rhythms can go out of tune. And when one rhythm disrupts, others follow. This creates a ripple effect through the entire system, disrupting communication between the cells, triggering oxidative stress and gradually wearing down the body.

It is the hidden cause beneath chronic health issues, showing up as symptoms of vague and persistent fatigue, pain, heaviness, or chronic low-grade inflammation, which lab reports can’t capture neatly.

The feeling of something being “off” lingers, stemming from a system out of tune for so long that no quick fix or isolated remedy can correct it. Starting or sustaining work requires monumental effort.

As you can see as we age, our hormonal rhythms keep changing over our lifetime.1 And our lifestyle also needs to follow the biological changes.

Rebuilding Coherence with Rhythm Mapping

When Kay came to me, we didn’t start with another supplement or protocol. We started with what he had been overlooking: his rhythms. Together, we mapped his rhythms such as:

• Sleep and wake cycles

  “When do you wake up, with and without an alarm? Are you consistently disrupting your natural sleep cycle?”

• Eating patterns

  “When do you get hunger signals? When do you eat? Is it in response to your signals or just the clock?”

• Energy fluctuations

  “How do your energy levels fluctuate throughout the day? When do you naturally feel tired and energetic?”

• Movement patterns

  “When are you moving your body? Is it energizing or draining? Are you pushing through when your body is asking you to slow down?”

• Emotional Rhythms

  “What emotions and feelings showed up? How do these connect to your activities and rhythms?”

By bridging these experiences with his physiological data – the rates, the phases, the biomarkers – a clearer picture emerged:

• Chronobiologically, Kay was an evening-type person, i.e., he felt more alert in the evening. Taking Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) in the morning only worsened his feeling of sluggishness.

• The calm derived from his late-afternoon relaxation exercise was over-ridden by his evening coffee, which stimulated his nervous system and spiked his cortisol just when it should have been at its lowest.

• The late evening workout pushed his dinner even later in the night, keeping his gut’s ‘clocks’ activated, signalling his master clock to stay alert. Even if he slept early, late eating sabotaged sleep quality, preventing restorative sleep.

• His post-dinner screen time disrupted natural melatonin release and reduced the effectiveness of his melatonin supplement.

In short, his habits were out of sync with his biology.

When it became clear to Kay that his well-intentioned efforts were nothing more than band-aids, he began working with one rhythm at a time: sleep and wake cycles, timed-eating windows, and daily activities.

The real transformation was nothing flashy.

With clarity about his daily rhythms, he understood the levers he could pull to support his body. And even when external demands momentarily disrupted his patterns, it didn't take him long to adjust back.

He had transitioned from the helpless "What is happening to me?" to an empowering declaration of "I can work with my body, not against it."

Re-tuning Our World

What troubles me is when people like Kay are dismissed with "your labs are normal" or "It’s probably just stress." The curious seekers are often forced to self-manage, self-medicate, and self-experiment, sometimes harming themselves further.

Zooming out, this is beyond just an individual issue, signifying a systemic problem.

The manufactured asynchrony and disregard for our fundamental human biology are already showing up as widespread burnout, anxiety, and collective overwhelm.

Biology follows flow more than force.

When you begin to identify your rhythms, you begin to understand how your body wants to heal. You learn to recognize the difference between a body in pathological distress and a body adapting to build resilience. This kind of self-understanding brings a clarity no AI or algorithm can offer.

The aim is not a balance across all dimensions of life simultaneously - one can’t really be equally weighted across different domains at the same time. It is to consciously work with the constraints in a manner that don’t break you or add friction. You can be unequally divided yet synchronous. Be organised enough to hold polarities and not oversimplify. Just like our complex differentiated body that holds capacity to regenerate (e.g. scarring) and destroy (immunity) simultaneously.

So, I invite you to pause and reflect. Which rhythms in your life have you overridden to survive, and what might shift if you gave them space to lead again?

Disclaimer: While biological rhythms are a foundational aspect of health, it is important to note that personal experience, underlying medical conditions, and past traumas require a multi-faceted approach involving specialized medical care alongside lifestyle interventions.