When More Data Hurts: How Chasing Perfect Numbers Can Keep You in Pain
“More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of people when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
— Goodhart’s Law
We live in a world that celebrates data.
We track our steps, sleep, heart rate variability, calories, strength, and range of motion.
And in many ways, this is progress — awareness can help us make better choices.
But there’s a tipping point where helpful data becomes noise.
Where tracking starts to replace trust.
Where chasing perfect numbers makes us feel worse, not better.
The Trap of Perfect Metrics
In rehab, we can measure almost anything:
how strong your muscles are
how far your joints move
how many hours you slept
how fast your heart rate recovers
your level of structural degeneration on scan
And yet, many people still suffer with persistent pain — even when their numbers look better.
Why?
Because pain doesn’t live in numbers.
It lives in the body’s sense of balance — what neuroscientist Bud Craig calls homeostasis.
The Homeostatic View: Feeling Over Fixing
Bud Craig’s research showed that pain is not just a “damage signal” from tissue.
It’s a message from deep within the brain’s insula, the region that constantly tracks your body’s internal state — things like energy, temperature, oxygen, hydration, and even emotional tone.
Pain is one of the ways your body says,
“Hey, something’s out of tune. Can you listen?”
When we over-focus on data and targets — how many steps, how high our HRV, how long we slept — we can actually increase internal stress.
We lose touch with feeling and get stuck in fixing.
The Inverted U of Data
Like Taleb’s quote, there’s an inverted-U curve with data.
At first, tracking helps.
It brings awareness and motivation.
But too much, for too long, creates pressure and anxiety.
Instead of helping us self-regulate, it can make us second-guess our body’s natural rhythms.
When the measure becomes the target — when “perfect numbers” become the goal — we stop listening to what the body is really trying to tell us.
What Actually Matters
Sometimes, the biggest healing shifts come from the unmeasurable:
feeling refreshed after a better night’s sleep
A slow walk after dinner
A conversation that lifts your mood
A few deep breaths before reacting
Letting yourself rest without guilt
These don’t always show up on a graph — but they move the system toward balance.
Simple Is Not the Absence of Science
It’s the refinement of it.
When you understand your body as a dynamic, self-regulating system — not just a collection of metrics — you begin to trust again.
You stop micromanaging the data and start tuning in to the rhythm.
Because healing isn’t about perfect numbers.
It’s about restoring flow.