I’m going to come clean and admit that for a long time, I was a dedicated Andrew Huberman follower. Between him and Bryan Johnson, the millionaire trying to “live forever,” Silicon Valley and the larger wellness industry offers us an interesting proposition. 

“If you do x things, take y supplements, and avoid z things, you can live a life that’s free of pain and discomfort.” 

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Now, as a yoga teacher and someone who is adjacent to the wellness industry, I get how sexy this proposition sounds. It feels really, really nice to feel light and relaxed in your body. As a leader in tech, I also know how lovely it feels when everything just seems to be going your way. 

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I am all for people striving to better their health and their lives in general, but I’ve personally found that this mindset of “optimizing your life” can also do more harm than good if taken to the extreme. 

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I have many coaching clients who I lovingly refer to as “hyper optimizers.” In fact, I myself fall into the trap of hyper optimizing now and again. 

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Let me paint a more vivid picture for you. 

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The hyper optimizer is successful, driven, and impressive—but also tends to be frequently anxious and stressed 

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These people know how to get shit done. 

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They have impressive educational backgrounds, high-paying careers, and seem to collect achievements the way I used to obsessively collect Pokemon cards as a child. Many of them are Crossfitters who have intense gym regiments, do Wim Hof’s breathwork practices, and maybe even dabble in meditation via The Waking Up app. 

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You’d think that because these people are so amazing at creating the reality they want, they’d feel really good inside. But the opposite tends to be more true. These people, impressive though they may be, spend most of their days incredibly anxious, stressed, or completely burned out. 

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How come? 

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Central to the hyper optimizer's lifestyle is a theme I’ve written extensively about—control. These people operate from a perspective that’s something like “If I take the right actions, I will create the life that I want. Therefore, I must dedicate myself to the right actions!” “Want” here is usually short-hand for a life that’s free of pain and discomfort and full of pleasure and joy. 

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On the surface that’s a great mindset, right? And it is mostly true that doing wise, value-driven actions repeatedly gets us to the life that we want. So what’s missing in this equation? 

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Well, frankly, a healthy dose of reality and humility. 

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You can’t optimize what you don’t actually control

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Last night, my partner accidentally woke me up in the middle of the night. My hyper-optimizer immediately kicked in: 

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“Oh no, I need to get back to sleep right now because I have a huge day tomorrow. What can I do to get myself to sleep as fast as possible? Oh, maybe I’ll do some breathwork. Hmm, no good? Ok, then I’ll go sit on the couch and read. Fuck, that didn’t work either!! Damn it!!” 

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This was, as you can imagine, a painful and frustrating experience for me. 

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I was trying to use willpower, determination, and effort—tools that usually serve me quite well—to fight back against a situation I actually had no control over. None of us gets to “make” ourselves go to sleep—our body decides to do it when it feels relaxed enough. Ironically, all my effort to optimize was just stressing me out more. I didn’t fall back asleep until I surrendered to the idea that I might be up the rest of the night, and if that were true, I’d still be ok. 

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A few hours of lost sleep isn’t that big a deal, really. But it’s a solid example of when a hyper-optimizer mindset backfires on us. And there are many more insidious examples of this, too. 

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Why are hyper optimizers usually burned-out and anxious? Because they spend their days acting out of control, trying to make life what they want it to be rather than flowing and dancing with the constraints and challenges that it naturally presents. 

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Many of us suffer because we have inflated egos and think we control life outcomes

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As I have said before, you truly have no control over the outcomes in your life. 

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Our egos do not want to hear that truth—they spend a lot of time denying it, thinking around it, or trying to disprove it. Perhaps your brain heard me say that and already produced a bunch of examples in which you did, in fact, have total control over the outcome of something. 

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But I promise you, if you are brave enough to really look at that example, you will see that the idea of there being some separate “you” who was all powerful and in charge is just an illusion your brain has created to make you feel safe. 

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Reality always wins because in a sense, we ourselves, in our truest form, are reality itself. We are all connected to everything— other people, the environment, our countries, the world at large. And because we are connected to it all, we can’t actually stand apart and control any one part of it. When you try to take this stance of control over outcomes, you are actually, ironically, battling yourself! 

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I know that insight is a doozy, so don’t worry if it didn’t quite click just yet. The important part is to see that the outcomes of your life are not yours to control—and that is actually totally ok and cool, because you are life itself. You are in charge of your actions, and you hopefully do things that matter to you simply because they just, well, do! But once you take action, you set off a deterministic chain of events that’s impossible to fully understand from your individual perspective. 

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We have the power to see immediate effects, and this usually confuses us again into thinking we have total control. I take the action to flick the light switch on, and the light turns on—see, I controlled that outcome! What my brain does not want to acknowledge is that if the power was out in my building, or the switch wasn’t set up properly, the light wouldn’t have turned on at all. 

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Can I really say I “controlled” the lights coming on if my ability to do so was predicated on pre-existing conditions like having electricity in the first place? 

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The hyper optimizer finds their power through surrender, not control

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When I first understood the illusion of control, it was a brutal insight. I felt powerless and unsafe and borderline nihilistic—isn’t this just signing myself up for victimhood consciousness? 

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If that’s you right now, I hope that I can use this last section to guide you through some of the mistakes in thinking I made at first. I promise this insight is freeing and uplifting—not scary. 

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First off—no, it is not signing you up for victimhood. I want to be extremely clear that I am not saying that we are powerless to change or take action. We absolutely do. All I am saying is that the final outcome of that change is not for us to control, and when we pretend like we can totally control it, we suffer greatly. 

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I gave my example about trying to force sleep above. To up the stakes, I am also saying you cannot control your career success, the amount of money you have in the bank, whether you fall in love or not, or whether or not your novel gets published. You cannot control these major outcomes, but you can certainly influence them. 

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If you work hard at your job, you greatly influence your chances of career success. 

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If you save a certain amount each month, you greatly influence your chances of hitting a million.

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If you commit to going on dates and remaining open to romance, you greatly influence your chances of finding love. 

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If you commit to writing 500 words a day, you greatly influence the chances of writing your novel. 

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When you move your focus to actions instead of outcomes, something magical happens. 

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First, you’ll find that the need to optimize your life is a lot softer because hey, you can’t actually control that much of it anyway. And ceding control (or surrendering) feels extremely liberating and freeing. When you throw up your hands and just say “hey, maybe!” you ironically become the most powerful version of yourself. 

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True power is the willingness to dance and be present with what life throws your way while you do the things that authentically matter to you. Trying to control and optimize every life outcome to be what  you want is a weakness in disguise. 

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Next, you’ll be forced to look at your actions and ask yourself if they, themselves, spark joy. Would you still write a novel if it meant you’d never get published? Would you still work as hard at your job if it meant you never got promoted? 

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When you remove the possibility of reward, you quickly see what you actually care about compared to what you take on in order to get a specific outcome. 

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And I am willing to bet a significant amount of money that if you feel anxious and burned out as a hyper optimizer, the list of things you do for outcomes is a lot larger than the things you authentically care about.

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The work from there is to let go of some of those actions that do not bring you actual joy. You needn’t let go of all of them—sometimes, it’s worth it to do things we don’t love for some greater good or higher purpose, like feeding your kids or helping a community grow. 

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But you do need to have a more balanced list in order to feel lighter and free again. Carl Jung reached a similar conclusion about anxiety and stress. From his (and my) view, much of our anxiety can be attributed to us not living out our soul’s purpose. Aka, not doing the things that authentically matter to us because we’re too busy doing things that get us to outcomes that may never actually materialize. 

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If you identify as a hyper optimizer or this article resonated with you, please, let’s talk. I promise you I have been exactly where you are and there is a better way to move through life. 

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