Let me walk you through what an “optimized” morning actually looks like these days according to what we’re told on social media…

Breakfast isn’t just supposed to be balanced anymore. 

It’s supposed to be organic, in season, and local, ideally something you grew yourself. 

You sit down to eat your (partially) organic (store-bought) breakfast.

Now you’re supposed to be tracking your glucose while you eat (but you haven’t yet bought that glucose monitor – you wonder if you really need it?), and afterward you need a ten minute walk so your glucose recovers properly and your digestion stays on track. 

So you put on your shoes and you walk. (You wonder if you should be wearing a weighted vest too?)

While you’re walking, you should be hitting your step count, so you check your watch. 

And while you’re at it, you should probably check your sleep score too to see how well you recovered from yesterday. 

Oh and you should also check your Monthly Cycle app to see what part of your cycle you’re in too. 

Then you remember you were supposed to meditate today, and you haven’t yet. So you plan to meditate when you get home, except you were also supposed to do Pilates today. 

So now you’re standing in your living room asking yourself “Do I meditate, or do I do Pilates?” (And what about lifting weights?)

After thinking about it for a few minutes you look at your watch and realize you actually don’t have time for any of it and feel frustrated that you weren’t more productive. 

You didn’t even get to the supplements and feel exhausted because in the midst of it all you were also:

Thinking about the groceries you need to purchase later today.

Mentally clocking the to-do list items around the house.

Starting a load of laundry.

Deleting spam emails (Old Navy – so many sales!) 

Responding to texts and mentally preparing your day ahead.

Now don’t get me wrong – eating well, moving your body and managing stress is incredibly important. None of that is up for debate. 

But the sheer amount of advice coming at us right can easily go from helpful to overwhelming. 

Especially when you consider the mental load we are carrying each day as women. 

You’ve probably felt this yourself. Decision fatigue shows that when we’re faced with too many competing choices, we don’t just get tired, we get stuck. 

We stall out and end up doing none of the things instead of one of them, because the mental cost of choosing correctly starts to outweigh the benefit of doing anything at all.

That’s the real cost of all this optimizing. 

Not that it’s unhealthy (although for some it can become that too). 

It’s that it can easily strip away our ability to do anything with long-term consistency because we’re too busy sorting through options to actually stick with it.

So here’s how I recommend keeping it simple while still feeling empowered:

Determine what’s foundational versus what’s extra. 

Real food, regular exercise, stress management – these are foundational. 

Organic versus not, matching your workout to your sleep score, that’s extra. 

Extra is fine if you have bandwidth for it, but it should never come before the foundations, and it should never be the reason the foundations don’t happen.

Pick 1-2 things to track, if any. 

Tracking 8 data points in 10 different apps competes for your attention, especially if your mental load is already full. If tracking helps you, pick the one or two metrics that actually help you take action and save the others for when you have more bandwidth.

Know your priorities for this season. 

Decide now what you’re actually focused on right now. Is it building muscle? Walking? Sleep? Reducing processed foods?

Knowing your priorities right now will reduce decision fatigue. When something like meditating versus cardio comes up, you’re not deciding in the moment. You already know what should come first.

Tune into your body. 

Your body is a better guide than any app or number will ever be. It already tells you when it needs rest, when it’s ready to push, when something’s off. 

But the more we lean on outside tools to tell us how we’re doing, the more we lose the ability to actually hear that. Some of the most useful information you have isn’t on your watch. It’s already inside you.

I love data and information and I love to track things from time to time.

But I want to remind you that you don’t need to optimize every hour of your day to be well. 

You need to focus on a few things that matter, chosen on purpose, done consistently, and with commitment.

That’s become one of my biggest goals. Not to help you optimize more, but to help you filter better. 

To help you know what actually deserves your attention and what doesn’t.

Because when everything feels important, progress gets stalled.

I’d rather help you build a routine you can still follow six months from now than give you twenty new ideas you don’t know what to actually do with. 

It’s why we designed the Lindywell app the way we did.

We intentionally don’t ask you to optimize everything.

We ask you to press play.

Because when one simple workout becomes part of your life, you create a habit that you can build on for years to come. 

See how simple it really is.