The Hidden Costs of Turning Employees Into Biological Athletes

The Quantified Workplace Has Arrived

The quantified workplace has arrived, and it comes wearing a Whoop wristband. In a recent New York Times article, labor reporter Noam Scheiber profiles a troubling trend: white-collar professionals increasingly using heart rate variability (HRV) tracking and other biohacking techniques to optimize their job performance. The piece raises a deceptively simple question that deserves a more complex answer than it receives: Is this a good thing?

The short answer is no, but the reasons why reveal fundamental tensions in how we conceptualize work, human performance, and the boundaries between personal health and professional productivity.

The Seductive Logic of Optimization

Scheiber introduces us to Dr. Ravi Solanki, a Cambridge-educated physician who runs an AI company in San Francisco. Despite his medical training and pandemic ICU experience, Solanki only became preoccupied with his heart rate variability after moving to the Bay Area, where comparing Whoop data became a team bonding activity. This vignette captures how workplace biohacking spreads: through social pressure disguised as camaraderie, with the implicit message that optimal performance is both achievable and expected.

The article notes that subscriptions to Optimal HRV, a dashboard service allowing coaches to track employee biometrics, increased more than tenfold since 2020. This growth reflects a broader cultural shift toward treating knowledge work as an athletic performance that can be quantified, tracked, and improved through biological interventions.

Yet this framing contains a dangerous assumption: that human beings function optimally when managed like machines. As MIT researcher Shoshana Zuboff documented in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the drive to render human behavior predictable and modifiable serves corporate interests more than individual wellbeing. When we internalize these surveillance logics, we become complicit in our own monitoring.

The Science Behind the Hype

To be fair, heart rate variability does have scientific legitimacy. HRV measures the variation in time intervals between heartbeats, with higher variability generally indicating better physiological resilience and autonomic nervous system function. Research published in the journal Psychophysiology has demonstrated correlations between HRV and cognitive performance, particularly executive function.

The breathing techniques promoted by HRV coaches, particularly resonance frequency breathing, also have empirical support. A 2017 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology found that slow breathing exercises can reduce anxiety and improve attention. These techniques activate the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting a state of calm alertness.

However, as data scientist Marco Altini points out in Scheiber's article, focusing directly on improving HRV metrics rather than overall health represents a category error. “We could starve ourselves and our heart rate would be low, HRV would be high,” Altini notes. “But that would not be a good condition.” This distinction matters: optimizing a metric is not the same as optimizing health or performance.

Dr. Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist at UCSF, has written extensively about how proxy metrics often fail to capture the complexity of biological systems. In his book Metabolical, Lustig argues that the reductionist approach of tracking individual biomarkers can lead to interventions that improve numbers while worsening actual health outcomes. The same logic applies to workplace performance: better HRV scores may not translate to better work, better decisions, or better outcomes.

From Wellness to Workplace Control

The most concerning aspect of the HRV trend is its migration from personal health tool to workplace performance metric. Scheiber reports that companies are now hiring coaches at rates ranging from fifteen thousand dollars for short engagements to six-figure annual retainers. These coaches work with technology, law, and finance firms, as well as professional sports teams.

Performance psychologist Jay Wiles, whose company Thrive serves major corporations, frames HRV tracking as a way to make stress management palatable to “hardheaded rationalists” by removing the “woo-woo” factor. But this rhetoric obscures a more troubling dynamic: the transformation of emotional labor into quantifiable productivity metrics.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” to describe how workers manage their feelings to meet job requirements. Flight attendants must smile; debt collectors must project authority. The biohacking trend extends this concept into new territory, suggesting that workers should also manage their nervous systems, breath rates, and cardiac rhythms to meet performance expectations.

This represents what organizational scholar Melissa Gregg calls “productivity paranoia”: the constant anxiety that we are not doing enough, not performing optimally, not fully maximizing our human capital. Rather than alleviating this anxiety, HRV tracking often intensifies it by providing endless data points to obsess over.

The Compulsion Trap

Scheiber includes the perspective of clinical psychologist Bonnie Zucker, who identifies compulsive device checking as a form of reassurance-seeking behavior comparable to hand-washing in obsessive-compulsive disorder. This observation gets at something crucial: tools designed to reduce anxiety can become sources of anxiety themselves.

Michelle Cicale, an executive assistant profiled in the article, observes: “I've watched people go insane from this.” Her comment about friends overdoing biohacking hints at a broader phenomenon documented in research on the quantified self movement. A 2018 study in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies found that self-tracking can shift from being informative to becoming a source of stress and reduced wellbeing, particularly when tracking becomes compulsive or when data reveals suboptimal results.

The psychological mechanism here parallels what happens with social media: tools that promise connection and enhancement become vehicles for comparison, inadequacy, and compulsion. When Pete Zelles, the telecom executive in Scheiber's article, monitors his HRV before and after presentations, comparing results year over year, he is engaged in a form of self-surveillance that may provide some anxiety reduction but at the cost of making workplace performance a constant biometric project.

The AI Anxiety Factor

Scheiber concludes with a provocative observation: this trend toward biological optimization may be driven by anxiety about artificial intelligence displacing white-collar workers. “Perhaps, in our race to stay ahead of the machines,” he writes, “it can be tempting to try to make ourselves more and more like them.”

This insight deserves more attention than the article gives it. The pressure to optimize human performance through quantification represents a capitulation to machine logic. Rather than insisting that workplaces accommodate human variability, creativity, and the need for rest, we are attempting to make humans more consistent, predictable, and machine-like.

Economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson argue in Power and Progress that technological change does not automatically benefit workers. Whether technology enhances or diminishes human flourishing depends on power dynamics and institutional choices. The biohacking trend represents workers internalizing corporate demands for optimization rather than demanding workplaces that respect human limitations.

The comparison to Taylorism is instructive. Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management movement in the early 20th century sought to optimize worker productivity through time-and-motion studies, breaking jobs into component tasks and eliminating “wasted” movement. While Taylor's methods increased output, they also dehumanized work and intensified labor, leading to worker resistance and eventually to labor protections.

Today's biohacking represents Taylorism turned inward. Rather than managers with stopwatches timing our movements, we voluntarily strap on devices that monitor our cardiac rhythms, optimize our breathing, and score our recovery. We have become our own efficiency experts, our own taskmasters.

What Organizations Should Do Instead

If HRV tracking represents a problematic response to workplace stress, what would a better approach look like? Several evidence-based alternatives exist:

• Address structural sources of stress. Research by Christina Maslach at UC Berkeley identifies six organizational factors that contribute to burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Interventions targeting these factors are typically more effective than individual stress-management techniques.
• Establish clear boundaries between work time and personal time. Expecting knowledge workers to optimize their biology for peak performance invades the personal sphere. The labor movement fought for decades to establish limits on working hours; biometric optimization threatens to erode those boundaries by extending work's reach into physiology.
• Be skeptical of technological fixes for human problems. While breathing exercises may help some individuals manage stress, normalizing biometric tracking as a workplace expectation creates pressure to participate and raises privacy concerns. Even aggregated systems can reveal sensitive information about employee health and stress levels.
• Build leadership systems around sustainable performance, not peak optimization. Athletic training shows that rest and recovery are essential for improvement. The same principle applies to knowledge work. Studies of professional service firms by Erin Reid at Boston University found that employees who appeared to work constantly were rewarded, even when those who set boundaries were equally productive.

The Deeper Question

Underlying the HRV tracking trend is a fundamental question about human nature and workplace expectations: Are we biological machines to be optimized, or are we humans whose variability, limitations, and need for rest should be respected and accommodated?

The framing matters. Viewing workers as biological athletes, as performance psychologist Leah Lagos does in the article, suggests that peak performance is achievable through proper training and monitoring. But this metaphor fails in important ways. Athletes have off-seasons. They retire young. They are not expected to perform at championship levels daily for decades.

Knowledge workers, in contrast, face expectations of consistent high performance across entire careers. The biohacking trend promises to make this possible, but the promise is false. Human beings are not machines. We have good days and bad days. We experience illness, grief, distraction, and fatigue. Attempting to eliminate this variability does not make us more human; it makes us less so.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues in The Burnout Society that contemporary capitalism demands self-optimization that paradoxically leads to exhaustion and depression. We are no longer disciplined by external authorities but by internalized demands for achievement and optimization. The biohacking trend exemplifies this dynamic: workers voluntarily adopting monitoring technologies to meet performance expectations that are themselves unreasonable.

A Path Forward

This critique should not be read as anti-technology or opposed to stress-management techniques. Breathing exercises can help. Mindfulness practices have value. Exercise and sleep matter for cognitive function. The problem is not these practices themselves but their conscription into workplace performance optimization.

Individuals who find value in tracking their HRV for personal health reasons should continue. But we must resist the normalization of biometric monitoring as a workplace expectation. We should be suspicious of claims that knowledge workers are biological athletes who should strive to optimize their cognitive performance through physiological interventions.

Instead, we need a renewed emphasis on workplace design that accommodates human limitations rather than demanding we transcend them. This means reasonable workloads, genuine work-life boundaries, adequate staffing, and cultures that value sustainable performance over constant optimization.

The question Scheiber poses is whether the proliferation of workplace biohacking is a good thing. The evidence suggests it is not. While individual techniques may help some people manage stress, the broader trend represents a troubling expansion of workplace demands into the realm of human biology. It reflects and reinforces unrealistic expectations about human performance while offering a technological fix for structural problems.

The most telling moment in Scheiber's article comes when he describes the team comparing Whoop data and helping each other optimize their HRV. What appears as collegial support is actually peer pressure to participate in a system of mutual surveillance and optimization. The friendly question “What can we do to help performance on HRV?” contains an implicit expectation that everyone should be working to improve these metrics.

This is not the workplace we should be building. Rather than asking how employees can optimize their biology for better performance, we should ask how workplaces can be designed to support human flourishing. Rather than turning workers into biological athletes, we should create conditions where people can do meaningful work without sacrificing their health, autonomy, or humanity.

The race to stay ahead of the machines tempts us to become more like them. But the better response to artificial intelligence is not to make humans more machine-like. It is to insist on the value of human qualities that machines lack: creativity, judgment, empathy, and the wisdom that comes from living a fully human life, complete with all its variability and imperfection.

The office taskmaster should not be your Apple Watch. It should be a well-designed job with reasonable expectations, adequate resources, and respect for human limitations. Anything less represents a failure of organizational imagination dressed up as personal optimization.