This CEO said three wines ruined his week. Has wellness gone too far?

After a year of being sober, Steven Bartlett had a glass of wine one evening – actually, he had three.

“It ruined three days of my life,” the Diary of a CEO podcast host said in an episode from December. “Because of the domino effect it caused.

“It meant that I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. Then I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after... because I felt really bad. I could track all of this on my Whoop… and I was like, oh my god, those three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect...”

It should go without saying that yes, consuming excessive amounts of alcohol is bad. But three glasses will not ruin your progress – and certainly not your life.

This sort of wellness catastrophising is hardly surprising from the man who believes it’s easier to work out seven days a week than four and maintains a group chat with friends where they remove the person who’s exercised the least that week.

It’s par for the course from Bartlett and his contemporaries, like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, who often share the extreme lengths they’re willing to go to in order to self-optimise: 4am wake-ups, strict diet and exercise regimes supported by cold plunges, saunas, peptides and more supplements than you could fill a hyperbaric chamber with.

When we are constantly go-go-go, our mind and body starts to shut down. “If we don’t get a proper life balance, psychologically and biochemically, we end up totally screwed,” says Clive Jones, a performance psychologist at Queensland Academy of Sport.

Jones points out the difference between harmonious and obsessive passion, identified by French researchers in a 2003 review. Harmonious passion is activated when we’re invigorated, excited and enjoying all the different things that we can engage in. By comparison, obsessive passion occurs when a person zeroes-in on a particular activity and in doing so, feels pressure to continue with it.

“Where there’s an obsession to just get better and every single element of life has to point towards that improvement or else – life stops being something to engage, and it becomes something to conquer,” says Jones.

“To get into a state of flow and performance, it’s a celebration of engaging life. Yet, often when we get an obsessive passion, there’s no celebration in it, it becomes a burden.”

As Bartlett alluded to by mentioning his Whoop band, we now have more information about our health than ever before thanks