Sarah Lindsay isn’t your average fitness founder.
The former athlete turned holistic movement advocate is the brains behind SALA, a boutique wellness studio in Auckland that’s redefining what it means to truly take care of yourself – body, mind, and spirit. As someone who’s spent years immersed in the world of performance and wellbeing, Sarah has developed a unique philosophy: one that favours feeling over tracking, presence over perfection, and intuition over optimisation.
In this op-ed, she shares a powerful perspective on the growing reliance on data to tell us how we feel – and why it might be time to start trusting ourselves again.
In a world where data is king, we’ve become strangely dependent on devices to tell us how we feel
We track our steps, our sleep, our stress, our cycles, our calories. We consult apps before we consult ourselves. The metrics have become the meaning, data points to be interpreted and improved upon. But somewhere in the search for external validation, have we stopped trusting ourselves?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, particularly in the context of movement. I’m not a fan of mapping a class around calorie burn or output. Not because the data isn’t interesting, but because it often distracts from what really matters: your internal state. Your awareness. How you feel, not how your wearable says you should feel.
One of the best stories I’ve read on this comes from professional golfer J.J. Spaun. The night before he won the US Open, he was up at 3am with a sick child. No sleep, complete chaos. A wearable would have told him to rest. Someone obsessed with optimisation might have panicked. Instead, he showed up, and he won. Why? Because he knew how to be present, not perfect, because life rarely happens under ideal conditions, and peak performance doesn’t always arrive with a green recovery score.
The truth is, it’s inhuman to be at 100 percent all the time, if ever. The beauty of life is often found in the curveballs. A late night with your partner talking about your dreams. A glass of wine too many with your best friends. A slow weekend spent watching reruns simply because you want to. None of it optimised. All of it deeply human.
Overoptimisation flattens our experience. It tries to engineer out the very things that make life rich: spontaneity, nuance, contradiction. I’m not against technology, it can be a helpful tool, but when it replaces intuition, we lose something essential. The special “source.”
In class, I’ve watched people glance at their watches the moment we finish, searching for confirmation that the effort was worth it. But the most valuable moment is not in the numbers, it’s in the asking yourself: how do I feel now? What did I need today? What do I need next?
Studies have shown that people who monitor their sleep scores daily often feel more tired, even if they’ve slept well, because the data suggests otherwise. It’s called orthosomnia, an anxiety created by the pursuit of perfect sleep hygiene. You wake up feeling fine, but your device tells you you’re not recovered, and suddenly, you believe it. The data begins to dictate your day, rather than your actual experience.
Wellness is not just about effort, it’s about awareness. And true wellbeing doesn’t come from performance, it comes from presence. So next time you reach for your device to tell you how you slept, how you recovered, or how much you gave, pause. Ask yourself first. Your body already knows.
I’ll leave you with a final thought, borrowed from Steve Jobs, a firm believer in the essential power of intuition. He famously avoided market research and resisted optimisation thinking in design. Instead, he trusted emotion and instinct to guide innovation, once saying: ‘People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’ That’s not just authentic business, it’s deeply human. Sometimes, we have to feel our way through rather than optimise our way out.
