Hello, my friends!

My daughter is going through a sleep regression right now. Normal for infants her age. Her pediatrician said it may last a few weeks.

It's temporary, but feels like forever. 😭

Which means I'm up multiple times a night. The sleep I do get is broken into chunks that barely count.

So when I finally woke up one morning (late, because survival), the first thing I saw on my wrist was a sleep score of 39.

Thirty-nine. Out of a hundred.

I hadn't even done anything wrong. I'd done everything I could. I fed her, held her, got her back to sleep, and grabbed what rest I could between rounds.

And my watch scored me a 39 for it.

A year ago, I would have spiraled. I would've spent the morning mentally calculating how to "recover" the score. Whether I could sneak a nap in. Whether the whole day was already shot.

Pre-baby Grazelle would have carried that 39 around like a grade she failed.

But this time, I just took the watch off.

Not dramatically. Not forever.

I still wear it when I go out. I just stopped wearing it at home.

And within a few days, I noticed something I didn't expect. I felt less anxious. Not a little less. Noticeably less.

That was the signal.

So why did a tool I used to genuinely love start working against me?

Because I was using a sprint tool in a marathon season. And that mismatch changes everything.

Today we're covering three things:

Sprint tools are high-feedback, short-horizon, and performance-oriented:

These work well for defined periods. Training blocks. 30-day resets. Data-gathering phases where you need numbers to learn something specific. There are more tools out there that I didn’t list here.

They give you a score, and that score motivates you because the conditions are relatively stable and within your control.

Marathon tools are low-pressure, season-aware, and principle-based. For example:

These are built for the long arc. The months and years where life is messy, unpredictable, and mostly outside your control.

The problem shows up when you use a sprint tool in a marathon season. The score stops being information and starts being a judgment.

In my specific case, a daily sleep score during a early motherhood is not feedback. But a failure notification on repeat.

This isn't just a feeling. There's neuroscience behind it.

Dr. Kyra Bobinet's research on the habenula explains what happens when you get repeated failure signals.

The habenula is a small structure in your brain that acts like a motivation kill switch. When it registers that you keep "failing," it suppresses your drive to try. Not because you're lazy. But because your brain is trying to protect you from wasting energy on something it thinks you can't win.

So a sprint tool in a marathon season does something quiet and dangerous. It trains your brain to associate the habit with losing.

Every low score. Every broken streak. Every unclosed ring during a season you can't control. Each one tells your habenula: this isn't working. Stop trying.

That's why my watch had to come off.

I’m not saying that tracking is bad. But tracking during an uncontrollable season was slowly undermining my motivation to keep going.

I'll be honest with you. I haven't done a single formal workout in the past week. Not even five minutes.

But I'm still moving:

I'm a physical therapist. I teach people movement for a living. And this is the principle I come back to over and over again:

Movement counts even when it doesn't look like "exercise."

The movement didn't stop. The measuring did.

That's the distinction that matters.

I know what some of you might be thinking. If you take off the watch, stop tracking, stop scoring yourself… aren't you just letting yourself off the hook?

Let me be clear.

The goal didn't change. The measurement changed.

I'm still prioritizing movement. I'm still prioritizing sleep (as much as a sleep-regressing baby will allow). I just stopped grading myself on things I can't fully control right now.

There's one question that helped me make this call:

If the score is changing your behavior in a helpful direction, keep it. That's a sprint tool doing its job during a sprint season.

But if the score isn't changing anything except your mood, it's not a tracking tool anymore. It's a judgment machine.

And while we're here. This same mismatch shows up in wellness culture all the time.

For example, continuous glucose monitors marketed to people with completely normal metabolic health.

The wellness industry loves to export sprint tools to people who don't need them. And it creates anxiety around totally normal physiology.

My Apple Watch is going back on when I'm ready to sprint again. When sleep normalizes. When I have the capacity to use that data to actually adjust something.

Your version of this might not be a watch. It might be:

So here's what I want to leave you with.

If it's the second one, you might be using a sprint tool in a marathon season. The bravest thing you can do is put it down for now.

Not forever. Just for this season.

The goal stays. The scoring goes.

You never fail. You adjust.

Hit reply and tell me: what's one tool you might need to put down for this season?

Still moving,

Grazelle 🌱

PS: Some changes are coming to this newsletter. New look, new format, a few things I've been slowly building behind the scenes for the past few months.

Yes, “slowly” is the plan. 😂

I'm not ready to share everything yet. But if you've been here a while, I think you're going to like where this is going. More soon.

Whenever you’re ready, here are some other (free) resources you can check out: