Maxxing: Why Optimizing One Thing Makes You Feel Worse

Somewhere this year you watched someone explain their sleep. Not that they slept well, but the architecture of it: the mouth tape, the magnesium, the blackout tape over the router light, the ring that grades the night out of a hundred. Then the morning video, the score, the slight disappointment at an 84.

That is sleepmaxxing, and it has siblings. Booksmaxxing, fibermaxxing, the general project of taking one area of life and pushing it to the ceiling. The suffix announces that you are not merely doing a thing, you are extracting the maximum from it.

It is also, almost word for word, a trait psychologists have been measuring since 2002, and the results are not what the videos suggest.

The Suffix That Ate Self-Improvement

Strip the branding and maxxing is a rule for how to pursue a goal: whatever the domain, do not settle for good. Find the best protocol, the best score, the best version. Compare constantly. Keep searching.

That rule has a name in decision research. Barry Schwartz and colleagues called people who follow it maximizers, and contrasted them with satisficers, people who decide what good enough looks like, search until they find it, and stop. The terms are borrowed from an older critique of perfectly rational choice, but Schwartz's team turned them into something you could score a person on.

The difference is the stopping rule. A satisficer has one. A maximizer, by definition, does not, because "best" cannot be confirmed without checking everything.

You can run a rough check on yourself without the scale. Think of the last thing you bought, booked or signed up for. Did you decide in advance what good enough looked like, find it, and stop? Or did you keep the tabs open after choosing, still reading about the options you turned down? Then notice where your reference point comes from. If the measure of a good choice is what other people got, and someone else's better deal reopens a decision you thought was closed, you are searching the way a maximizer searches.

What the Maximizing Scale Found

Schwartz's 2002 paper built the scale and then ran it across seven samples. Higher maximizing scores went with lower happiness, optimism, self-esteem and life satisfaction, and with higher depression, perfectionism and regret.

Three further studies filled in the texture. Maximizers were less satisfied than satisficers with consumer decisions, and more likely to compare themselves with others. They were more adversely affected by upward comparison, the kind where someone else got the better deal. And in an ultimatum bargaining game they were more sensitive to regret and less satisfied with what they walked away with.

Two caveats. These are correlations, not a causal verdict. And the scale itself has been argued over since: by 2016, Cheek and Schwartz counted eleven published measures of maximization and described the literature as befuddling and contradictory. Their own proposal: maximizing is a goal, choosing the best option, pursued through a strategy, searching the alternatives. That version maps onto the trend exactly.

Better Job, Worse Feeling

The study that makes this uncomfortable rather than merely interesting followed final-year students through a job hunt. Sheena Iyengar and colleagues scored them on maximizing in the autumn, then watched the year unfold.

The maximizers were not deluded. They did better, by a measure nobody disputes. Their strategy worked on the outcome and failed on the experience of the outcome, and the authors traced the gap to two habits: a heavier reliance on external sources of information, and a fixation on the options they had taken and the options they had not.

Which is a clinical description of a comment section. The maximizer's reference point is never their own life; it is the best life visible from here, and that reference point moves every time someone posts.

The arrival fallacy is the finish line failing to deliver. Maximizing is the arrival fallacy with the finish line removed.

Sleepmaxxing and the Patients Who Trusted the Band

Sleep is where maxxing stops being a mood and becomes a clinical case.

In 2017 a group of sleep physicians published a short paper about a pattern they kept seeing: patients seeking treatment for sleep problems they had diagnosed from their tracker data. Kelly Baron and colleagues coined a word for it, orthosomnia, "ortho" for straight or correct, chosen because the perfectionist quest for perfect sleep resembled the unhealthy preoccupation with healthy eating.

The three cases are a small portrait of the whole trend. One man felt pressure every night to make the tracker display at least eight hours. A 27-year-old woman arrived with a tracker reporting 60% sleep efficiency; a laboratory sleep study found no apnoea and increased deep sleep, and she still trusted the band. The shared behaviour across the patients was spending excessive time in bed trying to raise the number the device reported.

The authors are careful, and so should you be. Three patients is a case series, not a prevalence rate, and nobody has shown that trackers cause insomnia. What the paper documents is narrower and more useful: consumer trackers measure movement rather than brain activity, cannot accurately discriminate sleep stages, and tend to overestimate sleep. A number built on that is a rough estimate wearing the costume of a score. Lying awake trying to raise it is maximizing a measurement of the thing instead of the thing.

The best sleep is unconscious, and the tracker invites you to be conscious of it. The same inversion runs through every variant. The point of reading was never the count.

Why the Best Is a Moving Target

Put the three studies together and the engine shows itself.

Maximizing has no internal stopping rule, so it borrows one from outside: the best visible option. That is why the job-hunters leaned on external information and why Schwartz's maximizers compared more. But the best visible option is a function of how much you can see, and what you can see now is everyone. The ceiling rises as fast as you climb.

Meanwhile the unrealized options do not go quiet. The maximizer who picked a plan is still carrying the other six plans they researched, and each one is a reason the chosen one might be wrong. Satisfaction needs the question to close. Maximizing keeps it open as a matter of principle.

Tracking a pleasant activity can raise output and lower enjoyment of it, a finding we covered in when tracking backfires. Maxxing is tracking plus a mandate to beat the number, applied to things you did for the pleasure of them.

None of this argues for the opposite. The satisficer is not the person who gave up. They are the person who set the bar, cleared it, and spent the leftover attention somewhere else. The jam study we told in fewer goals is the retail version of this; maxxing is the lifestyle version.

Optimize the Floor, Not the Ceiling

The maximizing research does not say ambition is bad. It says ambition pointed at a ceiling you cannot verify tends to feel bad regardless of results. The fix is to move the target to something you can.

Write the stopping rule first. Before you start the protocol, decide what good enough is, in a sentence, with a number if there is one. In bed by eleven on weeknights. Twenty pages most days. Three runs a week, any pace. A goal with a floor can be reached on a Tuesday. A goal with only a ceiling can be failed every day of the year.

Raise the floor, leave the ceiling alone. Progress is the floor moving up, not the best day getting better. If your worst week of sleep improves, you have improved; chasing a perfect night while the bad ones stay bad is the maximizer's trade.

Measure less once it is habit. A tracker is a good coach for a new behaviour and a poor judge of an established one. Once the floor holds, check the data weekly rather than nightly. The orthosomnia clinicians' own suggestion was to watch the pattern, not the score, with a written log beside the device.

Pick your comparison set by hand. The maximizer defaults to the best visible person. Choose instead one earlier version of yourself and one person a step ahead whose constraints resemble yours. Everyone else is content, not evidence.

It is also the reason Future You treats a logged intention as the unit of progress rather than a perfect streak, free on iOS and Android. A floor you keep beats a ceiling you chase.

The Good-Enough Night

Go back to the person explaining their sleep. Nothing in their routine is foolish. Dark rooms help. Regular hours help. What the research questions is the frame around it: that there is a best night out there, that the band knows when you have had it, and that the gap between tonight and that night is a problem to be worked on.

The maximizers in the job study got the better salary and the worse year. The patients in the sleep clinic got the data and lost the sleep. Same structure, same lesson. Decide what enough looks like before you start, reach it, and then do the hardest thing in the whole trend, which is to stop checking and go to bed.