Ronald Weasley Teaches You How to Live a Happier Life

There’s a part in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where Ron Weasley is about to play a game of Quidditch, and he’s incredibly nervous about it. 

At breakfast, Harry pretends to pour a few drops of a potion called ‘Felix Felicis’ into Ron's pumpkin juice. This potion is supposed to give the drinker incredible luck for a number of hours. 

When Ron finds out that Harry ‘slipped’ him the potion, his confidence surges. He believes he’s going to play at his best, and he does. Their team wins the game and Ron becomes a hero. 

Of course, Harry never gave him the potion—Ron just believed he did, and that was enough to positively affect his performance. 

It’s a fun moment in the books, but it highlights a very interesting concept: The placebo effect of believing something about ourselves can often have a very real impact on our actual reality. 

Why are we writing about this?

At What Counts, we’re fascinated by the science of self-improvement and the ways that athletes and high performers around the world track, analyse and optimize their lives. 

But lately, we’ve been thinking about the impact of tracking our own data, and it raised an important question:

To what extent does viewing the data we track about ourselves affect our life—and is it always a good idea? 

We think there are two main issues, and we’ll explore them in this email. 

First, let me tell you another story:

One day, I woke up and checked my Whoop score to see that I had a shockingly low recovery score. 

(Whoop is a wearable that is supposed to track your fitness 24/7 in the background and give you a ‘recovery’ score each day to let you know how well rested and ready for exercise you are.)

I think it was something like 1%--horribly low. 

As soon as I saw this score, my body started to feel heavy. My heart felt like it was beating faster and I felt lethargic. 

“1%.” I thought. “I should probably avoid training today. I’m simply not up for it.”

Then, I checked the sleep tab of my Whoop, and I realised what had happened. 

Each night, Whoop will only record ONE sleep session—anything else will show up as a nap. 

The night prior, probably sometime in the evening, I had either slept briefly or been in such a relaxed state that Whoop thought I was asleep—and it had recorded that hour or so as my sleep session—and the rest of the night was logged as a nap. 

The issue was that Whoop calculates your recovery based in large part on your sleep—and so it basically took 1 hour as the ‘sleep’ input for the calculation that figured out my recovery. 

I quickly edited my sleep for the night prior and entered the correct data. As soon as I did that, my recovery score switched to something normal and healthy, like 80%. 

So, far from being fatigued, I was in a great physical state and my body was ready for exercise. 

However, it’s fascinating to me that simply the perception that I was tired was enough to override the reality that my body actually wasn’t tired. 

This ties into a concept that I’ve seen referred to in different ways—from the term ‘illusory fatigue’ to ‘nocebo’ to ‘expectation-induced fatigue’. 

Simply put, this is the idea that our expectations—shaped by feedback, beliefs, or even errors in our data—can influence how tired we feel, how much effort we think something takes, and ultimately, how we perform.

In other words, fatigue isn’t just physical—it’s psychological. And when we outsource our sense of readiness to an external device, we might be more vulnerable to these illusions. A wrong number can make us feel heavy, hesitant, or even incapable, not because our body is struggling but because our mind believes it is. 

That’s the first issue with viewing the data you track. 

The second is similar but deals more with the subjective data we track. 

For the last couple of years, I’ve been tracking certain subjective measures like my emotional well-being, happiness, focus, mood, and a whole handful of similar metrics. 

My hypothesis was fairly straightforward:

If I track both the things I do and the things I feel, I should be able to figure out how the things I do affect the way I feel.

After a couple of years of data, I’m finding that it’s a little more complicated than that. 

On one hand, I’ve been able to draw some fascinating insights about the lifestyle choices and activities that contribute to my emotional well-being. 

But one of the biggest issues I didn’t anticipate has been the difficulty in tracking that subjective data in the first place and the negative effects it can have on the person collecting the data. 

The first reason for this is that in some ways, it simply feels wrong to reduce something as abstract and hard to define as your happiness to a single number each day.

Not to mention that, unlike your heart rate, it’s hard to find a way to measure something like this that will be consistent and objective each day. 

The second reason is that, in many ways, the fact that you’re tracking your happiness makes it harder to just enjoy life and take it as it comes.

For instance, If I’m having a good day by midday, I might start to get stressed about making sure I keep that momentum up and end the day well to keep the score looking good. But that stress alone starts to pull my day down, and suddenly, other things that happen in the day are even more stressful simply because of the impact they’ll have on my data. 

The third reason is that we’re becoming increasingly convinced that happiness isn’t even the right thing to aim for. 

If our goal in life is simply to put a happiness number on each day and make those numbers as high as possible, would that actually lead us to happiness?

Personally, we don’t think that would really be the kind of life most of us want to live—so why are we so concerned with making our numbers look good?

We’d rather design a life based on what gives us meaning and purpose and let the numbers fall as they may—and our guess is that would be the path that truly leads to happiness anyways.

A reader, Zach, recently wrote in response to an email on this theme and said the following: 

“I agree that finding and giving ourselves to what stirs our soul is good. However, a life lived with that as our sole focus leads to selfishness, abuse and ultimately a willingness to surrender to anything that gives us what we want.”

Those are just a few of the reasons we think viewing and tracking our own data can be a bad idea. 

But what’s the solution to all this? Do we think it’s a bad idea to track all of these things—from the physical to the mental?

Plus, as the technology moves steadily onwards, we’re not far away from our phones telling us each and every hour how ‘happy’ or ‘stressed’ we are.

Well, this might sound contrary to all the points that we’ve been making, but we don’t actually think so. 

We think there’s a huge benefit that comes from tracking your life—understanding your performance, using data to improve your performance, and gaining insights on what helps and hurts us. 

And when it comes to wearables like Whoop, when the data is accurate, it is undoubtedly helpful to get a feel for what our body is ready for on any given day. 

We simply would suggest three things:

1. Let the data work for you—don’t work for the data

Don’t let your wearable data dictate your life. Take it as just another useful tool in the toolkit, and if it stops becoming a tool and becomes a tyrant—that’s a problem. 

At the end of the day, it’s just data and nothing can come close to measuring the complexity of daily life. 

2. Where possible, get the output without reviewing the inputs

When it comes to subjective measures like ‘how happy am I?’, we think it would be entirely possible to devise a system where we could input data each day and generate insights about what affects and impacts our happiness, without the need to be constantly viewing our data and watching our scores over time. 

For example, if we could just drop each day’s numbers into a database and allow that database to do all of the data analysis work without ever needing to actually look at those numbers again, we wouldn’t feel as attached or stressed about the data we’re inputting.

Unfortunately, we haven’t yet devised a system that works perfectly like this, but that’s where we’re aiming to go in the future, and we will certainly share any tools we find with you.

3. You are not your numbers

As we’ve said, life is far more complex than an arbitrary rating of your day from 1-100 or how many calories you consumed that day. So try not to beat yourself up for the data you may find disappointing because if you do, you may stop recording things, which isn’t the point.

The positive of self-tracking is that, in our experience, anything that’s watched, observed, and tracked usually improves. Keeping your emotional well-being separate from your data ensures that you are using it in the right way.

We hope you got something out of this email. 

If you don’t take anything else away, we hope you remember this: 

A future where our happiness is controlled by our data is a grim reality. 

A future where our happiness, even in some small way, is supported, uplifted, and perpetuated by our data would be a great world to live in. 

What have your experiences been with tracking yourself?

How do you work to ensure your personal progression is healthy and helpful rather than detrimental and harmful? 

We’d love to hear from you. 

Speak soon,

Benji & Jacob.

P.S. We wanted to let you know that What Counts is evolving. We’ve noticed that the stories you like most (and we enjoy making most) are the personal stories we’ve been sending once a month—where we talk about how we’re implementing the science of self-improvement in our own lives. 

Going forward, we want to spend more of our time and emails focusing on these personal stories. We’ll aim to increase the frequency to two per month. 

We’ll finish this month on the usual schedule, but that new schedule will kick in starting next month. 

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