What is healthmaxxing? A calm guide to optimising the basics

The word arrived from the same corner of the internet that gave us looksmaxxing and every other -maxxing: forums, fitness threads and short-form videos where the goal is to optimise some part of yourself as hard as possible. Attached to health, it can mean anything from going to bed on time to cold plunges, peptides and a drawer full of gadgets. Most of that range is noise. A small part of it is the whole game.

Where the word came from

Maxxing is gamer slang for pushing a stat to its maximum. Healthmaxxing points that instinct at your own physiology. At its best it is just taking the boring fundamentals seriously and being straight about results. At its worst it is a costume: the aesthetics of optimisation, with very little underneath. The difference is entirely about what you choose to optimise.

The short list that moves the needle

Almost all of the real return comes from a handful of inputs, and they are unglamorous. If you only ever touched these, you would be doing better than most people running elaborate protocols.

• Sleep. The single biggest lever. Regular timing and 7-9 hours does more for mood, focus and recovery than any supplement.
• Movement. Most days, some of it brisk, some of it heavy. The specific programme matters far less than consistency.
• Sunlight. Daylight early in the day anchors your body clock, which quietly improves the sleep at the top of this list.
• Food. Mostly whole foods, enough protein, enough fibre. The principles are dull and they have not changed in decades.
• Attention. Usually missing from these lists, and it should not be. How you spend your attention shapes your stress, your sleep and whether the day felt like yours at all.

The long list of noise

Everything else competes for the attention these basics deserve. Most supplements do little for a person who already eats reasonably. Most wearables measure more than they change. Most biohacks are someone’s edge case sold to you as a rule. None of it is forbidden, but almost all of it sits in the low-return, high-effort corner.

The figures above are illustrative and meant to show relative leverage, not measured fact. Individual circumstances vary, and none of this is medical advice.

Why one honest number beats ten dashboards

The failure mode of healthmaxxing is not laziness, it is sprawl. Ten apps, three wearables and a spreadsheet, each with its own metric, none of them talking to the others. You end up managing dashboards instead of changing behaviour. A single number you trust is worth more than a wall of charts you have learned to ignore, because it gives you one thing to nudge tomorrow.

That is the idea behind the Soren Score: one daily 0-100 number computed entirely on your iPhone from three pillars - Focus, Sleep and Physical movement. Sleep is auto-detected from iPhone motion with no watch required, and stages are estimates rather than clinical readings. There is no account and no server; nothing leaves the device. It is a reflection of your day, not a verdict on your health.

Attention belongs on the list

Here is the part most wellness writing skips. You can sleep, move and eat well and still spend the day with your attention shredded across a dozen apps, and feel terrible for it. Attention is a health input, not a productivity nicety. It shapes how wound-up you are, how easily you switch off at night, and whether the hours you put in counted.

Most optimisation tools quietly leave it off the list because it is hard to measure. Soren’s answer is the lock-in: OS-level Screen Time blocking with no pause, skip or early exit, so a session of deep work is real rather than aspirational. That focus then folds into your score alongside sleep and movement. Healthmaxxing without attention is half a programme. Put it back on the list.

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Soren is a private iPhone app, iOS 17+, on the App Store. The Soren Score is an honest estimate and a reflection of your day, not a diagnosis or medical advice. If something here reads wrong, tell us at hello@sorenlabs.xyz.