The “Worried well” is a medical industry term for healthy people overly concerned with maximizing their health. They never met a supplement they don’t think they need or a test they’re not willing to pay extra for. Just in case.
There’s an entire medical almost charlatan shadow industry catering to both feeding and assuaging those worries.
“Data hunger” is a business term that ties in with the desire to computerize and quantify everything. Those “how did we do?” surveys we get with every purchase now are an example of business’s data hunger. The motto is “If we had more data we could make better decisions”. Which is a little bit true, but lots of businesses are way past diminishing returns.
Lotta people are getting on the same bandwagon. How did I sleep last night? Don’t think about your experience; instead consult your FitBit and connect it to an app to track your sleep. Which might provide more insights if you track your diet too. And your steps. And.
But don’t forget your money. How about you track everything to the penny every day? Just in case.
The compulsion to collect info that’s probably useless but sounds useful is data hunger.
Obviously as applied to health, there’s lots of ways for worried well people to convince themselves they have data starvation and so begin to track everything they can think of that touches health.
Lotta ways to sell unhelpful things to those fools.
Sorry that I failed to know that these phrases are not as common knowledge as I thought.
I’ll emphasize the healthy but anxious over the maximization side of the worried well.
And data hunger, more metrics more better always, is not only a problem because it distracts from the data that does matter, useless, but because it not infrequently misleads, is potentially actually harmful. But it is a spreading mindset.
Does that concern me? Sure. I’d consider sleeping on it but my watch might not like what it does to my sleep score!
Overlapping Venn diagrams. I think of hypochondriacs as more disabled by it? The worried well are mostly functional and a very large group. Maybe hypochondriacs are the peak of a worried well pyramid? A spectrum condition!!
And here I am, just now slapping my forehead, realizing that “well” in the phrase is meant as an adjective (short for “the people who are well”) rather than a noun (I was envisioning some sort of reservoir or pit full of worries—“throw your worries down the Worried Well”).
I thought it was well as an indicator of degree: the worried well are the significantly worried. Yes, “well worried” would be a more typical use, but the whole title was undecipherable gibberish to me, so…
