How to Escape (or at Least Dial Down) the Social‑Media "Maxxing" Trap

Jennifer Donnelly's recent piece for The Conversation US turned attention to something worth taking seriously: the growing habit of "maxxing" everything — looks, fiber, personality, productivity — as if self‑improvement were a video game with a maximum score to hit. Her core observation is that pushing any trait toward its theoretical limit can quietly convert healthy self‑improvement into a source of stress, comparison, and self‑criticism rather than well‑being. That observation is the starting point for this piece — and underneath it lies a deeper, more rigorous principle that both "maxxing" culture and the usual critiques of it tend to miss: the goal is not a maximum. It is the golden middle. 

The Real Target Is the Center, Not Either Edge

The clearest way to see the flaw in "maxxing" logic comes from basic physiology, specifically the principle of symmetry in health, described in the book Symmetry in health and illness. Its central argument reframes the whole debate: for essentially every physiological indicator in the human body, health is not defined by how far you can push a value in the "good" direction. It is defined by a symmetric range around a normative center— and any deviation from that center, in either direction, signals trouble. The middle is not a compromise or a default. It is the actual target.

The book's clinical examples make this vivid. A prolonged QT interval on an ECG is a well‑known marker of dangerous arrhythmia risk, but an abnormally shortened QT interval, discovered decades later, is equally dangerous. The syndrome sat undiscovered for years because cardiologists were trained to watch only the high side of the range, never suspecting that the low side held an equal and opposite risk. Heart rate variability follows the same logic: a decrease in variability is conventionally treated as the warning sign for cardiovascular stress, but the authors' own research found that an abnormal increase — excessive parasympathetic dominance — signals impaired adaptability just as reliably. Blood pressure obeys the identical rule: hypertension is dangerous, but so is low diastolic pressure, a major cause of falls and serious injury, especially with age.

The authors state the general principle directly: "For no human indicator can there be a limitation of normal ranges from only one side — a symmetric limitation from the other side is mandatory." Blood glucose is held near a center by two opposing hormones, insulin and glucagon, neither of which is "the good one" — both are necessary to keep the value in its healthy middle. Inflammation works the same way, balanced against anti‑inflammatory processes; enough inflammation to heal an injury, not so much that it becomes chronic disease. Acid‑base status in the blood is buffered toward a center, because either acidosis or alkalosis — deviation toward either pole — is dangerous. Nowhere in the body does the healthy zone sit at an extreme. It sits at the middle, held there by two opposing forces in balance.

This is precisely what "maxxing" culture gets backward. It assumes every trait — fiber intake, step count, productivity, discipline, muscle mass — has a one‑directional scale where farther toward the "good" end is always better. Physiology says the opposite: the aim was never to push toward one edge. It was always to stay centered, and pushing toward either edge — including the edge that looks virtuous — moves you away from health, not toward it.

Three Sources, One Pattern

Lining up several independent investigations makes this hard to miss. A Brown University Health Gastroenterology explainer on fibermaxxing, published this past March, is largely enthusiastic about pushing fiber intake as high as tolerable, citing the statistic that only 7% of American adults meet current fiber recommendations, and treating overconsumption as a minor logistical footnote. A more skeptical look — drawing on a 2021 study led by Stanford's Justin Sonnenburg — found that doubling fiber intake for four months did not reliably increase gut microbial diversity, because a fiber‑depleted gut may lack enough fiber‑fermenting bacterial species to handle a sudden large load, producing bloating and discomfort instead of benefit. The lesson isn't "fiber is bad at high doses." It's that fiber, like almost everything else, has a personal middle range, and both too little and too much sit outside it.

Donnelly's article reaches a structurally identical conclusion through psychology: constant self‑optimization invites perfectionism, comparison, and rigidity, and in extreme cases has been linked to muscle dysmorphia and orthorexia. The symmetry principle explains why these independent critiques converge: gut microbial capacity and psychological capacity are simply two more physiological systems with a centered, bounded normal range. Pushing fiber, discipline, or self‑optimization toward a maximum ignores that the underlying system — a microbiome, a nervous system, a mind — functions well only near its own middle, and degrades in both directions once you move away from it. 

The Middle Is Personal, and It Moves

The book adds a crucial refinement: the center is not identical for everyone, and it is not even fixed for one person across time. The authors note that illness has its own personal norms, which shift depending on the stage of a disease process — comparing a patient's values to healthy population norms, or even to their own values at a different stage of the same illness, is a common source of clinical error. The same logic extends to "maxxing": a healthy young adult's ideal middle for fiber intake, exercise volume, or workload is not the same as an older adult's, someone recovering from illness, or someone managing a chronic condition. The golden middle is not one fixed number stamped on a chart. It is a personal, moving target that has to be found and re‑found as life changes.

What This Means in Practice

Bringing the symmetry principle together with the psychological and microbiome evidence gives a sharper version of "moderation‑maxxing" — one that treats the middle, not the maximum, as the explicit goal:

• Name both edges, not just one. For any habit framed as "more is always better," identify what the corresponding harm looks like on the low end and where a comfortable middle sits between the two. Under‑fiber causes constipation and poor cardiometabolic markers; over‑fiber causes bloating and malabsorption. Under‑exercise weakens the body; over‑exercise injures it. The healthy zone is between, not past either edge.
• Treat the center as the destination, not a fallback. "Good enough" is not a lesser version of "maximal." It is the actual physiologically correct target, the same way a centered QT interval, a mid‑range blood pressure, and balanced blood pH are not compromises but the definitions of health themselves.
• Expect the middle to be personal and dynamic. Your own healthy range for fiber, exercise intensity, or self‑improvement effort will differ from someone else's, and will shift with age, illness, recovery, and circumstances. Recalibrate rather than chasing a fixed external number.
• Read symptoms as boundary signals from either direction. Bloating from too much fiber and constipation from too little are the same kind of signal. Burnout from too much self‑optimization and stagnation from too little are the same kind of signal. Neither means try harder in the same direction; both mean move back toward the center.

Closing Thought

Donnelly's article, the fibermaxxing evidence, and the symmetry principle were developed independently, in different disciplines, without citing one another — yet all three converge on the same conclusion, stated most precisely by the physiology: health is not a one‑directional scale where more of a good thing is always better, and it is not simply "extremes are risky" either. It is a bounded range with a true center, and the aim is that center — the golden middle — not the edge that happens to look virtuous. "Maxxing" culture is popular because it quietly redefines the goal as an edge. The body, the microbiome, and the mind all insist otherwise: the target was always the middle, and deviating from it in either direction is the actual problem.

More about this topic can be found in our book "Symmetry in health and illness" and in our article "Fibermaxxing: What It Is, Why It Can Backfire, and How to Use It Safely in Real Life" on Our Books on Google Play and related articles in the Index.

Mykola Iabluchanskyi together with Andriy Yabluchanskiy