Is It Possible I'm Hooked on My Smartwatch?

There's a building tension. Visible is the frosty air exhaled by my competitors as they do the "starting line" wiggle on the starting line.

A rapid movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I have to adjust my watch. As does the guy alongside me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… done! GPS ready, I'm off.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us runners who wear them.

This is a thriving, multi-billion pound sector. Brands like Garmin lead the market, all offering an wide range of diverse devices to suit a spectrum of lifestyles. According to how feature-packed the device you go for, price tags can range from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"I find it infuriating, it's impossible to relax."

"It reassures me… It feels like a supporter guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a poor sleep."

A small sample of the responses I've had from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they feel about theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My current opinion on my own device? Right now, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the overhead branches I'm running below are disrupting my GPS connection.

Countless individuals of us attach these compact gadgets onto our arms and use them constantly, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're continuously monitoring us.

Gone are the days when we relied on them only to give us an rough count of our step count. Today, they can track our sleep patterns, heart rate, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

It's difficult to find a health indicator they fail to monitor.

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the data points we obsess over a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they enhance our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of measurements and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I find myself getting a bit fixated with mine," a wearer reveals.

While she loves how her device monitors her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently productive enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I have a young baby, there's no point to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just remove it?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this complicated dynamic with it," she explains. "I value it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps overkill for me."

How Do They Work?

Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your bodily functions and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly shine minute LED lights onto your arm which can monitor pulsation, identifying your BPM. More advanced devices measure changes in the skin conductance that flows through the skin to assess your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially prevent illness, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not mean someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the future.

But how to interpret these figures is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as more functions are introduced, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A health researcher focusing on wearable tech agrees. Research into the effect of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM went up. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate rose further.

"When people are presented with data about ourselves that we lack context for then, understandably, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."