Why can’t I break up with my smartwatch?

Every morning I open my Samsung Health app to check how I slept, and my energy score for the day. When I do a workout, I make sure I’m wearing my watch and log it. If it doesn’t work, or I forget, I’m genuinely a bit disappointed that it hasn’t been captured.

I imagine this feels familiar to many of you. Our phones and wearables have been logging our behaviour for years now, and at this point it can feel strange not to know how many steps we’ve done, how well we slept, or what our heart rate was during a workout.

But when I quit dieting, I purposely stopped tracking things like calories, calorie burn and my weight. It helped me focus much more on internal signals (things like hunger, fullness, and how food actually made me feel) rather than numbers that often fluctuated for reasons I couldn’t control.

And yet, when it comes to exercise and sleep, I still can’t seem to let go of the data.

So I’ve been wondering: why am I so attached to it? And is it actually helping my quest to be healthy and happy?

Tracking can help us to make changes

When it comes to changing our health habits, research suggests that self-monitoring can be helpful. It gives us feedback on what we’re actually doing, rather than what we think we’re doing, and can help us monitor progress towards a goal.

And my watch has genuinely helped me make some positive changes. Thanks to its feedback, I’m making more of an effort to wake up at roughly the same time each day. I’m taking it easier when my energy score is very low. And I’ve become a bit more conscious of getting some movement that actually raises my heart rate.

In those cases, the data has prompted me to notice things about my body and behaviour that are genuinely useful. The problem comes when the watch and my body disagree.

When the tracker and my body disagree

My health app, Saturday: “You have a low energy score today. Take it easy.”

Me: has a lovely chilled, low-energy day

My health app, Sunday:“You didn’t do enough activity yesterday!!!”

Me: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!?! 🤯

Or:

Me, Monday morning: Mmm, I feel good. That was a great sleep.

My health app:“You slept too long and you went to bed too early. POOR.”

Me: Oh. Maybe I don't feel as good as I thought 😭

Some of this might be a limitation of my particular watch. But consumer wearables aren’t perfectly accurate, particularly when they move beyond measuring relatively straightforward things like movement or heart rate and start estimating things like sleep quality, recovery or “energy”.

Makers of the smart ring Oura are even currently facing a lawsuit over claims about the accuracy of its sleep data.

But I think the more interesting issue is not simply whether the data is right, it's what happens when we believe it. Research suggests that the information trackers give us can actually change how we experience ourselves.

In one study, researchers manipulated the step-count feedback people received from an Apple Watch. When people were given artificially low step counts, they reported more negative emotions and lower self-esteem, ate more unhealthily, and showed increased blood pressure and heart rate.

Their actual activity hadn’t changed. Only the information they were given about it had.

There’s similar evidence around sleep. In one experimental study, people with insomnia were given false feedback suggesting they had slept either better or worse than they actually had. Those told they’d slept poorly subsequently reported more fatigue and poorer alertness.

This is slightly alarming when I think about how often I wake up feeling perfectly fine, check my watch, and immediately start questioning myself.

Tracking can also feed guilt and all-or-nothing thinking

There’s another problem with tracking: it can change what success feels like.

Research looking at people’s experiences of diet and fitness tracking found that the numbers could become wrapped up in guilt, shame and disappointment. When people felt they hadn’t stuck to the goals in their app, they sometimes avoided logging altogether. When they put in loads of effort but didn’t see the outcome they hoped for, they felt deflated.

And there was another finding that really resonated with me: when people did something they were proud of but their tracker failed to record it, their frustration about the missing data could overshadow the actual achievement.

One person said:

“Argh, got a PB for a half-marathon in training and my phone died at the end, so none of it recorded to Strava. Shouldn’t matter… (but does).”

I know that feeling: I can have a brilliant swim, feel strong, relaxed and very pleased with myself – and then discover my watch stopped recording halfway through and think, "oh FFS". Nothing about the swim has changed. But somehow it feels as though it counts a tiny bit less - and when I think about it, that's actually quite ridiculous.

Looking internally, instead of immediately looking at my wrist

I'm a little worried that while tracking helps me in some ways, I think there’s a risk that I start outsourcing too much of my judgement to my watch.

I feel exhausted, but my watch says my energy is good.

I wake up feeling refreshed, but my watch says I slept badly.

I have a lovely walk, but apparently it wasn’t fast enough to count as exercise.

And every time I automatically believe the watch over myself, I’m practising something I’ve spent years trying to unlearn: trusting an external rule more than my own body.

So I’m going to try a small experiment. I’m not binning the watch (apart from anything else, I like getting my notifications on it 😉), but I want to change the order in which I get my information.

Before I open Samsung Health in the morning, I’m going to ask myself:

• How did I sleep?

• How does my body feel?

• How much energy do I think I have today?

Then, if I want to, I can look at the data. The information is still there, I'm just not prioritising it over my own experience. It's another source of information about my body, not the final authority on it.

And perhaps that’s the question worth asking about any kind of health tracking:

Is this data helping me understand myself better, or teaching me to trust myself less?