My rock bottom was when I caught myself at a nice dinner, transfixed by my phone under the table. I was opening the app for my smart watch, checking whether the numbers it assigned to my “training status” had improved since I finished my run an hour ago. The numbers hadn’t budged, so I closed the app and refreshed it, frowning a little. Was it broken? My companion asked what I was doing. “Nothing,” I lied.
At first, I loved that smart watch, which I used to get faster at racing marathons. Suddenly, I had metrics on things I didn’t even realize my body did: lactate thresholds, VO₂ max, Heart rate variability. Each evening I had a full report, telling me what this device thought of my performance.
Soon I couldn’t stop thinking about the numbers on the watch. I was addicted.
At the dawn of the smart watch era, the introduction of the Apple Watch in 2015, Tim Cook pitched the new device as aspirational tech, the next must-have gadget, loaded with apps and features. After a choppy start, smart watches have exploded in popularity in recent years and are expected to reach shipments of 230 million units by 2026. Lately, companies have been marketing these devices less as luxury products and more as essential medical devices, necessities for anyone concerned about health. Amid the pandemic, this pitch seems to be working.
Some brands now have ECG monitors, which let you check for atrial fibrillation, and pulse oximeters, a useful feature during a coronavirus infection, when low blood oxygen can be a useful signal. Others can track your skin’s exposure to the sun. If you fall down in the woods, Apple assures us in some rather alarming advertising, its watch can call for help. And this kind of monitoring isn’t confined to watches: Smart beds that will report via an app on how you slept last night are among an arsenal of health-monitoring home technologies. There are light bulbs in development that will measure your heart rate and body temperature. A breathalyzing product called Lumen invites users to breathe into a tube that it claims can read your metabolism “to see if you have enough energy for your workout or if you should fuel up.”
The message is clear. Self-quantification isn’t just aspirational anymore — it’s essential. A roster of famously healthy-seeming people endorse these claims. Coros makes a watch for the marathon world-record holder Eliud Kipchoge. Jennifer Aniston says she’s “addicted” to her Oura ring, which tracks everything from breathing patterns to blood oxygen to sleep. In 2017 Gwyneth Paltrow promoted the Frédérique Constant Horological smart watch and its pointed command that women “Move More, Sleep Better, Improve.”
But does this constant monitoring of our vital signs truly yield better health? There’s no clear answer yet. One study found that people trying to lose weight who used wearable technology to help actually lost less weight than their watch-free counterparts. A review in the American Journal of Medicine found “little indication that wearable devices provide a benefit for health outcomes.” Another issue is that the measuring abilities of wearables are imperfect for some metrics.
I also worry that the safety-net sales pitch ignores one major downside to all this quantification: It can interfere with our ability to know our own bodies. Once you outsource your well-being to a device and convert it into a number, it stops being yours. The data stands in for self-awareness. We let a gadget tell us when and how to move, when we’re tired, when we’re hungry.
With my smart watch, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and check my app to see how I slept — instead of just taking a moment to notice that I was still tired. When I discovered that my watch could measure my stress levels, it was as if I’d started carrying around an expensive psychological pyramid scheme on my wrist. The more I used my watch to monitor my stress, the higher my stress levels rose.
It’s an extension of our hustle-oriented culture, said the executive coach and performance expert Brad Stulberg, author of “The Practice of Groundedness.” “Our culture promotes the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the predominant arbiter of success, and these devices play right into that,” he told me. “It’s like you’re trying to win at this game instead of living your life. Instead of learning what your body feels like, you have a number.”
Add a social or competitive component, as in the fitness app Strava or the community features on Peloton, and the feelings of control and empowerment that fitness can foster can morph quickly into the opposite. Halfway through one marathon training cycle, I discovered a new trick: My watch could measure my overall fitness level, assigning it a number, plotting its change over time and telling me how my levels compared with others’, sorted by gender and age. I craved its approval.
If it feels like an addiction, that’s because it can work similarly to smartphone and other digital addictions. Dependency is what these devices are designed to foster.
“These technologies have, in essence, druggified even exercise,” said Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, and the author of “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,” which explores addictive behavior. “You may think, ‘A wearable device that keeps track of my actions couldn’t possibly be bad because it’s just a watch, and I’m just, for example, monitoring my heart rate, which is about my physical wellness.’ But in fact, we very much can become compulsively fixated on these wearable devices — in a way that is akin to addiction.”
These devices don’t just record your behavior — they influence it and keep you coming back. You become dependent on external validation. This in itself is nothing new: As with weighing yourself on a scale, or calculating your body mass index, or measuring your step goals, it’s easier to read a number than it is to know instinctively whether you are healthy. But you can’t quantify your way to good health. The reality is much harder.
For a while, my smart watch probably did help me get healthier. I know I got fitter. But I started to feel that my health wasn’t grounded in my own body anymore, or even in my mind. I didn’t know how my workout had gone until I opened the app.
I had been using numbers — and the success they validated — as a shortcut to feeling good enough in general. Exercise wasn’t helping me rebound from pressure anymore; it was adding to it.
Of course these watches can be useful: for health data, reminding you to move more or maybe even that emergency call if you wind up falling in the woods. Many of us make better choices when we know we’re being watched.
But if you’re thinking it might be time for a break from the numbers, I propose a challenge for the year ahead: Try taking your cues from your body instead of a device.
That’s what I did. At some point in the pandemic, I took off my watch. It left a stripe of skin on my wrist where it had spent years blocking the sun. Then I lost it and never bothered to find it.
The adjustment didn’t always feel natural. Once you outsource your confidence to something else, it takes a while to come back. But finally, I stopped counting, stopped tracking.
Now sometimes I come back from running in the dreariness of the pandemic and feel great, like the grown-up Peter Pan in “Hook,” out there relearning how to fly. The miles disappear when they’re done. And the only one who knows they happened is me.
Lindsay Crouse (@lindsaycrouse) is an editor and producer in Opinion who writes on gender, ambition and power. She produced the Emmy-nominated Opinion Video series “Equal Play,” which brought widespread reform to women’s sports.
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