Here’s a good news/bad news example of how technology can help and hurt us. Wearable technology that allows us to effectively monitor our health so that we can react to the information can also contribute to greater health-based stress and anxiety. If you’re the type of person who constantly checks the data that wearables provide, listen up—they may not be for you.
Fitness trackers, biosensors, smart watches, bands, and smart-health clothing can lead the wearer to fixate and have an unhealthy obsession with bodily data, defeating the device’s goal.
How do you know if you should lay off these types of wearables? Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- Is the device causing me to worry/stress more about my physical health?
- Do I check and monitor the data more often than I would like to?
- Is checking wearable data getting in the way of other parts of my life, including work, pleasurable activities, or relationships?
- Is looking at the data the device puts out “automatic” or involuntary?
A warning was published a few years ago in the Cardiovascular Digital Health Journal: “although unlimited access to digital health information can motivate some individuals to engage in healthy behaviors, these data may inadvertently contribute to pathologic symptom monitoring and impaired function in others.”
When we overcheck, our behavior can fall into the category of “care-seeking,” viewed as a maladaptive response to anxiety regarding our physical health. The behavior is unhealthy and potentially damaging and distracts us from our lives.
Another example of problematic use of a wearable is from a 2024 study on the impact of smartwatches on health-related anxiety. Researchers found that “some participants mentioned an increase in perceived stress” upon wearing a health-monitoring smartwatch for one week while cautioning that “the impact of smartwatches on perceived stress and health anxiety is complex and individual-specific.” It’s important to ask yourself whether persistent health monitoring made by possible our smart devices will be helpful or detrimental.
It is important to recognize that anxiety often causes us to seek definitive answers, our anxious minds telling us that only a concrete answer can eliminate our worry. In the case of our physical health, however, we must also recognize that our “numbers” change throughout the course of a normal day: Our pulse rate increases and decreases, our respiration changes based on our activity, and all of this can be affected by our sleep quality.
Don’t ditch your health-monitoring device yet. Wearables offer many benefits, and we can always reassess our relationship with them if they distract us from other important areas of our lives. That’s when to ditch it.
