I felt the Watch’s effects ripple out into different parts of my life, beyond what had occurred with the sleep tracker.įor example, if I happened to exercise without recording it on my Watch, it was as if the workout didn’t happen. It became the source of serious anxiety and something else bordering on obsession that took me from being happy, to being exhausted, distracted, and beholden to a device. And those little rings! It was like a game to see how many days in a row I could close them.īut soon, that game wasn’t so fun anymore. I could answer calls on it, even when my actual phone was buried in my purse. I could finally see my heart rate in spin class. I ended up getting one for my birthday from my husband, and I eagerly strapped it on. In a 2016 study published in JAMA, researchers found that people trying to lose weight lost less while wearing a tracker.Ī recent, small study in BMC Psychology found that wearables had a mostly positive impact on wearers, with negative feelings mostly occurring when participants couldn’t wear the tracker.īut that’s not true for everyone, and although the research is spotty, I believe that the psychological effects of constantly tracking yourself in so many ways, can’t be underestimated.Īfter a year or so of hearing my friends talking about some of the cool features of the Apple Watch, I started to get interested. One in five of us uses a wearable device to lose weight, meet our fitness goals, and track our health metrics.īut research around whether or not all of that actually works, isn’t so convincing. I didn’t want to be reachable 24/7, and I had no interest in have something on my wrist that was always tracking my steps and workouts and standing and whatever else. When the Apple Watch came out, I was dead set again getting one. That’s that, I thought.īut little did I know that the sleep thing was just the beginning. I started taking my Watch off at night, and immediately noticed how relieved I was when I didn’t have to look at those numbers in the morning. I didn’t need the sleep tracker rubbing it into my face. Yes, I knew I was tired, and yes, I knew I had slept like sh*t. But during the night, if my husband snores, or the dog has to pee, or the kids feel sick, I’m woken up.Īnd when I was tired, which I often was, those numbers on my Watch seemed to make everything worse. Most of the time, my sleep is something that I have very little control over. Did I really need to track my sleep? And more importantly, what was I getting from this information? Was it making my health and sleep better? Or, could it possibly be making them worse? I had slept for decades without giving any of these things a second thought. I had been excited to use my Apple Watch as a sleep tracker, but it all began to just feel wrong and misleading. Research shows that the accuracy of sleep trackers – especially in tracking deep sleep – leaves a lot to be desired, so what I was looking at may not have even been correct. I was still feeling shortchanged that how I felt wasn’t congruent with what the tracker was telling me. It didn’t matter that my tiredness could have come from something else other than how I slept – overexercising, not fuelling properly, or just stress. I would also feel upset, as if I had done something wrong.Ĭonversely, on days when I was tired but the app told me that I had slept fine, I’d be frustrated. The sleep metrics I was seeing every morning on my Watch seemed like they were becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.įor example, on mornings when the app said that I had a terrible sleep, or that my deep sleep wasn’t great, I automatically felt tired, even if I was fine before I saw the numbers. I’ve never had serious problems with my sleep, but after a couple of months of using the sleep tracker, I started noticing some concerning trends. Would my numbers be normal? Would I be able to tie them to how I felt in the morning and the rest of the day? At first, the numbers on my Apple Watch were fascinating to me. Just having gotten my Watch, I was super excited to see a real drill down of how long I was asleep, and how much deep sleep I was getting. It started with the sleep tracking app that I downloaded for my new Apple Watch.
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