My Apple Watch is going to hate this’: Our wearables are making us anxious and obsessive

These days, millions of us have smart devices strapped to our wrists, fingers and arms, measuring our metrics and building a picture of the “quantified self” to make us healthier, more active and better prepared for a medical emergency.

Wearables can help improve our wellbeing and nudge us towards better habits, but it’s less common to hear about the flipside: the anxiety at failing to close your rings, the frantic exercise to ensure you maintain your streak, and the obsession with meeting your targets on a daily basis.

These are feelings I know all too well. Having worn some of the best Apple Watches for close to a decade, I’ve watched it become an essential part of my life — so much so that I’ve tried closing my rings when I’m ill, on vacation, or should otherwise be resting and recuperating. I obsess over those little rings on my watch.

I know this is a problem for me. But what I wanted to find out was whether this is a more widespread issue, and if it is, what can be done about it. Is wearable tech making us more anxious? And can it be redesigned to push back against these tendencies and help us feel more relaxed, not less?

To find out, I spoke to tech and wellness experts who shared their thoughts on the ways wearables can impact our health — for better or worse.

The endless streak

(Image credit: DMstudio House / Shutterstock)

During the FIFA World Cup in July, I was preparing to wake up in the early hours to watch England play Mexico at 1am local time. I set my alarm, went to bed early, and got ready to cheer on my team without waking the neighbors.

Yet there was one thought that I couldn’t get out of my mind as I contemplated the looming disruption to my sleep: my Apple Watch is going to hate this.

It’s now become part of my morning ritual to check my sleep score on my Apple Watch. Every high score gives me a little dopamine hit, every low result a crushing sense of disappointment. And I knew that waking up at 1am and staying awake for two hours in the middle of the night was going to make my Watch very disappointed indeed.

In the end, I rolled over and went back to sleep when my alarm woke me for the game. I didn’t watch it, and I know that was only partly because I was woken at some ungodly hour — it was also because, to a certain extent, I’ve allowed the scores and metrics on my Watch to govern the way I live my life.

That’s not the only way this has happened to me. I recently hit a streak of closing my Move ring for 2,000 consecutive days. But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some days when I entered a fake exercise to get me past my calorie goal on a day when I was ill, tired or simply unmotivated.

Why cheating is fine, but resting is not, is something I admit doesn’t make much sense. But what I do know is that the thought of losing my streak absolutely fills me with dread. 2,000 consecutive days on my Move streak sounds like a lot, but knowing myself, I’m sure I’m going to try to continue it until the day I die, such is the anxiety associated with the idea of my streak ending.

The dark side of wearable tech

(Image credit: Future)

I’ve long had perfectionist tendencies, but it’s through observing the way I interact with my Watch that it’s really become clear to me how strongly my device’s gamification of fitness has struck a chord with me — and led me into some unhealthy, possibly obsessive behaviors.

I spoke to Dr Dana McKay, Associate Dean of Interaction, Technology & Information at RMIT University in Australia, to get her opinion.

“These technologies are often designed to help us form habits,” McKay pointed out. "They often use tools for so called ‘persuasive design’.... to persuade us to do something we wanted to anyway when we bought the device."

There are two problems with this:, Dr McKay points out: the possibility of becoming “unhealthily focused” on the device, and the prospect of being convinced to don a wearable by an outside party, like an insurance company, and sharing data we don’t want to share. Some private health insurance companies may subsidise the purchase of a wearable in exchange to access to lower premiums, and sharing your tracker's information to an insurer's app.

Yang Wei, Professor of Wearable Technology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, agreed, saying that while wearables can help us form positive habits, we also need to be careful around them.

“For many people, wearables can be motivating and empowering,” Wei noted, “but for some users they can also create pressure, anxiety, guilt, or unhealthy dependence on data.” After all, wearables “create a framework for what counts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ activity, sleep, recovery, or productivity,” Wei said. If that data is framed the wrong way, it can push users in an unhelpful direction.

Wei also warned that “One of the risks is that people may start to trust the device more than their own body. For example, someone may feel they slept badly because their watch gave them a poor sleep score, even if they felt fine. Or they may feel they have failed because they did not close a ring or reach a step target, even if they had a perfectly reasonable day.”

That certainly resonates with me: I consciously work to close my Apple Watch’s rings, viewing it as a requirement for each day. A full set has almost become a condition for having a ‘good’ day, regardless of how I’m feeling or what I’ve achieved. And this overreliance on a piece of tech strapped to my wrist feels key to the negative habits I seem to have formed. So what can I do about it?

How to push back

(Image credit: Kanut Photo / Shutterstock)

If wearables have the potential to form negative habits, what can we do to put things right? The answer is often remarkably simple, both McKay and Wei believe: take your watch off from time to time.

“There is no need to wear your device while on vacation unless a health practitioner recommends it,” McKay advised. If your relationship with your fitness tracker has become a problem, ...

Indexed and credited by AIPROPX. Originating outlet: TechRadar. Open at source →