Smartwatches, fitness trackers, pedometers, sleep pads, smart rings, chest straps, and continuous glucose monitors are just some of the many wearables available to help you achieve your health and fitness goals. To live better longer, you may use one or more of these tech options to keep you on track.
These devices promise to optimize our health and fitness, from how we sleep and recover to tracking vitals and workouts. With all this data, are wearables helping you improve your health and well-being, or are they quietly sabotaging you?
So, what can you do to ensure you’re using wellness tech wisely? Let’s explore how to use it to help and not hinder your fitness and health journey.
Wearable Data Overload vs. Health Insights
One of the main appeals of wearable technology is its data. Steps taken, calories burned, sleep quality and quantity, recovery and readiness scores, workout results, heart rate variability, and SpO2 are just some of the datapoints at your fingertips. But in practice, it is overwhelming.
Too much information can lead to decision fatigue, which is when you’re mentally overloaded after making lots of decisions. As a result, decision-making becomes more difficult, leading to stress, anxiety, and poor choices.
When presented with all this data, it can be challenging to know what’s important. You may even begin to rely on your fitness tracker or other tech to decide whether you’re ready to exercise. So instead of supporting your health goals, your wearables hinder them. For example, you may love morning runs, but your fitness tracker says you need more recovery, so you feel guilty going for a run even though you feel great.
While wearables give you insight into your health based on the data they collect, nothing will replace how you feel. The data may suggest you’re ready to rock, but in reality, you may feel run down or sore. How you feel should always be your guide over whatever the data suggests.
When Optimization Becomes Obsession
Wearables should provide feedback to help you optimize your behaviors and achieve your health and fitness goals faster. Ironically, some people tracking their sleep can worry so much about their sleep quality that it causes sleeplessness.
Glucose trackers may lead to developing unhealthy avoidance of certain foods that trigger normal glucose responses simply because they cause a temporary spike. The same is true for the availability of smart scales, where a person may be weighing themselves too frequently and observing the natural weight fluctuations throughout the day.
Your health is not a math problem that wearables can solve. If your pursuit of self-improvement begins to harm you mentally, emotionally, or physically, it’s time to make a change. It’s reasonable to use a wearable to track your steps and motivate you to move more. However, it’s another matter when you feel guilty, anxious, or like a failure if you don’t hit your step goal, even on a rest day.
Your Intuition Is At Risk
Wearables provide awareness about your health that can help you match sensations to real-time data and feedback. However, suppose you start relying on screens, data, and notifications to tell you how ready your body is for exercise or how much deep sleep you had. In that case, you may stop trusting your body signals like energy, motivation, mood, and other cues.
Once you start relying on your wearables, you start trusting data more than how you feel. For example, you may feel well-rested, but your fitness tracker says you slept poorly, so you believe you’re tired even when you feel awake.
What also happens is that the gamification of reaching your goals shifts your motivation. In other words, you may start moving, exercising, sleeping, or eating to hit goals instead of what your body needs. Even though you’re exhausted, you may go for a late evening walk just to reach a daily goal before midnight. Does this behavior sound reasonable?
Avoiding The Tech Trap
Wearables are very useful, but they should help you achieve your health and fitness goals without dictating your behavior and causing you to ignore your body’s signals. Would you still exercise even if your watch didn’t record it? If so, you may be driven more by the dopamine of digital rewards than your well-being. But you can change your tech-reliant habit to tech-assisted.
So, how can you avoid the tech trap and ensure that your wearables help you reach your health goals rather than hinder them? Let’s look at tips to help balance a tech-focused approach to your health and wellness.
Only Track Data Related To Your Goals
While wearables provide a plethora of data, you only need to track data related to your health goals. For example, tracking the number of steps can be helpful if you’re looking to move more during the day. If you want to increase your fitness level, tracking your heart rate during workouts can ensure you hit your target heart rate.
There is no need to track everything. Instead, focus on the few metrics to help you achieve your goals. Ignore the rest for now, as it’s just fun to see. If you find a different metric is helping, start tracking that one, too.
Lastly, there are no bad results from any one data point. So don’t beat yourself up when you aren’t receiving the expected results. In fact, the data may be telling you that you’re overreaching and may need a break.
Emphasize Trends Over Daily Goals
While you’re using wearables to reach your health goals, there’s a bigger picture at play. While it may be satisfying to achieve your goals daily, the ultimate goal is to use your health tech to build a healthy habit. Tracking yourself over time lets you get a bigger picture of your progress. You can see if you’re progressively exercising for longer, taking more steps, or covering greater distances. You can’t tell that from any one day.
Take advantage of a fitness app that can collect your data over time and show you a chart of your progress. Tracking helps you identify patterns, instead of guessing why you’re struggling. It can also break that all-or-nothing mindset.
Tracking your progress shows that consistency matters more than perfection. Try not to get frustrated when you miss your daily goals. One number from your fitness tracker doesn’t make or break your success. What matters is how you are doing over time.
Schedule Tech-Free Days
Try disconnecting from your wearables for one day a week. Just because it’s not recorded doesn’t mean it doesn’t count toward your overall well-being. While unplugged, focus on how you feel, exercise, sleep, and move about your day. This can help remind you that your body is the ultimate indicator of your current state, not any technology or data.
Always Believe Your Body Over The Data
No matter what the data or any notification says, you should not ignore signs of fatigue, illness, or soreness that isn’t going away. Pushing through to reach a daily goal is a recipe for disaster because it increases your chances of injury and burnout.
No goal is worth your health. If your body is tired and needs a day off, skip your workout to rest. Skipping one or two workouts will not erase all your hard work. In fact, rest may be what you need to recover and renew your motivation to pursue your health goals.
Prioritizing rest and listening to your body will enable you to live better longer, and maintain your quality of life as you age. So, when you use your wearables as tools while letting how you feel be the guide, you can optimize your workouts for health and achieve your goals.
The Takeaway
Wearables can support your health journey, but they shouldn’t override how you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally. When you start relying on data more than your own body, like skipping workouts because of a low readiness score or feeling guilty about missing a step goal, you may do more harm than good.
To get the most from wearables, track only what aligns with your goals, focus on long-term trends, and take breaks to rest and recover when your body needs it. Let data guide you, and not control you.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your workouts, weight, mood, calories, and more. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect supported gadgets to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
