Fitness trackers and smartwatches can provide a wealth of information regarding your health. Measuring your steps, workouts, heart rate, and other data can be helpful. However, your fitness tracker or smartwatch can also lead to stress and bad habits that could make your goals harder to achieve.
As someone who is a sucker for data-driven results, my wearables are essential to help me achieve my fitness goals. Not surprisingly, the tech has progressed significantly over the past several decades. Today, one wearable can measure more than just your heart rate. It can also monitor several advanced metrics such as sleep cycles, blood oxygen levels, and heart rate variability. Unfortunately, all this data can easily lead to confusion and frustration.
How A Fitness Tracker Can Cause Stress
You may think it’s silly that a fitness tracker can cause stress. For example, a popular notion is to walk 10,000 steps a day to improve your health. It’s tempting to look at your fitness tracker throughout the day to see how close you are to achieving 10,000 steps. What happens when you don’t reach 10,000 steps? Unfortunately, it can cause some people to feel disappointment or anxiety.
Your fitness tracker can cause stress in other ways, such as notifications that tell you to stay active, warnings of breaking your streaks, sleep scores, stress detection, and other alerts. As a result, you may change your behaviors to achieve those goals, such as going for a walk at 11 p.m. to reach 10,000 steps for the day. You may even exercise when your body is telling you to rest.
Avoiding Stress From Your Fitness Tracker
A fitness tracker is meant to help you achieve your goals by tracking your progress over time. Unfortunately, it’s easy to look at one data point, like the number of steps you’ve taken in one day, and then base your success solely on whether you’ve reached an arbitrary number. If you’re beating yourself up over goals and alerts from your fitness tracker, then it’s time to retake control.
Set Your Own Goals, No Matter How Small
If your fitness goals are “to exercise more” or “get in shape”, then you don’t have anything measurable to call success. What do those goals really mean? If you don’t define your goals, you may follow the preset goals on your fitness tracker, such as trying to walk 10,000 steps a day. Depending on your height, 10,000 steps could be as much as 5 miles (~ 8 km) daily. That’s a lot, even for those who walk, hike, or run as part of their exercise routine. In fact, 10,000 steps may be an unreasonable goal for you.
Instead, establish your own goals and ignore the ones on your fitness tracker. Some people do find their fitness tracker alerts helpful to keep them motivated. However, it’s best to turn off your fitness tracker reminders if you are stressing out, rearranging your schedule, or exercising to make your numbers.
Your goals don’t have to be significant. In fact, start small and build upon each success. For example, let’s say you want to walk 10,000 steps a day. First, wear your fitness tracker for a week. This will give you an idea of a starting point. If you average 2,000 steps a day, start by trying to achieve 2,500 instead. If you can consistently achieve 2,500 steps, increase your goal by another 500. Repeat this strategy until you get to your overall steps goal.
This strategy can be used for any metric from your fitness tracker. Regardless of your goal, celebrate the small wins because small wins are progress. Instead of feeling discouraged when you miss your goal, you’ll have enough success behind you to know you’re making progress on days when you miss the mark.
Forget Streaks, Leaderboards, And Challenges
Fitness trackers and apps use streaks, leaderboards, challenges, and other well-intentioned features to gamify your efforts and keep you motivated as you work towards your fitness goals. These features are meant to help you on days when your motivation is low or simply not there. Unfortunately, if you’re like me and have competitive tendencies, these features can turn your fitness tracker into a stress and anxiety machine.
Streaks are impossible to maintain because life happens. Eventually, you will have to miss exercising for one reason or another because of some obligation. In fact, you should build in rest days to do light or no exercise so your body can recover.
Leaderboards can cause stress when comparing yourself to other people. In some cases, you’re thrown into the ring with strangers who could be more fit than you because they happen to live in the same city or are in your age group. In fact, the same thing can happen between friends.
Challenges such as walking 300,000 steps, running 100 km, or cycling 400 km in a month can be motivating. Unfortunately, like streaks and leaderboards, it can cause stress and anxiety, especially if you don’t have an established exercise habit.
If you rearrange your schedule to exercise or exercise when you don’t feel like it, you’ll eventually burn out, become ill, or become injured. When that happens, you may be forced to stop exercising altogether. A streak, your standings in a leaderboard, or a badge aren’t worth it.
Listen To Your Body
No matter what’s next on your workout plan, what your fitness tracker says, or how close you are to accomplishing a goal, if your body is telling you to take a break, then take a break. Unfortunately, you’ll get sick or injured if you don’t listen to your body. Never try to push through pain or discomfort.
On the other hand, the better you become at listening to your body, the more proactive you can be by adjusting your workouts or intensity. However, don’t be afraid of taking a day off. Fortunately, one or two days off will not erase all your hard work and progress.
Tracking Your Progress
Your fitness tracker is one of the best tools for helping you accomplish your fitness goals. It is great at gathering data, which you can then analyze using an app to see your progress unfold.
Tracking your progress gives you a bird’ s-eye view of your effort. It can show you how far you’ve come and point out areas to adjust. Reviewing your fitness journal routinely can help you stay on track.
However, remember that all these numbers are there to help you see the big picture. They are not meant for you to judge yourself poorly because they aren’t what you expect them to be. Instead, your data is like your fitness tracker, another tool to help you set reasonable goals and track your progress.
The Takeaway
Your fitness tracker is one tool to help you achieve your fitness goals. However, it’s a fine line between exercising for your health and exercising to reach a goal set by your fitness tracker. As a result, you may be causing yourself stress and anxiety while trying to achieve goals from your fitness tracker alerts.
Instead, set your own goals. Use your fitness tracker to track your progress and give real-time feedback while exercising. Don’t take streaks, challenges, and leaderboards too seriously since they can influence your behavior and make exercise a chore instead of something that is supposed to be fun. Most importantly, listen to your body and take a break if needed. Otherwise, you may stop exercising and derail your goals because of frustration, illness, burnout, or injury.
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.
