Do Your Health Plans Help You Feel Better?
Health Trackers: Just imagine, you wake up, see your sleep score and are oddly unhappy about it. You rested, but you didn’t do as well as you wanted to. This type of guilt doesn’t come from feeling bad physically, it comes from worrying about your data. An increasing number of people see that the borderline between being interested in health and being too concerned with health is much thinner than expected.
Fitness watchers, smartwatches, rings and apps were invented to give us information about our physical activity. They do in many respects. And yet, there’s another truth that we don’t see in the marketing, but it’s becoming more notable to us day-to-day.
The Quantified Self: Where It Starts to Spiral
At first, tracking steps, calories, sleep and recovery was meant to promote better health. It gave me confidence to check my health without having to go to a doctor. In a short time, everything feels like a performance. Every bite was recorded, each run was timed and every day not exercised had to make sense.
A few users start to think they are controlled by their technology. They don’t guide their actions with their own judgment, but wait for someone to tell them how to behave. At the beginning, it might just be skipping some rest, just to achieve your step goal. After some time, it shifts from addiction to dependence. When your health gets measured by a scorecard, resting makes you feel unproductive.
When Looking to Track Health Becomes Anxiety-Inducing
It’s now more important to control the economy than just to count its numbers. A lot of users start every day by reviewing how much they slept and sometimes walk around their house in the middle of the night to reach their daily activity goal. Alternatively, they think less about priorities and more about perfection.
For a number of people such challenges result in anxiety, sleeping issues or unusual eating habits. When you share your metrics, you feel a special push to perform properly, since people can see your achievements online. It’s not enough to be healthy; you want to be the healthiest compared to others around you. When you’re not productive, it feels as though you’re somehow lagging, according to your goals, even if you are still capable.
Using Social Proof and Competition
These apps and platforms push people to post their fitness achievements, compete and get higher on the leaderboard. It may drive some people forward, but it negative affects the mental state of others. What starts out as inspiration ends up being self-criticism. It makes you wonder if you could have run farther. Why was I not in a heart rate zone that was right for me during exercise?
Because of this, people might keep working beyond their body’s limits or forget to pay attention to injuries when they compete. These activities might become so regular for younger users that they find it tough to change them. Health-related activities turn into something that must be done continuously without stopping.
Expert Observation: Unintended Consequences from Everyday Actions
Clinical psychologists and specialists in behavior are starting to review the evidence. For a few people, using awareness devices makes them more attentive to their surroundings. It can cause feelings of hunger, tiredness or distress to be ignored.
We start worrying about the outcome of a test, instead of listening to our feelings. Feeling disconnected from our intuition can result in feeling more anxious, less flexible and more judgmental of ourselves. A device that helps us can now function as a digital critic all the time.
An Awakening to the Real World
A story that particularly caught my attention is about a young professional who kept wearing her tracker all the time, nearly for three years. Motivation gradually developed into an unhealthy obsession. She decided to give up going to parties to increase her step counts and it was impossible for her to go to bed without checking her heart rate many times that night.
After the therapist suggested removing the tracker for a break, she began to feel agitated, anxious and guilty. Eventually, she started feeling less stressed. Her sleep quality improved. She was happy and cheerful once more. Having all the data helped her health instead of harming it.
To stay hidden, How Do You Track But Avoid Being Found?
For some, it’s not important to quit trackers at all; just set some rules instead. Simple habits can help you keep your health from going off track:
- Seeing trends is better than analyzing every daily result. Zoom out. Slow but real progress is still possible.
- Set yourself aims focused on emotional growth, not just physical achievements. ‘How do I want to feel?’, you should ask, instead of just counting what you need to achieve.
- Pay attention to how you feel before launching your app. Stretch, breathe or move for a moment before using it.
- Take some time off from thinking about it. Try not to use your tracker for one weekend each month and pay attention to your feelings.
Wise use of these tools makes life better. Once we give them power, they change life into doing things perfectly.
To sum up: Are Your Health Trackers Helpful or Harmful to You?
Their best use is to help people know more, want to improve and keep each other responsible. However, if they begin telling us how to live, they go from useful tools to problems. Living flexibly is what makes you healthy, not having flawless data.
Have you ever stopped to think if your body or your gadget is in charge? If the problem is the device, then who is in charge?