At a Glance
Fitness trackers and wellness devices can encourage healthier habits by monitoring activity, sleep and other health indicators. However, constantly checking data, worrying about normal fluctuations and treating daily targets as measures of success can contribute to anxiety. A healthier approach involves focusing on long-term patterns, setting flexible goals, limiting unnecessary checking and recognising when tracking becomes stressful.
Does Technology Affect Your Mental Health?
Fitness watches and wellness trackers can tell us an extraordinary amount about ourselves. We can see how many steps we have taken, how long we slept, our resting heart rate, our stress levels, how much exercise we have done and whether we have met our targets for the day.
For many people, this information is genuinely useful. It can encourage us to move more, develop healthier routines and notice things we might otherwise miss. But there can also be a point where more information doesn’t make us feel any healthier. Instead, it gives us more things to check and more numbers to worry about.
If you have ever felt perfectly fine until your watch told you that you slept badly, or felt disappointed because you were a few hundred steps short of your daily target, you may have already noticed how easily useful information can start affecting the way you feel.
So, are fitness trackers bad for your mental health, or does it simply depend on how we use them?
When Wellness Tracking Is Actually Helpful
There are plenty of good reasons to use a fitness or wellness tracker. One of the biggest advantages is that it can give you a clearer picture of what you are actually doing rather than what you think you are doing.
You might discover that you move far less on days when you work from home, for example, or that your sleep tends to be better when you exercise earlier in the day. Seeing those patterns can make it easier to make small changes that suit your own lifestyle.
Trackers can also be motivating. If you are trying to become more active, seeing your steps increase over several weeks can give you a useful sense of progress. The same can apply to exercise, running distances or other goals that are easy to measure.
Problems are less likely when the information is treated as guidance rather than a set of rules. There is a big difference between noticing you have been less active than usual and feeling that you have failed because you did not reach an arbitrary number of steps.
A tracker can provide useful information, but it does not need to decide whether you have had a good or bad day.
Can Fitness Trackers Cause Anxiety?
For some people, having constant access to health data can increase anxiety rather than reduce it.
A reading may be perfectly normal, but if you do not understand what it means, it is easy to start wondering whether something is wrong. You may notice that your resting heart rate differs from yesterday, that your sleep score has dropped or that your watch has recorded a change you were not expecting. Even some normal variation can then start to feel significant.
This can be particularly difficult for people who are already prone to worrying about their health. Fitness trackers and health anxiety can be an unhelpful combination when every change in a reading leads to more checking, Googling or monitoring.
You may also feel tempted to keep looking for reassurance. You may check your heart rate because you feel anxious and want to make sure everything is fine. The number reassures you for a while, but because checking helped reduce the anxiety, you become more likely to check again the next time you feel worried. Over time, the tracker can become part of the anxiety rather than something that supports your health. Technology can start affecting your mental health before you realise it.
So, can fitness trackers cause anxiety? They certainly can contribute to it for some people, particularly when the numbers are repeatedly checked, interpreted as signs of danger or used to seek reassurance.
Are We Becoming Too Obsessed With Optimising Ourselves?
A huge amount of technology now aims to help us become better versions of ourselves.
We can measure our steps, sleep, heart rate, exercise, calories, recovery and stress. Some devices even give us a daily score telling us how ready we are to exercise or how well our body has recovered.
Used sensibly, this information can be interesting and helpful. But there is also a risk that looking after ourselves becomes another area in which we feel we are supposed to perform well.
Sleep is a good example. Sleep is something the body normally does automatically, yet it can start to feel like something we need to do to succeed. A low sleep score can leave you worrying that you did not get enough deep sleep or wondering how badly the day will go as a result. That worry can sometimes become more disruptive than the original poor night’s sleep.
The same thing can happen with exercise. You might have had a busy day, walked to work and spent the evening with friends, but still feel you haven’t done enough because your watch says you missed your target.
Well-being should make life easier. If trying to optimise every part of it starts creating pressure, it may be worth considering how much importance you give the numbers.
Your Body Is More Than a Dashboard
Wearable technology can measure some useful things, but it cannot tell you everything about how you are doing.
A sleep tracker can estimate aspects of your sleep, but it cannot fully tell you how rested you feel. A step counter knows how far you have walked, but it does not know whether you have spent the day doing something enjoyable, whether your body needs rest or whether you are recovering from illness. This is where it can be useful to pay attention to your own experience as well as the data.
You may wake up feeling rested even though your sleep score is lower than usual. You may feel energetic on a day when your tracker says your recovery is not ideal. You may also feel exhausted even though all your numbers look perfectly normal.
Your own physical and emotional experience still matters.
When people ask does technology affect mental health, this is one of the areas worth considering. Technology does not simply give us information. The way we interpret that information can also affect how we feel about ourselves and our health.
How to Build a Healthier Relationship With Your Wellness Tracker
You do not necessarily need to stop using your tracker if you notice yourself becoming too focused on it. Often, changing the way you use it is enough.
Start by thinking about which information is genuinely useful to you. If your main goal is to move more, you might decide that steps are useful but that checking your sleep stages every morning adds very little. You don’t have to use every feature simply because your device provides it.
It can also help to loosen rigid targets. Ten thousand steps is not a pass-or-fail mark. Some days you will move more and some days less, depending on what else is happening in your life.
Try to look at longer-term patterns rather than individual readings as well. One unusual night of sleep or a slightly different heart rate doesn’t necessarily tell you very much on its own.
You can also experiment with not checking certain data immediately. If looking at your sleep score first thing in the morning affects how you feel about the day ahead, try getting up and noticing how you actually feel before opening the app.
And if tracking has started to feel stressful rather than useful, taking a break is an option. Your health doesn’t disappear because you stop measuring it for a while.
When Health Tracking Starts Feeding Anxiety
There is a difference between being interested in your health and feeling increasingly controlled by the information you are collecting.
You may notice you check your statistics repeatedly throughout the day, worrying about small changes or looking online for explanations whenever a number falls outside its usual range. Some people start changing their plans based on what their tracker says, even when they feel perfectly well.
You might also feel anxious when you cannot wear the device or uncomfortable when you forget to charge it because you will lose a day’s data.
Guilt can become part of it too. Missing a step target, recording less exercise than usual or receiving a poor sleep score may start to feel like evidence that you have done something wrong.
If you are searching for how to get rid of health anxiety, repeatedly checking your body or your health data for reassurance is worth paying attention to. Reassurance can make you feel better temporarily, but if you become dependent on it, the need to check can become stronger rather than weaker.
It can help to ask what the tracker is actually adding to your life. If it helps you make sensible decisions and motivates you to look after yourself, it is doing its job. If it is making you think about your health far more than you otherwise would, something may need to change.
Your Tracker Should Be a Tool, Not Your Judge
Wellness trackers are not inherently good or bad for mental health. They are tools, and their usefulness depends partly on the relationship we develop with them.
A step count can encourage you to go for a walk. Sleep data can help you notice a pattern. Exercise tracking can show you how much fitter you have become. None of those numbers needs to become a judgement about how well you are doing as a person.
If you find yourself becoming increasingly anxious about health information, struggling to stop checking or feeling unable to trust how you feel without consulting a device, hypnotherapy can help you change some of the thinking and behaviours that have developed around it.
How Hypnotherapy Can Help
With health anxiety, there can be a strong habit of monitoring the body, looking for signs that something is wrong and seeking reassurance whenever anxiety appears. The reassurance may help briefly, but the mind never gets the opportunity to learn that the anxious feeling can settle without checking.
Hypnotherapy gives us an opportunity to work with those habitual responses. We can help reduce the urge to check, change the associations that have developed around certain sensations or numbers and mentally rehearse responding differently when the familiar worry appears.
We can also use hypnosis to reduce general anxiety and strengthen a greater sense of trust in yourself and your body. Positive suggestion can help change the expectation that every unusual sensation or reading requires investigation, while reinforcing calmer and more realistic ways of responding.
If you feel the need to address the anxiety caused by your fitness trackers, feel free to book an online hypnotherapy consultation with me, Susannah.
Track Your Health, But Don’t Let Trackers Take Over Your Mental Health
The aim is not to make you ignore genuine health concerns. It is to help you recognise the difference between taking reasonable care of your health and spending so much time monitoring it that the monitoring itself has become a source of anxiety.
Your tracker can give you useful information, but it does not need to be something you continually check for reassurance or use to decide how healthy you are allowed to feel. When you can take the information you need and leave the rest alone, technology can go back to being a useful tool rather than another thing to worry about.
