My Time and Issues With Fitness Trackers

I recently ditched my fitness trackers – my Garmin watch and an Oura ring. They started to feel a little toxic, and were bringing me down quite a bit. Towards the end of their use, I began to think about whether the devices were acting as the carrot or the stick. Most of the platforms are set up to be carrots – “motivating” the user to complete challenges, compete with friends, and meet goals for step counts, sleep scores, and stress levels. For some, these might be great incentives to achieve these things, and any failures of them aren’t really dwelt upon. For others, and I am putting myself in this group, they can act as standards that must be met each day. If I fail to meet them, I can feel like I’ve somehow let someone down (I’m not sure if it’s myself or the fitness tracker platform). This constant striving to meet these goals can feel exhausting. Chasing the carrot begins to feel like being hit with the stick; a desperate shuffling along to tick off all the requirements in order to say I’ve had a ‘successful’ or ‘healthy’ day.

I think the strangest and most ironic outcome of fitness trackers is the stress they cause around sleeping. The devices measure your sleep and often give you a score out of 100. I was usually hitting around 80+ most nights – often in the 90s. But any time I didn’t land in that ballpark, I felt like I’d somehow done something bad – like I’d really screwed up. The outcome of this would simply be moved to the following night, where I would need to make up for the terrible sleep score. On these nights, I would really aim for 90+. But how do you actually make yourself have a good sleep? Consecutive sub-80 scores would compound a feeling of dread, as I thought about the severe damage I must be doing, or the way that I won’t be ‘functioning at my peak level’. What this would accumulate to is the ridiculous situation of lying awake in bed, feeling stressed about not being able to fall asleep, fearing that I would wake up with a low sleep score. I can’t fall asleep because of the stress of not being able to fall asleep. My low sleep score is caused by my fear of getting a low sleep score.

So, I thought about ways to ‘healthily’ work with these fitness trackers. I tried committing to only checking it once a day. I tried committing to not checking it when I woke up. I thought about only checking it every 3 months to see longer trends rather than a day-by-day increase or decrease of my fitness levels and various scores. I then finally resorted to deleting the apps altogether, and to just have the data uploaded to the platforms through Wi-Fi. But then I thought, why on Earth am I even wearing the device if I’m not actually going to look at the data? So I’ve resorted to taking off the devices altogether and instead wear a normal dumbwatch.

Fitness Trackers and Our Bodies

Fitness trackers have a way of separating us from our own bodies. They tell us narratives about our bodies and our health that can contradict our own feelings we have from within them. There have been times when I wake up feeling refreshed, but check the sleep score and see, say, 70/100. I then start to think “you know what, I do actually feel pretty drowsy and unrefreshed”. The opposite is also true; I wake up feeling drowsy and unrefreshed, only to see a sleep score of 90, making me consider whether in fact I do feel refreshed and well slept. These technologies make us second guess our own sense of our bodies. They make our bodies something to be read and analysed, rather than felt from within. They cause a strange sensory dissonance, separating us from how we feel, and what a device tells us about ourselves. I’m not necessarily saying that the fitness trackers are inaccurate in their readings – in fact, I believe their accuracy is beside the point. In other words, I’m not saying there is a discrepancy between what is actually the case, and what is represented in the data. Instead, I’m drawing attention to the separation between what is felt from within the body and what is read from the analysis of the body. And, importantly, I feel that often, what is read and analysed is seen as more accurate, or a more authoritative source of information about our own bodies.

These sorts of strange, redundant cycles, catastrophes and feedback loops are a common feature of modern existence. These technologies are sold to us as ‘essential’; in order to reach ‘maximum potential’, or to enrich existence in some way, we must adopt them. But after sustained use, we find that in fact, they are part of, or the very cause of, the problem. This is the case for social media, being framed as the great connector while actually driving us apart. It’s the case for fitness trackers promising good health but instead causing obsession and higher stress. These are two examples of technologies of alienation – alienation from others, and alienation from ourselves.

Technology companies often present their products as a form of ‘help’ – whether by promising to keep us social, improve our health, or, in the case of financial services, make purchases more convenient. However, can these outcomes truly be considered ‘help’? Making it easier for someone to spend their money isn’t really helping them; it’s helping companies get into the pockets of their customers. I think it’s important to remain critical of the technologies we use, questioning their promises and the real consequences of their adoption.

Leaving the fitness trackers behind led me to rely on my own sense of my body to get an idea of how I was feeling, how I slept, how stressed I was, how active I’ve been. It turns out I don’t need a device to tell me how ready I am for the day; I can feel that pretty well by myself. Who would have thought!? (My partner, who has been saying this for over a year now while I’ve been complaining about the trackers, rolls her eyes.)