Is Your Fitness Tracker Actually Hurting You?
One morning, I dragged myself up a peak I’d hiked a dozen times before. The trail snaked through the trees, rounding bends that looked maddeningly close to the open ridgeline. Instead of reveling in the challenge, I grew more irritated. The only difference in this ascent? I was wearing a tracker, and the tediously steep section was a lot longer than I thought. I tapped the screen every few minutes, exasperated I’d gained over 2,500 feet and still wasn’t out of the literal and proverbial woods.
I don’t normally wear a watch. I know myself well enough to predict an unhealthy fixation on metrics. But my job in the outdoor industry means testing gear, so I spent the summer strapping on gadgets. Turns out I was correct: I don’t have the brain for it.
Integrated wearables first started gaining popularity in the 2000s (think FitBit and Nike+ FuelBand), which seem positively quaint compared to today’s wrist-bound supercomputers. Logging apps were introduced in the 2010s, incorporating visually appealing readouts that fed into consumers’ desire to share online. Today, wearables track everything from sleep quality to heart rate variability and blood oxygen levels. And like most consumer technology, the benefits and drawbacks swing in both directions.
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Visual progress markers help motivate physical activity, while setting achievable goals makes getting started less intimidating for the everyman. For athletes, wearable devices offer invaluable training insights into their readiness to perform, V̇O₂ max, and zone-based training insights.
A 2018 study published in Digital Health Journal found that wearing tracking devices could reveal problematic patterns and encourage healthier behaviors, with participants reporting the devices helped support reflection about their habits. But the range of products makes it hard to regulate reliability, and the addictive nature of smart devices combined with outsourcing our self-assessment complicates the relationship further. That same 2018 study found self-monitoring and tracking had the potential to provoke disordered eating, as well as reduce overall enjoyment of healthy activities.
When I first started testing watches last year, I told myself I’d maintain a certain level of removal and only look at time and distance. But I blew past my initial metrics almost immediately, scrolling the readout for pace, vertical gain, heart rate, calories, and splits.
Monitoring my activity so closely also changed how I perceived my efforts. I’d feel proud after a run, then check the watch to see the mileage was shorter and pace slower than I thought. Instead of pride at my effort, I felt ashamed of my pace.
Will Truettner/Unsplash
Opting Out of Tracking
Like most personal tech, the experience depends on the individual. Can you maintain a healthy relationship with your data and performance metrics? Can you separate your self worth from your step count?
Berlin-based Darina Goldin, Ph.D., is a former world-champion Brazilian jiu jitsu athlete. She began using a tracking watch in 2022 to time her open-water swims and navigate hikes and bike trips. She quickly became preoccupied with the metrics, noticing a startling level of anxiety if she wasn’t wearing the watch. She used the mobile app to ensure all activities were logged even when she didn’t wear the tracker. A year later, Goldin cut the chord.
“I didn’t become less active,” she said, “I just stopped obsessing.”
Once I realized I was also heading in this direction, I pared back.
A (Reward) Path to More Feedback
There’s a reason we’re prone to overdoing it. Wearables tap into “the same dopaminergic process of reward seeking," explains North Carolina–based psychotherapist and neuroscientist Anne Baker, Ph.D.
It’s a hijacking of the reward system that functions similarly to addiction. Those initial rewards establish a baseline, releasing chemicals like dopamine, which make us feel good but demand ever-greater hits to feel better: 10,000 steps today snowballs to 12,000 tomorrow.
Failure to meet goals can manifest as shame when the readout shows a trend we don’t like. “The goalpost needs to keep moving,” says Baker.
Tracking ourselves this closely also taxes our executive function—a limited resource that can easily be drained. As tempting as it is to scroll through every stat on your watch or ring, the number fatigue rarely pays off.
“This type of overthinking can exacerbate obsessive tendencies,” says performance and longevity expert Mark Kovacs, Ph.D., founder of Kovacs Institute for Sport and Human Performance and the former director of the United States Tennis Association Sports Science Department. In his 20 years in the field, Kovacs has seen clients so locked into the numbers that they stop listening to their bodies, attempting to “fix” recovery scores by changing their entire nutrition, or inadvertently sabotaging shuteye because they’re afraid of what their sleep score will be.
He also sees clients push through warning signs, like soreness or elevated resting heart rate, because data suggested they were “still in the green.” These athletes can incur soft-tissue injuries and wind up with weeks of forced recovery time, in part because they listened to an algorithm instead of their body.
Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images
Balancing Data, Peer Performance, and Intuition
Another concern is the outsourcing of critical thinking as we compare app scores to experience and others’ performances to our own. The more we rely on data readouts and Strava segment records, the harder it is to punch through the noise and think, How do I actually feel?
“When we rely too heavily on tracking devices, we can lose something known as interoception,” explains Chicago-based physiotherapist Alex Lee, who holds a Master of Physiotherapy from the University of Sydney. Interoception is our ability to interpret feelings of achiness and fatigue, says Lee.
Essentially, adding more external feedback in the form of a tracking device can muddy internal cues around experiences, expectations, emotions, and environments, says Nicole Villegas, doctor of occupational therapy and founder of the Sensory Conscious Institute.
Since many readiness, sleep, or recovery results are based on just one or two metrics compiled to create a proprietary score, it’s difficult to assess a full health picture. These simplified “health scores” don’t provide a comprehensive wellness overview.
An October 2025 study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology used machine analysis to aggregate user feedback, finding that—along with questioning result accuracy—people felt frustration with algorithm-set goals and recognized negative emotional and motivational impacts.
Related: Fitness Trackers Might Be Quietly Sabotaging Your Motivation, Study Finds
Since these devices activate reward systems, people who’ve become overly invested in tracking devices might actually feel withdrawal-like symptoms when they stop using them.
Some users, like Goldin, can resist the urge to resume unhealthy tracking. Others might find it hard to escape the escalating internal conflict. I found myself in between. I missed the feeling of seeing my mileage unspool on the little watch face, but I felt relief at not having to perform better every week or receiving an “unproductive” training status alert.
External validation can also make it harder to unplug, and tech companies are continually unveiling new social-ready features. GPS watch brand Coros released its first smartwatch in 2018, and it has since introduced a laundry list of updates that includes 3D Flyovers: animated visuals showing a birds-eye view of your route as it zips over a topo map. Text over the map displays elapsed time, distance, pace, and elevation.
Community feedback from activity sharing can be motivating, but it also has potential to change the intent of your workout. Activities that might have initially been about presence and enjoyment become more focused on peer reinforcement and competition.
For many people, using a smartwatch is a relatively benign behavior. But if you feel ill effects of metric reliance and still can’t seem to disengage, Baker suggests talking to a therapist to unpack your emotions around fitness tracking.
Oleg Breslavtsev/Getty Images
AI Enters the Tracking Sphere
A medical student I spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous, doesn’t share their logged workouts on social media, but still wears an Oura Ring to track sleep patterns and stress levels.
They liken the Oura Ring to a positive partner who encourages them to do better if they fall short of sleep or activity goals. This conversational component comes from the brand’s 2025 Oura Advisor update, an LLM-powered “assistant” that responds to prompts similar to the therapy-lite communications of ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
They showed me a sleep readout from the previous week, which included a steep dip one night. In the familiar tone of an AI-chatbot, the text read: “Be kind to yourself. Your sleep score was low, and that’s completely ok. We all have nights that don’t go as planned.” From there, the Oura Advisor encouraged them to reflect on what might have impacted their sleep.
A chatbot-enabled fitness tracker is a far cry from AI-induced delusions, but the level of integration exacerbates what is now a three-pronged system of external validation: Activity logs provide proof of activity, chatbots offer encouraging feedback, and peer recognition comes from social sharing.
Somewhere in there lies our own intuition, but it’s impossible to draw a line and say: This amount of health data is good for you, but this amount is toxic. Every user has a different data tolerance.
“One of the biggest signs that someone has reached their tolerance level is when the data starts to drive emotional responses that feel more negative than positive,” says Kovacs.
Related: Struggling to Stay Motivated to Run? A Trainer Reveals the Simple Trick That Actually Works
Paying attention to motivations and reactions is crucial. If the device is reinforcing good habits and motivating you to move, that’s great. If the readouts cause palpable frustration and anxiety? That's a pretty clear sign to dial it back.
A simple way to limit this without going cold turkey is to prioritize data you can act on. This might mean tracking steps per day or activity time instead of sleep quality or heart rate variability. Non-movement stats are a lot harder to influence and can contribute to feelings of failure. The goal is for technology to support wellness without controlling it, to note objective metrics without losing subjective awareness.
“If those don’t align, the body always wins,” Kovacs advises. “Data should amplify intuition, not replace it.”
When used correctly, this amplification has clear benefits. Lee uses his client’s body’s cues, supported by readouts, to help them recover from injuries. He says the visualization of fitness goals also helps with motivation.
The medical student mentioned this as well. When their Oura Ring tracked their increased activity this past summer, they could more easily visualize the benefits of additional exercise.
“My resting heart rate and health metrics changed a lot,” they said. “It was pretty cool to see how the movement adds up to help your body.”
The Pendulum Swings Back
As with anything, balance is key. The utility of wearable tech is still expanding, but so are concerns about our reliance on it. Digital detoxes are becoming more common, and fitness retreats offer the chance to reconnect with movement in a less data-driven way.
Elizabeth Arnold, retreat leader for Run Wild Retreats, says that while her events don’t explicitly ban tracking devices, participants are encouraged to tackle the runs without them. Each trip also hosts a tech-free run on the final day where participants leave their watches behind.
Arnold has witnessed the difference when runners don’t have a watch spitting out data on pacing, heart rate, and altitude gain. They feel more present in the experience, more in tune with themselves out on the trail.
She mentioned similar instances to my disappointment when my performance didn't align with my expectations. One participant was thrilled with the run until their readout showed a slower pace, less vertical gain, fewer miles.
“What the watch can’t tell her is that she spent time with a turtle crossing the trail, or stood by the waterfall for the mist to hit her face,” says Arnold. “The most valuable elements of a trail run can’t be measured by a watch.”
Related: Why the Bicycle Is Still the Greatest Adventure Machine on the Planet
Fitness Off the Record
I’m not anti wearable tech. If a watch or ring encourages users to move more each day, that’s great. If it helps an athlete complete a training cycle or provides a life-saving health alert, also great.
I do predict some sort of eventual backlash. Not against the technology itself, but against the effect of our disconnect. In the same way certain tech categories used to be status symbols, a return to analog versions is now a marker of elevated appreciation. Consider the revival of physical media like print books and vinyl albums, long-form writing, and full-bleed photography in square-spine magazines. Reconnecting to how we interact with experiences—from music to dirt miles beneath our feet—will be a signifier of appreciation and presence. It already is.
These days, Goldin is happy to take a hike or tackle a technical mountaineering route sans smartwatch.
“It's just silly to rely on a colorful dot to prove something to yourself or the world,” she says. “You don't need a digital record, you know what you did.”
I left the tracking watch on its charger the next time I hiked my hometown peak, opting for my humble $35 Timex that tells me the time and not much else. By then, I knew it was more than four miles and 3,000 feet of vertical gain to break the treeline, but without each step being monitored, I had no way of telling how much I had left.
I just had to stop thinking and keep moving.