How My Apple Watch Impacted My Mental Health (And How I Fixed It)
Activity trackers are everywhere. I have had an apple Watch for 3 years. Before that I had a Fitbit, and before that I had another no-name step tracker. These devices are made to motivate us to move more. But what happens when motivation shifts to obsession? In this blog post, I will be talking about my journey with activity tracking, and how I have shifted my relationship towards mental health.
What is an activity tracker?
Activity trackers are wearable devices that track different kinds of activity. Step trackers are tracked most, and almost every smartphone on the market has a step counter integrated into the device. There are also fancier devices that will track your exercise, calories burned, heart rate, and so on. The software usually creates a relatively arbitrary goal for the user to hit every day.
Why I started tracking
I started wearing a step counter at a time when everyone seemed to be wearing step counters. I can remember them being a prize in cereal boxes for a while. Having been a fairly active person all my life, I was excited to have a real metric that would tell me just how active I was! I am a person who puts a lot of value in data being accurate, which means that if I was wearing a step tracker, I was definitely wearing it 24/7.
I graduated from a basic step tracker to an Apple Watch in 2017, and WOW is there a lot of data captured on that device! The Apple Watch depicts progress towards movement daily goals using three rings: Move, Exercise, and Stand. The ultimate goal is to close all three rings every day, and I loved seeing those fireworks on my wrist every day as I hit those goals.
How tracking evolved to obsession
As an active person, hitting those goals was relatively easy to do most days. It started to become something that I had to do every day. Those rings started to have power over my mood; how active I was determined how happy I felt.
On January 1st, 2019 I decided that I wanted to get a 365 streak of closing all of my rings. I kept that streak going for months, sometimes having to do a few jumping jacks in the middle of a movie, but otherwise feeling quite confident that my goal was achievable and realistic.
One day at the end of June – 6 months into my personal challenge – I was traveling for work on a horrible stormy day. My flights kept getting delayed, re-routed, and finally canceled altogether. I remember walking around the airport at 11:45 PM trying desperately to hit my Move goal. The minutes trickled by, and ultimately I was not able to hit the goal. I felt defeated. Halfway through my challenge, I had lost my streak.
How I made a change
Being active is seen as a healthy habit. Because of this, it took me a long time to realize that the obsession I had with these activity goals was having a negative impact on my mental health. I am a perfectionist and I suffer from anxiety, which means that these rigid “goals” cannot exist without causing harm. I started to actively prioritize my mental health, taking an inventory of things in my life that I no longer had space for. And this was one of those things.
Once this realization clicked, my initial thought was that I should get rid of my watch altogether. As I reflected on what my objective really was, I realized that I wanted to be able to see the numbers without having them affect me. I wanted to regain control.
The first thing I did was turn off any notifications from the activity app. Some of the “motivational” text I used to receive was telling me that I was less active than I was on an average day. Or that I had not stood up in a while. By turning these notifications off, I was no longer bombarded with messages that made me feel inadequate or that I was not as “good” as I had been yesterday.
The second thing I did was change my watch face. As long as I had my Apple Watch, I had always had those activity rings displayed every time I looked at my watch so that I could monitor my progress at a glance. Now my watch just shows me the time – what a novel concept! This small change has had an incredible impact on my mental health on a daily basis.
Final words
The conclusion here is that some things that may be designed to be helpful can also be harmful. We are told that there is a GOOD outcome (hitting the goal) and a BAD outcome (not hitting the goal), but this binary mentality does not apply every single day. In fact, there may be some days when it is more beneficial to not hit that goal – like when you are sick, or you did not sleep well, or if you had a really strenuous workout the day before!
I think it is worth doing a deep internal dive to consider whether activity tracking is having a positive or negative impact on your life. Research has shown that activity trackers result in people moving more, but it also shows that the same people enjoy their activities less. If you are finding previously enjoyable activities are feeling more like a chore, this may be something to consider.