Fitness trackers are supposed to make your life better, not worse. So what we’re going to talk about today quickly is a growing epidemic of what we see in the real world. And also in the research literature that fitness trackers are driving people crazy. And what I mean by crazy is that it’s stressing them out.
I don’t know if you wear an Oura, a Fitbit, a superhuman ring. Whatever it is, a lot of us have been tracking different physiological parameters for a long time, right? These tools are amazing. They’ll track your HRV, your heart rate. There’s cool new ones that are actually kind of portable EEGs. They’ll do a step count for you, give you your calorie expenditure for the day.
And you know, how accurate any of this is, it’s hard to say for sure. But what we try to tell people is if you’re going to use a fitness tracker, use it intelligently. Unfortunately, because people have become addicted to data, what we’re seeing is that people are not using it intelligently and instead they’re letting it run their lives.
And since we’re going into the holiday season, when things are already stressful, wouldn’t it be terrible if your fitness device told you to be more stressed because you didn’t get a perfect night’s sleep score? All right. But that’s what a lot of people do. So I want you to be really, really clear on this.
Wearables are a feedback device. So the question is, is my wearable making me smarter about my body or dumber about my body? A lot of people are ceding control and awareness of their own physiologic state to a wearable. And that is unfortunate because that’s really not the best use of this tool.
Years ago, had a really interesting conversation or multiple conversations with one of our, advanced practitioners. Her name’s Dr. Schraefel. She’s from the UK. She’s a multi PhD person that deals with human computer interface. And we were talking about HRV tracking, how it was an interesting kind of cool assessment of physiology, but did it really tell us that much?
And what was, you know, what were the ideal algorithms and all these different things? And even at that time in the conversation, it became really apparent that we thought similarly about it, which was, if you’re trying to, to live to a device, you’re trying to do all of your training to get a better measurement on the device. You’re probably missing the point.
So what we’re trying to convey to people, at least in our community, is if you’re going to use a fitness tracker or wearable of some type, particularly one that tracks your sleep and your HRV and your breathing rate and whatever, you should know within about two to three months of practice with the device, what your scores are going to be, probably 95 percent of the time the next morning.
If you use a tracker in that way, it’s enhancing your own mapping of your body. It’s enhancing your own understanding of your physiology. What we don’t want to do is to begin ignoring and unmapping our understanding of ourselves and ceding control of that to a device because ultimately our brains are predictive organs and they rely on our capacity to understand ourselves.
And so if we’re saying, you know what? I can’t understand myself anymore without looking at my ring. Well, guess what? Eventually for people, that’s going to create a lot of stress. And also when you look at the algorithms behind a lot of these fitness trackers, we don’t know really where they’re coming from. Are they super research based? How accurate are the trackers?
So a lot of people I talk to, particularly around sleep are freaked out all the time because they’re like, I’ve been wearing this thing for six months or three years. And I’ve never gotten above an X score on my sleep score. Am I going to die early?
Because that’s what everyone hears when they hear bad sleep equals, you know, early death and dementia or whatever. I don’t want you to freak out about any of that stuff. That’s not a useful, iteration or process. to go through with any of these tools. These are like a snapshot of certain parts of your physiology at a particular part of the day.
And we don’t have enough information to know how all this stuff works together to make any definitive decisions about, am I going to die because of my Oura reading?
Now I’m not saying I don’t love these devices. I think used appropriately and correctly. They are invaluable tools. I think they’re fantastic for people in terms of detecting, are you going to get sick? Are you potentially having some cardiovascular issues that you need to see your physician about? I think they are fantastically useful in those arenas. And I think they can be a fantastic teaching tool and help you analyze. How you’re doing things in your life and how that’s impacting on you. Also great for stressing out if you don’t understand it.
So if you’re going to use one or you’re going to tell your clients to get one, understand what you’re measuring, what it may mean, what it probably doesn’t mean and how to use these things to enhance your understanding of your own body. Rather than to cede control of your body to the device. All right.
My advice to you in the holiday season or any other season about wearables, don’t let them increase your stress. Another good practice is please don’t look at the information more than once a day. A lot of people become fanatical about using this device, checking it every two hours. Am I getting my steps in?
If you over police yourself, there’s a really, really good chance that you’re going to increase your stress levels. And this is what we see in, like I said, both anecdotally in the real world and also in the research. So give this some thought, make sure you’re using these intelligently.
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