Wearables' Dark Side: How Fitness Trackers Fuel Anxiety and Obsessive Behavior

The alarm was set for 1 a.m. to catch England play Mexico during the FIFA World Cup in July, but as the writer lay in bed contemplating the disruption to sleep, a different anxiety crept in: the Apple Watch on the wrist would register a poor night. In the end, the game went unwatched. The decision wasn't really about the early hour—it was about protecting a sleep score, a number on a screen that had somehow become more important than the actual event.

This is the paradox at the heart of wearable technology. Millions of people now wear devices that track their movements, their rest, their heartbeats, their productivity. These gadgets promise to make us healthier, more active, better prepared for medical emergencies. And they can. But they also do something else: they turn wellness into a game with rules, targets, and consequences. They turn the body into data, and data into judgment.

The writer has worn Apple Watches for nearly a decade and recently hit a 2,000-day streak of closing the Move ring—a daily calorie-burn target represented by a circle on the screen. But maintaining that streak has required compromises that feel anything but healthy. On days when illness or exhaustion made real exercise impossible, fake workouts were logged. The thought of the streak ending fills with dread. The watch has become a taskmaster, and the body has become something to be managed in service of its demands.

Dr. Dana McKay, an associate dean at RMIT University in Australia, explains what's happening: wearables are built using "persuasive design," techniques meant to nudge users toward behaviors they theoretically wanted when they bought the device. But there's a problem. The technology doesn't distinguish between healthy motivation and unhealthy obsession. It doesn't know when someone is sick, stressed, or simply needs rest. It only knows whether the ring was closed.

Yang Wei, a professor of wearable technology at Nottingham Trent University, puts it more directly: for some users, these devices create pressure, anxiety, guilt, and an unhealthy dependence on data. They establish a framework for what counts as good or bad—and if that framework is wrong, it pushes people in the wrong direction. Worse, people begin to trust the device more than their own bodies. A person might feel they slept poorly because the watch said so, even though they felt fine. They might feel they failed because they didn't hit a step target, even though their day was full and reasonable.

The solutions, both experts agree, are surprisingly straightforward. Take the watch off sometimes. Turn off notifications. Stop checking the goals obsessively. Understand why you're using the device in the first place—is it to be more active, to understand sleep, to monitor a specific health concern? Having a purpose makes it easier to keep the technology in perspective. Most importantly, treat wearable data as guidance, not judgment. A device cannot understand the full context of a life: illness, stress, caring responsibilities, disability, travel, recovery, the simple human need to rest.

But the responsibility doesn't rest entirely with users. The devices themselves need to change. McKay argues for better controls—letting people set how many notifications they receive, hiding the ones they don't want to see, removing gamification elements like badges and competitive leaderboards with friends. Wei calls for a shift from data-driven relationships with wearables to something more reflective and human-centered. Designers should move away from addictive, performance-based features and toward supporting long-term wellbeing rather than daily judgment.

The writer cannot change how Apple designs its watches, but can change how they respond to them. Staying fit and healthy matters. But when the cost is anxiety about a streak ending, when it means logging fake workouts while sick, when it means missing a game to protect a sleep score, something has gone wrong. The solution might be as simple as taking off the watch, stepping away from the numbers, and remembering that a lost streak is not a lost life.