When her insurance company offered her a fitness tracker, LeClair, who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and trains Montessori teachers, thought it would help her stay motivated. At first, she liked to track her steps and monitor her heart rate. The information was new and interesting.
However, after a few months, the tracker became a standard she measures herself. I started focusing not on the fun of walking, but on how to make sure she would get enough steps. Instead of noticing the sky changing or running her hands along the moss-covered trees, she worried that her heart rate wasn’t high enough. When I woke up, my first thought was, “Am I going to get enough steps today?”
“I tried to pretend he wasn’t there and let her track her data without even thinking about it,” Leclerc said, but that was getting more and more difficult. And she found herself wishing she could go for a walk without being bothered by the machine telling her of her progress.
Then one day Leclerc decided she had had enough. “I took it off and threw it in my bathroom trash,” she said.
Years after ditching her fitness tracker, LeClair’s activity level hasn’t decreased.
“I tortured myself for eight months because I thought this was what we were supposed to do or it was too good to have all the data that’s tracking,” she said.
Today’s fitness trackers can do a lot more than just track your steps. The latest wearables monitor your sleep, recovery, exercise intensity and even track your waves while surfing the web. Having access to this information isn’t always a positive thing, and some experts warn that gadgets may get in the way of your fitness rather than help it.
Here’s how to tell if it’s time to give up your tracker and what to do next.
Possible problems with trackers
Alyssa Ramsey, a registered dietitian in Brooklyn and author of Unapologetic Eating, coaches individuals and groups to intuitive eating and exercise. She said fitness trackers help some of her clients get an idea of where they are in their movement, but for many people — and for her — tracking can become a negative obsession, as happened with LeClair.
“They get so focused on the numbers and they kind of get caught up in tracking and hitting certain numbers that they lose track of what really matters,” Rumsey said.
Fitness trackers can start to become unhealthy if there are no limits associated with their use, warns Daryl Appleton, a psychotherapist and performance coach in East Greenwich, RI.
“If you constantly check your app or steps and measure your value by it, or find that tracking your fitness and calorie intake is getting in the way of your daily personal and professional life, you may be predisposed to some mental health disorder,” Appleton said. She said this can lead to depression if left untreated.
In addition to making people obsessed with keeping their numbers where they think they should be, fitness trackers can discourage them from exercising at all. Steve Goudreau, a nutritional therapist and strength coach in San Diego, said one of her clients bought a tracker to help her feel motivated to walk regularly. Instead, it had the opposite effect.
The woman told Gaudreau that if she knew she wouldn’t walk 10,000 steps, she wouldn’t walk at all. “If I can’t meet the number 10,000, why bother trying?” Goudreau said the woman asked her.
Another potential problem with fitness trackers is that they can encourage users to ignore their body’s cues and continue exercising when they shouldn’t.
“They stopped caring what their bodies were feeling and if they needed rest, if they needed movement,” Rumsey said. “It’s more like, ‘Oh, I’ve achieved my tiered goals. So I don’t have to worry about moving today,” or, “I didn’t hit them, and even if I feel really tired and exhausted, I need to get out there and hit my target steps or my calorie goals.”
This can lead people to feel disconnected from their bodies, Rumsey learned firsthand. A few years ago, when she was struggling with her sleep, she decided to use an app on her phone to track her sleep patterns. But on the days when she woke up feeling like she had a good night’s sleep, the app told her she didn’t sleep well (one problem with trackers and apps is that they aren’t always accurate). This prompted her to speculate about her body.
Fitness trackers are removing the boundaries that once existed between medical devices and consumer products. Information previously restricted to doctors’ offices — such as heart rate variability and sleep patterns — has become a lifestyle product. The benefit of these blurred lines is that we have more information on hand about our health; The drawback is that we are left to our own devices to interpret and analyze the information we collect.
Leela R. Magavi, a psychiatrist and regional medical director at Mindpath Health, said that while trackers can be useful tools that help people establish routines and build positive habits, they are not tested or regulated as devices that make clinical diagnoses Accurate, and as Rumsey found out, they may have inaccurate results.
“Trackers do not know an individual’s life story and cannot assess physical or mental health,” said Magavi, who lives in Newport Beach, California. And she cautioned that they can generalize recommendations that may lead to fatigue of the individual, leading to injuries.
“Some of my patients with anxiety disorders experience distress when they see their heart rate and breathing patterns,” Magavi said. She advises patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder or an eating disorder to avoid purchasing trackers.
What to do instead of tracking
If your tracker has led you to an unhealthy place, Gaudreau and Rumsey say it’s time to learn how to check your body and monitor your activity without one. Rumsey recommends taking a moment in the morning, afternoon, and evening to stop and think, “How do I feel?”
“If this is something new to you,” Rumsey said, “you’ll probably say, ‘I have no idea what I’m feeling right now.’ In that case, keep paying attention and think about whether you’re feeling energized or tired. Do you have ulcers? Stiff? Tie up. These feelings are by the amount and type of movement you made that day or that week.
You can also check with yourself if you decide to go for a run or walk without a tracker telling you how far you’ve traveled or how many calories you’ve burned. Instead, immerse yourself in your body while you exercise. How do your legs feel? Do you have a time when you want to hurry? Do you have a time when you want to slow down? Follow these instincts and see how you feel.
In the case of a client who was too frustrated to walk at all, Goudreau suggested the woman put the tracker away and move from an all-or-nothing approach to a “good is better is better” model. The client decided that “good” was walking 20 minutes, “best” 40 minutes and “best” 60 minutes.
“It smashed her all or nothing mentality,” Goudreau said, “because she realized her base level is a 20-minute walk, which is a reasonable daily goal for her. Even if she did the minimum and walked for 20 minutes, she still felt accomplished.” Eventually, the woman put her Fitbit back on her wrist, once she learned how to avoid letting it affect her sense of self-worth.
Rumsey said that because trackers enforce the idea that exercise should be a certain way — a certain length of time or intensity — she encourages her clients to focus on simply moving.
“Any kind of movement can be counted on, like playing music and dancing around your living room,” Rumsey said. “There are many different ways to move our bodies.”
Hilary Aschauer is a freelance writer based in San Diego. Find her on Instagram at hilaryachauer or HilaryAchauer on Twitter.
