By: Ava McCormick (Staff Writer)
Over the last few years, I have cycled through nearly every wearable fitness tracker on the market — Apple Watch, Oura Ring, Garmin and Fitbit — each one promising to track every variable known to man: Heart Rate Variability, VO2 Max and of course, sleep. I became obsessed with the metrics. Some mornings, I would roll out of bed feeling refreshed and grab my phone.
“50 Sleep Score. Are you feeling okay, Ava?”
“Your heart rate is high. Take it easy today.”
And like clockwork, the headache set in, bags appeared under my eyes and the day felt doomed before it even started.
I became anxious about my workouts. While I was training for a marathon, I was fixated on my pace, always trying to beat the previous day’s splits. My step count tormented me and I felt like my workout was inadequate if my heart rate never hit zone four.
I began to rely on my metrics as a thermometer for how my body felt instead of reading the cues myself. It was a double-edged sword. Readiness at a 95? It’s going to be a great day! I realized that my watch wasn’t simply measuring how I felt; it was deciding it.
I began to wonder if other people experienced similar obsessions and anxieties. The answer is slightly more nuanced than it might seem.
Wearable fitness trackers do not mentally affect everyone in the same way. Whether a tracker makes you fitter is a different question from the one this piece asks, which is whether you can still hear your body underneath it.
Their effects depend on the metrics that a user fixates on — steps, sleep or workout intensity — and the personality traits the person brings to the device. Research shows that specific personality traits shape whether a tracker benefits someone or undermines them.
A BioMed Central Psychology 2019 study tracking wearable users found that people with stronger conscientiousness traits — which are tied to self-discipline and structure — reported more empowerment and motivation and less guilt and self-consciousness while wearing their trackers.
A more recent BMC 2026 study of 486 consistent exercisers found a similar pattern with neuroticism. The link between smartwatch use and social physique anxiety was roughly three times stronger among people high in neuroticism than those low in it.
Personality isn’t the only important variable, though. The metrics someone tracks are equally as influential. Step count is the metric where negative psychological effects are most consistently documented, turning a daily activity into a target that generates both emotional and physical stress when not reached.
A 2023 JMIR study demonstrated those negative effects. Researchers gave 162 adults Apple Watches for five weeks and without telling the participants, lowered the step counts that some of them saw. The group shown artificially low numbers felt their activity was inadequate, didn’t eat as healthy and showed measurably higher blood pressure and heart rate than the group that was shown accurate data, even though they all completed the same amount of activity.
The number, not the activity, changed their bodies’ responses, a finding that research was consistent across other studies. A review of over five dozen studies on fitness trackers found that unmet activity goals were among one of the most consistently named triggers for anxiety and stress.
Sleep tracking demonstrated a similar pattern. A 2025 survey found that nearly a third of adults who tracked their sleep showed signs of “orthosomnia,” an obsession with achieving a perfect sleep score.
Clinicians first documented and named this term in a 2017 case study, which noted that consumer sleep trackers can’t distinguish between sleep stages and are poor at detecting when someone is awake. Regardless, patients trusted the tracker data, even when it was contradicted by medical testing. As a result, patients spent excessive time in bed trying to improve their sleep scores, a habit that reinforced the insomnia that they were trying to fix.
The study’s authors admitted they were unable to distinguish if the trackers caused the fixation or simply revealed an existing one. Based on my own experience, I’m inclined to believe the former.
Skeptics might argue that if these effects are influenced by personality, the wearable itself is not the problem. However, the step count study shows the tracker isn’t a neutral object that personality is projected onto. The same people, with the same watch, displayed measurable differences in blood pressure and heart rate depending only on whether the number they were shown was accurate or artificially lowered, demonstrating that the devices’ decisions did produce a physical stress response, with personality determining who is most vulnerable to that effect.
Knowing all of this has not completely undone the influence of my Oura ring on how I read my body. I still catch myself checking my phone to see how I slept the night before and feel a flicker of relief when a high readiness score flashes across the screen. But understanding that a number on the screen can move my blood pressure just as easily as a bad night of sleep can has given me the perspective to take a moment before letting it decide how my day goes. I would encourage anyone like me who has fallen into the trap of letting a number dictate how their body feels to do what I am still learning to do: read the score, then ask your body what’s actually going on.