It was more than a decade ago when I asked a colleague about the story behind her funny-looking watch. “It’s a Fitbit. It keeps track of my steps and exercise.” I’m sure I made a face. Watches were for telling time, so why would I want one that makes me feel bad about my lack of exercise? I vowed never to get one.
As with most of my tech-related vows (I’ll never get a smartphone! I’ll never subscribe to more than one streaming service!), I eventually broke down and got a fitness tracker. As I entered my 40s, I realized my body wasn’t really taking care of me anymore, and I was going to need to take better care of my body. At first, the tracker was just for counting steps. I had to get those 10,000! By the time I learned that 10,000 steps was an arbitrary number from a 50-year-old Japanese marketing campaign, it was too late. I had gamified my body.
Counting steps evolved into keeping track of my “active minutes,” or periods of elevated heart rate. I became–and remain–obsessed with keeping an eye on my resting heart rate. I worked hard on my cardio exercise to bring that rate down to a healthier level for a man my age. When I see my resting heart rate go up quickly, it is frequently a good indicator that I’m getting sick.
As walks became runs, and runs became races, my watch helped me keep track of personal records and show me my running routes. It was great! But I’d been sticking with the same brand for years, and I felt like I was outgrowing it. After asking my running friends and colleagues what they used, I switched things up this December and gifted myself a fancy new fitness watch.
This watch does everything my old watch did, but better. It also does a lot of things my old watch didn’t do, like assess my sleep quality and stress levels. Within a few weeks, I became less enthusiastic about those new features.
I am not a normal sleeper and haven’t been for most of my adult life. A really good night of sleep for me is about six hours, but I frequently get less. Based on feedback from my doctor, my family history, and my own expertise as a geneticist, I strongly suspect I have a mutation that causes “ familial natural short sleep”, which means I function pretty well for someone who sleeps very little. My watch doesn’t understand that, however, which is why it tells me every morning that my sleep is “shorter than ideal.” If I were getting a letter grade for sleeping, my watch would be failing me.
And stress? Has my watch seen the news lately? Does it understand that I have three teenagers? For both political and personal reasons, my stress is not likely to be much lower for a while. Get used to it, watch.
All these stats–exercise, sleep, stress, and more–are combined to tell me what my “body battery” is at any given time. Thanks to my wonky sleep, I usually wake up to my watch telling me that my body battery is less than 40%, so I should “take it easy” today. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I like that my watch motivates me to exercise more, but I won’t let my wearable tech bully me. As a matter of fact, it’s getting banished to the nightstand tonight.
Eric J. Perkins writes about Gen X for The Belmont Voice. When he’s not writing, he’s the Director of Transformation at Addgene, a life sciences nonprofit in Watertown.