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A sense of nervous excitement. I can see the chilled vapour emanating from my competitors as they perform the "about to run" shuffle on the starting line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. It's almost time...

Hold on. I have to start my device. The same goes for the person beside me.

The person behind us sighs. I'm not moving until… yes! GPS ready, away I go.

Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And this extends beyond us participants who rely on them.

It's a booming, multi-billion pound industry. Brands like Apple Watch are prevalent, all offering an broad range of various devices to fit a range of lifestyles. Based on how advanced the device you go for, costs can range from £100 to a small fortune.

"I find it infuriating, it's impossible to relax."

"It provides solace… It acts as a companion encouraging me."

"Please don't notify me I've had a restless night."

Just some of the responses people have shared from like-minded device users when I ask what they feel about theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My current opinion on mine? At this moment, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the trees along my route are interfering with my location tracking.

A vast number of us strap these small monitors onto our arms and wear them 24/7, apparently unconcerned with the fact they're constantly recording us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them solely to give us an estimation of our daily steps. Now, they can measure our sleep quality, heart rate, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

It's a challenge to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the data points we obsess over a true reflection of our actual health? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of measurements and cheerleading alerts just add to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I do get a quite fixated with mine," an individual reveals.

While she loves how her device tracks her runs, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a pregnancy.

Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was failing to be energetic enough. Later on, the watch insists her she's had a restless night.

"I am caring for a six-month old, there's no point to be informed I'm tired," she says. "That fact is perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just take it off?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I love it for its workout tracking, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your health metrics and processing your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the back of the watch.

They commonly shine minute LED lights onto your arm which can monitor pulsation, recording your BPM. Higher-end devices analyse changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

A professor says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually aid early diagnosis, "detecting disease before we show symptoms", it could also turn us the tracked into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more susceptible of a heart problem in the years to come.

But how to interpret these numbers is not straightforward. The expert fears that as more functions are introduced, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data.

"I have some doubts that the ability to monitor so many things is such a positive development," he says.

A professor focusing on wearable tech agrees. A study into the influence of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use doctor's time".

She identified a cycle with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate increased. They got more worried. They looked a second time, and their anxiety increased again.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."