Your Fitness Tracker Might Be Making You Extra Anxious. Here Are 4 Signs You Need a Break

Fitness trackers deliver constant feedback on everything from step counts to sleep. But these handy devices can also backfire, creating anxiety when your health metrics aren’t what you’d hoped.

Reddit, for example, is rife with posts about health tracker-induced anxiety. “When my stats are good I’m happy,” wrote one user, “but every once in a while a stat will drop and I will go into an immediate panic.” 

And a study from July, focused specifically on people with atrial fibrillation, found that those who wore trackers were more preoccupied with symptoms, more anxious, and more likely to use “informal” health care resources than non-users.

To be sure, plenty of people who use fitness trackers don’t develop mental health issues. But with one in five Americans using a device to monitor their health metrics these days, psychologists say there’s plenty of opportunity for anxiety to crop up. 

“I’ve seen fitness trackers have a snowball effect, causing people to hyper-fixate on numbers rather than overall well-being,” Erin Connors, PhD, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Health.

These are the biggest signs that it’s time to take a break from your wearable, according to mental health experts.

Many fitness trackers will give you a score or count of certain areas of health, such as your heart rate and sleep. “If you get a 70, it can feel like you got a C,” Connors said. “If you see that constantly and are feeling anxious on top of that, it can feel like you’re not doing a good enough job.”

It’s important to keep tabs on how your data influence your mood, Marcia Edwards, PsyD, a sports psychologist and clinical assistant professor at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, told Health.

“If you notice that much of your mood is based on your ability to meet fitness goals from the device, then this may be a sign of unhealthy attachment,” she said. Edwards also recommends being on the lookout for feelings of frustration, disappointment, and a sense of failure.

If you’re reaching for certain goals, like a daily step count, and you fall short here and there, it’s natural to feel a little disappointed, Peter Economou, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at Rutgers University, told Health. But how quickly you can emotionally react after that matters, he added.

“Most athletes have a healthy relationship with fitness and know they’re not always going to win,” he said. “You have to learn how to ‘fail.’ You never want your mood to be impacted by your outcome, and it’s important to focus on the process.” In other words, if you don’t hit your daily step count goal or get the sleep score you’re after, it’s important to look at the big picture. 

“We always feel good when we achieve our goals, but you’re not going to do well all the time,” Economou said.

Fitness trackers can cause you to doomscroll and go down a rabbit hole of health metrics to try to interpret your data, Thea Gallagher, PsyD, a clinical associate professor at NYU Langone Health and cohost of the “Mind in View” podcast, told Health.

“I had a patient with health anxiety who was Googling her heart rate levels every night to try to figure out what they meant,” Gallagher said. “But many of us are not at the physician level to interpret these results, and we don’t even know if these trackers are working correctly.”

Understanding the nuances is important when trying to decipher the numbers, Edwards added. “Data or metrics that are interpreted as consistently ‘too low’ or ‘too high’ could lead individuals to believe they have serious or underlying health issues that do not exist,” she said.

Fitness trackers aren’t foolproof—sometimes, they get glitchy or collect data improperly. And then there are times when you may leave home without remembering to take your tracker off the charger.

“We’re addicted to our phones and social media. It’s the same mechanism for a wearable,” Economou said. “You have to learn to not be anxious when you can’t see it.”

Unfortunately, this anxiety around data can become a vicious loop, Kaston D. Anderson Jr., PhD, MPH, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, told Health. “The over-checking of our health metrics might also heighten our anxiety when we are unable to access them,” he said.

Fitness trackers are designed to support your health, not replace your body’s signals. Ignoring how your body feels in favor of what the tracker reports is a big issue, Shannel Kassis Elhelou, PsyD, a neuropsychologist at Pacific Neuroscience Institute’s Brain Wellness and Lifestyle Programs at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, CA, told Health.

Connors agrees. “When people rely heavily on health trackers for feedback, whether it’s about steps, heart rate, sleep, or counting calories, they might gradually lose touch with their own internal signals and what their body is telling them,” she said. “Your brain will start to prioritize external cues like data on the tracker vs. fatigue, hunger, or fullness.”

You may even feel well-rested but second guess yourself if the tracker says your sleep quality is low, Connors said.

There’s no scientific data on this, and Elhelou said a lot depends on your reaction to your tracker. “Some people may benefit from a short break, while others might need a longer period,” she said.

If you feel more stressed when taking a break from your fitness tracker, Connors said that’s a sign you need a longer break. “Remind yourself that the tracker is not keeping you alive; You’re keeping you alive,” she said. “When you reach a point of acceptance about that, it’s a sign that you can go back.”

Experts say if you want to use a tracker again after taking a break, it’s a good idea to be more intentional about how you view the device.

“When starting again, it is important that we set clear intentions and know the ‘why,’” Anderson Jr. said. “Why are we using the tracker? What is our ultimate goal? What do we want to gain from the information it will give us? What do the metrics say about our own self-worth?”

He also suggests setting clear boundaries and focusing on trends, not daily numbers. “Instead of checking our metrics multiple times a day, we might think about checking them once a day,” he said.

But if you go back to using a fitness tracker after a break and feel anxious all over again, Gallagher said it’s time to stop using it for good and consider what’s behind your anxiety. “If you’ve never been to therapy and one of these devices is consistently causing you anxiety, it might be helpful to speak to a mental health professional,” she said.