These are all useful for spotting patterns, guiding recovery or alerting you to potential health issues. Less important, she cautions, are “caloric burn estimates, body composition metrics, stress readings, and readiness scores”, as they can often induce anxiety without doing much to improve outcomes. “Obsessively tracking sleep quality or heart health can create a pressure to perform, paradoxically making the outcomes you’re trying to improve harder to achieve,” Arora points out.
Her advice? Simplify things. Instead of monitoring the data, she suggests asking yourself some basic questions: Do I feel rested? Am I ready to get out of bed? Rather than scrutinising each night in isolation, she recommends zooming out to review the week as a whole instead – and applying a bit of logic to the factors that might be influencing the way it has played out.
Progress, she notes, is often subjective. The same principles apply to heart health – improvements are often felt before they’re measured (climbing the stairs without getting winded, everyday tasks feeling easier, being able to carry heavy bags and recovering more quickly). Real world cues, she says, are often more reliable – and far less anxiety-inducing.
How to take a break from wearables
“Going cold turkey often backfires, because interrupting a habit loop can feel genuinely uncomfortable,” behavioural scientist India Lesser says. “It’s a kind of withdrawal our brains interpret as a loss.”
See it as a break, not a break-up
Her advice is to start with a two-week break – not a permanent break-up. This reframing can lower the pressure and make change feel possible. After that, if you choose to pop the wearable back on, it’s about redesigning the experience.
Limit what you track
“You can try turning off notifications, hiding certain metrics or taking the device off during specific parts of the day,” Lesser suggests. In her opinion, you want to try and add enough pauses in the habit loop to reflect on how you’re feeling, rather than just how you’re scoring. Over time, you’ll learn to trust your own bodily cues – like knowing whether to move, stretch or rest.
Go analogue
If you’re working towards a goal, like improved fitness or increased water intake, try tracking your stats in a journal. The goal isn’t to abandon tech entirely, but to stop confusing numbers for intuition, and to remember that consistency doesn’t need a scoreboard.
How to stay “on track” without tracking
“What keeps us consistent isn’t data, it’s habit, identity-based motivation and feedback,” explains Lesser. “Wearables work because they reward, nudge and keep us hooked.” Those mechanisms, she says, can be recreated without the hypervigilance of a constant monitor.
Instead of fixating on achieving a flawless set of stats, she encourages asking yourself questions about your day – such as whether you moved in a way that felt good, or managed to eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. These small habits will, over time, add up to long-term change – with or without a watch that lets you know about it.
