It is almost midnight on a Tuesday. Everything is quiet except for the back-and-forth pacing of a woman in her darkened living room.
The 46-year-old remote worker, who wished to be known only as Nurul, isn’t looking for anything specific. She just needs to walk a couple more steps in a tight circle because the digital ring on her smartwatch is a few calories short of completion.
To Nurul, her day can’t officially end until the device emits its celebratory chime.
As the landscape of personal health management changes, so too has the quest for perfect health data.
In the early 2010s, “wearable devices” was pretty basic in form and function. One example is the pedometer, a simple plastic clip that only counted steps with varying accuracy. Since then, contemporary devices like smartwatches offer a constant plethora of biometric data – from heart rate to sleep quality – on our wrists.
Welcome to an era where nearly every heartbeat, breath, and restless twitch can be tracked and transformed into scorable data.
But as the data grows more granular, it has also given rise to a new phenomenon among users: wearable weariness.
Mortality as a motivator
According to a January 2026 report titled When Fitness Becomes Fatigue: Wearable Technology, Self-Tracking Anxiety, and Health Perception Among Gen Z in the Journal Of Public Health Indonesian, excessive health monitoring may generate psychological strain and negatively influence health perception.
But for Nurul, her smartwatch is more than a trendy accessory; it is a clinical shield.
With a family medical history shadowed by diabetes, heart problems, Alzheimer’s, and dementia, she uses the device to manage the challenges of perimenopause (like muscle loss and bone density depletion due to declining estrogen, and disorienting “brain fog”).
“Every time that watch vibrates with a reminder to move or hydrate, it’s not just a suggestion – it’s an urgency,” she says. “I feel that if I don’t religiously practise these daily goals, I will get weak and sick.”
But as her lifestyle shifted toward working from home and the physiological changes of her 40s set in, the watch became her new instructor – one that never clocks out.
This urgency has redesigned her domestic life. She confesses to “hacking” her chores, vacuuming and mopping her 859sq ft home to generate movement data or to purposely walk to a restaurant for dinner to add more steps and burn more calories.
Fiona Yassin – a child, adolescent and family psychotherapist and international clinical director of The Wave Clinic – notes that there has been a shift from health apps to increasingly sophisticated wearable devices, which “offer insights into metabolic rate, calorie burn, steps, sleep and more”.
She explains that for some users, “there’s a perception that having access to all this data will improve longevity or overall health – but that’s not a blanket truth”.
What is striking, however, is how Nurul describes the device as a moral arbiter. When she forgets to wear it, she admits: “Sometimes it does feel like the CCTV is not installed, so I can commit some ‘crime’.”
The ‘CCTV’ effect
Why does a smartwatch feel like a surveillance camera?
Fiona explains that anxiety and obsessive thinking sit on the same neurocognitive spectrum.
“What we’re seeing in these traits sits within a neurocognitive pathway. Why do these patterns emerge? Because whether we’re anticipating something going wrong (anxiety), or trying to make sense of something we think is wrong (obsessive thinking), we’re ultimately trying to control information in order to control the outcome,” Fiona notes.
“That said, for others, these tools can genuinely be helpful. Used gently, in a way that supports rather than criticises the body, they can help people stay on track with goals build awareness in a positive way,” she adds.
There is a catch. While wearables give that power to the user, it can also trap them in a continuous feedback loop, which could lead them to focus on the minutiae, spotting small changes that can spiral into anticipatory distress, she further adds.
Validating workouts
This stark divide between the body and mind can be seen in the fitness world.
Anna Rina, a professional personal trainer, sees this daily on the gym floor. While she acknowledges that wearables are excellent accountability tools, she notices a specific segment of clients who become fixated on “closing their rings”, particularly the strength and intensity metrics.
A major red flag, she says, is when clients start “stressing out on days where they don’t meet their targets, or when they train hard even though they are physically and mentally exhausted”.
It’s times like these when Anna has to step in as a mental coach to remind her clients that there are many variables in their lives outside of the workout session, and to listen to their bodies instead of the numbers on their devices to validate their workout.
The problem? Tech cannot detect the emotional aspect of one’s life.
Fiona agrees, noting that devices don’t capture the full relational picture. “For example, during exam season, a teenager may sleep less or have a higher resting heart rate. That doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. The wearable can’t account for external pressures.”
Data-driven over mindfulness
When it comes to mindfulness practices, the contextual blindness brought upon users by wearables can be disruptive.
Charmaine Ang, a certified yoga instructor, notes that yoga emphasises listening to one’s body and headspace. However, the persistent feedback loop of a wearable acts as a loud, consistent external interruption.
“The constant monitoring would take up quite a bit of mental capacity, making it difficult to focus,” Ang explains. She has observed students move away from intuitive movement toward a rigid, data-driven approach.
Ang recalls one example of such behaviour: a student who arrived late for a class and was thus denied entry flew into a rage and started berating the front desk staff.
“She yelled, ‘I came all the way and now I can’t work out to burn my calories!’” Ang shares. In that moment, the student wasn’t there for her health and fitness; she was there to hit a digital target.
The fixation can even be dangerous. Ang recalls nearly tripping while checking her watch during a hike. “Definitely don’t want to fall flat on my face because of that!” she quips.
Cyberchondria and anxiety
The psychological pressure is a recognised clinical concern.
Lee Soon Li, a lecturer at Monash University’s Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, explains that continuous monitoring can amplify users’ anxiety levels.
This phenomenon is known as cyberchondria, whereby the escalation of health anxiety is driven by excessive and repetitive health-related information seeking.
“Continuous feedback provided by wearable devices may reinforce hypervigilance toward bodily sensations, thereby increasing the likelihood of misinterpretation and distress,” Lee warns.
Fiona notes how this tightens the loop: “If we notice our heart rate is over 95, we might immediately check that online. We may then read that a sustained elevated resting heart rate could impact longevity... So the continuous feedback loop fuels the anxious bowl we’re already sitting in, behaviourally.”
This pattern of behaviour can impose tangible economic burdens: “Individuals may seek medical consultation more frequently than clinically warranted or purchase health-related products or supplements without clear necessity,” says Lee.
Family anxiety loops
This anxiety is no longer confined to the individual user.
Features that allow users to create ‘circles’ to share data can extend anxiety, creating a shared or family-based anxiety loop.
“Shared data around sleep cycles or activity levels has, in some cases, led to distrust within family systems,” Fiona explains.
A parent might monitor a teenager’s sleep cycles and become suspicious if the data shows them awake when they “should” be asleep, turning a health tracker into a domestic policing tool, she adds.
When we outsource our bodily intuition to a machine, we run the risk of damaging our self-esteem. Fiona warns that preoccupation with metrics creates rigid definitions of what is ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ versus ‘bad’ or ‘unhealthy’.
“If you’re wearing something that is, in effect, telling you that you’re not doing well enough – that you didn’t sleep enough, your heart rate is too high, or your body isn’t responding as expected – it can amplify worry and leave you feeling unsettled,” Fiona explains.
The accuracy myth
Anna the personal trainer believes that it’s good to be objective as far as the data goes, adding that users should “realise that tech trackers aren’t 100% accurate”.
That said, “it’s a good marker or baseline to have, provided they are using the same device throughout,” she explains.
Ang concurs: “I used to teach hot yoga and I remember how my watch would record a ridiculously high amount of calories burnt due to heat-induced heart rate spikes, when in reality I wasn’t moving about much.”
Lee adds that individuals with limited health literacy may find it difficult to accurately interpret the data. The physiological signals captured are typically non-specific and require contextual interpretation.
In the absence of medical knowledge, users may misinterpret normal physiological fluctuations as signs of pathology, he explains.
Reclaiming the body
So, how do we stop our devices from making us weary?
The experts suggest a multi-pronged approach to breaking the data dependency.
Anna’s philosophy is clear: treat the data as support, not the absolute authority. “Use a fitness tracker as a source of insight, not instruction,” she advises.
Let your body and your goals guide your workouts, focusing on long-term trends rather than daily targets, she adds.
Breaking the cycle also requires radical disconnection. Yoga instructor Ang suggests scheduling sessions with the notifications turned off or not wearing it at all. Having movement sessions where you just focus on having fun without tracking is a vital reminder that health exists outside of the numbers on devices.
Setting and establishing firm digital boundaries is also a good idea. Turning off non-essential notifications and only checking data at the end of the day or week can drastically reduce reliance and free up mental capacity to focus on actual surroundings, Ang adds.
Long-term resilience requires health and medical literacy. Lee notes that empowering users with adequate knowledge to interpret their data is a foundational step in promoting adaptive engagement.
Instead of seeing the body as a machine that is constantly failing to meet its daily quotas, experts advise a shift in perspective.
“Our bodies are, in most cases, doing an exceptional job of taking care of us,” Fiona reminds users.
“Reframing towards that understanding can be an important part of stepping out of negative cycles.”
