Stop trusting your smartwatch stress score right now, new research says it often gets your mood completely wrong

Hindustan Times

5 days ago

Smartwatches promise a quick read on your day: heart rate, sleep, stress, and a nudge to breathe when things spike. A new peer reviewed study suggests one of those signals may be far less reliable than users think. When it comes to stress, consumer wearables can confuse excitement for strain and flag you as overworked when you are simply having fun. Smartwatches can label excitement as stress. Sleep hours are more reliable, but how rested remains hard to read from a wrist.(Unsplash)
What the study actually found
Researchers tracked 800 young adults wearing Garmin Vivosmart 4 bands for three months. They compared the devices' stress, fatigue, and sleep scores with how participants said they felt in the moment. The headline result was blunt. On stress, there was 'basically zero' correlation with self reported feelings, according to lead author Eiko Fried of Leiden University. He noted that his own watch has labelled him stressed at the gym and during a friend's wedding, situations where elevated heart rate and arousal are normal but not negative. The point is not that wearables are useless. It is that they measure physiology, not context. A pulse spike can mean anxiety, excitement, caffeine, or a sprint for the bus, and the algorithm does not always know which is which.
Fatigue tracking did a little better, though still short of a clinical read. Sleep tracking was the strongest of the three, particularly for time in bed. About two thirds of participants saw a clear match between nights they felt good and nights the watch logged roughly two extra hours of sleep. Even there, the devices were better at counting hours than judging how rested someone felt. That makes sense for consumer sensors that infer sleep stages from movement and heart rate rather than EEG.
How to use these scores without overreacting
Treat stress metrics as a rough guide, not a diagnosis. A spike can be a useful prompt to take a break, drink water, or step outside. It is not proof that your workload is toxic or that you need to overhaul your life. If your watch regularly cries stress during workouts, social events, or after coffee, consider adjusting alert thresholds or turning off real time stress tiles to avoid alert fatigue. Use trends over weeks, not moment by moment swings, and pair the numbers with a quick check in: How do you feel right now?
Sleep remains the most practical signal for daily decisions. If longer nights line up with better mornings, let that guide your bedtime. For fatigue, look at multi day patterns rather than single day dips. And remember the researchers' caution: these are consumer devices, not medical tools. They can help you notice patterns. They cannot read your mind or your mood with clinical accuracy.
The hope is that studies like this will steer better models that factor in context and multi sensor data for early mental health screening. Until then, keep what works, step counts, sleep duration, heart rate trends, and keep stress scores in their lane as a lightweight prompt, not a verdict. The study was published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science .