Hooked on wearables: Is all of this self-monitoring making us paranoid?
Sarah Hills was worried about her heart. Her Oura Ring, a wearable device that tracks users' biometric data, including body temperature, heart rate and blood oxygen levels, was telling her something might be off.
The ring provides some of its data in the form of scores, like a 'readiness' score that uses 'sleep quality, body signals, and activity levels to show how prepared you are to take on the day,' according to Oura. Since receiving the ring as a Christmas gift, Hills had begun to compulsively check her stats. If her scores weren't good, the 22-year-old said, she would ruminate.
When her stats wobbled this year, she tried to see a doctor. When she couldn't get an appointment soon enough, Hills, a recent graduate of Providence College in Rhode Island, and a friend drove to a pharmacy where she spent US$50 (S$64.41) on an at-home blood pressure cuff and monitor to put her mind at ease.
'At that point I was, like, 'Oh my gosh, this thing is literally destroying my mind,'' she said.
Eventually, Hills was able to see a doctor who told her she was healthy. The doctor did have one recommendation: Consider ditching the ring.
In the eternal human quest to know thyself, it's tempting to seize on every bit of information we can glean. If you could know, for instance, not just that you slept 6.5 hours last night but also that 12 per cent of those hours were spent in REM sleep and that your overall 'sleep efficiency' – time asleep versus time awake – was 85 per cent, as many pieces of wearable tech can tell you, why wouldn't you?
At least that's the attitude of many people in our age of the quantified self, in which collecting sheaves of data about our bodies every day seems to hold the promise of bringing about a happier, healthier life. But what if all of that data is also heightening our stress? Is there a metric for that?
While some Oura users say they enjoy the ring as a screen-free way to keep tabs on their bodies, several Oura owners, including Hills, described feeling increasingly anxious after using their devices. Rather than helping them feel more in control of their wellness, the data only made them fixate on potential – and often nonexistent – problems.
You could call it Oura paranoia, though the phenomenon is hardly exclusive to any one product: As wearable health technology, including Apple Watches and Fitbits, have become more popular in recent years, some users have struggled with the unintended psychological side effects of the devices.
Hannah Muehl, a physician assistant and dietitian in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said she found that the quantified knowledge that she wasn't sleeping well made it even harder for her to get rest. She purchased her ring after having a baby to track her sleepless nights nursing.
'It puts action behind things that should be innate, like reminding you to rest, reminding you sleep, all these things that shouldn't be innate practices,' Muehl said. 'Making them things that you're trying to hit as a goal – which inherently, if you're working hard toward resting, you're not actually resting."
'I just felt like I couldn't do anything right to make the ring happy,' said Abi Caswell, a bakery owner who lives in New Orleans.
She got her ring a little over a year ago to use the device's temperature-tracking feature for family planning. She liked the idea of not having 'to remember to take out a thermometer every morning,' Caswell, 29, said.
She described become disenchanted with the device while opening her second bakery location. It was an intense period for Caswell, and the ring's regular reminders reinforced what she already knew: 'My body was in maximum overdrive,' she said.
Seeing that spelled out in data only exacerbated her negative feelings, like giving an upset person the wildly unhelpful advice that he or she should just calm down.
'It was stressing me out more thinking about how stressed I was,' Caswell said, 'and how I was not able to give my body and my health the attention that it needed.'
The proliferation of technology designed to track our biology can also make it easy to forget that human beings are pretty well equipped to do that on our own, said Jacqueline D Wernimont, an associate professor at Dartmouth College in the film and media studies department who specialises in histories of quantification.
Wearable technology 'takes the authority and knowledge out of the individual and places it in some third party, in a device that then the individual has to consult in order to try to decipher or understand her own body,' said Wernimont, who is the author of Numbered Lives: Life And Death In Quantum Media.
'That in and of itself produces a kind of anxiety,' she added.
Shyamal Patel, Oura's senior vice president of science, acknowledged that sometimes having access to so much data can be stressful for some users, including himself. Occasionally, he said, he take breaks from wearing his ring if he is feeling overwhelmed.
'I think it's on us as individuals and users and how we actually leverage this technology so the technology is serving us not the other way around,' Patel said.
He also stressed that users should take care not to compare their biometric data with others'.
Some have found that difficult, particularly as social media has amplified stories of people who they say their wearable tech tipped them off to serious medical conditions.
'I knew that I had cancer before I was diagnosed because of my Oura Ring,' Nikki Gooding, a 27-year-old nurse practitioner in Richmond, Virginia, said in a widely shared TikTok in March. Hunter Woodhall, a Paralympic track star, said his Oura Ring 'may have saved my life' after it helped him seek treatment for appendicitis.
Gooding, who was later diagnosed with lymphoma, explained how the ring's daily updates alerted her to 'major signs of some sort of physical stress.' Her temperature was consistently higher than usual, she said in an interview.
'Please don't let this scare you!!,' Gooding later wrote in a comment on her video, acknowledging a number of people who said Gooding's story was the reason they could never wear an Oura Ring.
'I deal with a lot of patients who do have health anxiety, so I understood,' Gooding said.
These days, Muehl said, she has taken off her ring for good. She's back to using an old-school pedometer to track her steps. Caswell is still wearing hers. She said she checks it only twice a day. Hills abandoned the blood pressure monitor at her parents' house. She still sleeps in her ring a few nights a week.
Wernimont said she regularly has classroom discussions with students who are overly reliant on their quantified experience, focusing closely on data and trusting those metrics over their own firsthand experiences and physical sensations.
'They're like, 'The device said ...' or 'The monitor said ...,' and I'm like, 'But what did your body say?''
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Eventually, Hills was able to see a doctor who told her she was healthy. The doctor did have one recommendation: Consider ditching the ring. In the eternal human quest to know thyself, it's tempting to seize on every bit of information we can glean. If you could know, for instance, not just that you slept 6.5 hours last night but also that 12 per cent of those hours were spent in REM sleep and that your overall 'sleep efficiency' – time asleep versus time awake – was 85 per cent, as many pieces of wearable tech can tell you, why wouldn't you? At least that's the attitude of many people in our age of the quantified self, in which collecting sheaves of data about our bodies every day seems to hold the promise of bringing about a happier, healthier life. But what if all of that data is also heightening our stress? Is there a metric for that? While some Oura users say they enjoy the ring as a screen-free way to keep tabs on their bodies, several Oura owners, including Hills, described feeling increasingly anxious after using their devices. Rather than helping them feel more in control of their wellness, the data only made them fixate on potential – and often nonexistent – problems. You could call it Oura paranoia, though the phenomenon is hardly exclusive to any one product: As wearable health technology, including Apple Watches and Fitbits, have become more popular in recent years, some users have struggled with the unintended psychological side effects of the devices. Hannah Muehl, a physician assistant and dietitian in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said she found that the quantified knowledge that she wasn't sleeping well made it even harder for her to get rest. She purchased her ring after having a baby to track her sleepless nights nursing. 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