Smart watches, health trackers can cause anxiety among some users

Millions of people use a wearable health and fitness tracker. These devices can be useful for monitoring activity levels, sleep quality and heart rate. But for some, wearables can have unintended consequences on wellbeing.

This is something I encountered recently. At a public talk, I got to chatting with a man who told me a story that stayed with me.

He’d just finished a long hike and felt great. Then he glanced at his smartwatch. Heart rate: 130 bpm. Instant panic.

About 30 minutes later he realised the cause: the altitude. Yet in that moment, he’d gone from feeling perfectly fine to feeling awful – all because of the smartwatch’s reading.

This man isn’t alone. Some users have found their wearable increased anxiety so much they needed to stop wearing it.

A key reason wearable health devices may increase anxiety for some people comes down to a mismatch in expectation and what the device says.

Our brain is a prediction machine. It continuously, automatically generates and updates a mental model of our environment by comparing its predictions to the sensory information it receives.

Processing every sensory input from scratch would be slow and inefficient. By predicting what it expects to encounter, the brain can interpret noisy sensory information quickly and usually accurately.

Some examples of this happening include feeling...

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