When all sense of control was lost during the pandemic, I found solace in something I could take command of: the numbers on my Apple Watch. Meeting my step, calorie-burn, exercise, and stand goals became central to my days—even if it meant getting out of bed at night to do lunges to make it happen.
But soon that motivation to get up and move turned toxic: Rather than focusing on how I felt or taking rest days, I needed to simply hit the goals to avoid self-inflicted shame.
I’ve now learned just how normalized such behavior has become.
As the popularity of fitness trackers has grown—with roughly one in five Americans wearing one, according to a 2020 Pew Research survey—so have anxiety and obsession around them. And while a recent study found fitness trackers can increase anxiety about heart health, a range of articles and social media posts have also documented another effect on mental health: the internalized pressure to reach fitness goals.
On Instagram, fitness instructor Lorie Banietti posted about how “tracking every step, calorie, and minute of sleep turned into an obsession—not inspiration.”
“As it began to track more data,” Business Insider writer Dan Ginn recounted in a 2024 essay about his Apple Watch, “I spiraled into a world of obsessive checking and health anxiety.”
“I used to have such a toxic relationship with my Apple Watch,” influencer Sophia Panella said in a TikTok, explaining that she “based literally every part of my day” around it.
“Anxiety was the real workout,” she said. “Instead of feeling motivated, I was stressed about hitting arbitrary goals.”
That all sounds familiar to Victoria Sekely, a physical therapist who coaches running and strength training. “I have a lot of clients who are obsessed with closing the rings,” she tells Fortune, referring to a goals-batched feature of the Apple Watch.
The danger of a dependency on such trackers, including Whoop, Garmin, Oura Ring, Fitbit, and others, is that you can start to lose touch with your own body, Sekely says—and even disbelieve what you’re feeling if it doesn’t match what the watch says.
Using fitness trackers for good
Despite the issues with fitness trackers, says Sekely, “It can be motivating. Having data can be a very good thing.” And it’s certainly possible to have healthy relationships with the technology.
“Fitness trackers provide very concrete goals that are easily measurable and generally reasonably achievable. It feels good to close the ring, or hit your 10,000 steps for the day—it makes you feel competent,” says Marina Milyavskaya, associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a researcher on the topic of goal pursuit.
“I think that was the original aim of these fitness trackers—recognizing that people have fitness goals, and that these goals are generally not easy to attain,” Milyavskaya says.
In addition, there are many device features that could help you take control of your health—allowing you to track sleep quality, menstrual cycle, and mood—as long as you don’t let yourself get too caught up in the goals and when you fail to hit them, Milyavskaya points out.
“It’s not the device that is inherently problematic,” says Ryann Nicole, a therapist and nutritionist who stopped using her tracker after realizing it took on an obsessive effect. “It’s what you do with that device that can become problematic.”
How to know if your tracker relationship has turned toxic
You’ve stopped listening to your body
In his article, Ginn described how his experience with the tracker led to almost a complete disconnect between his body and his mind.
“Things I didn’t know existed became important to me. Heart-rate variability, blood-oxygen saturation, and maximal oxygen consumption were all part of my daily monitoring,” he wrote for Business Insider. Regardless of how he felt, he relied on his watch to tell him.
“If I felt refreshed after sleep but the app said otherwise, it had to mean I had an underlying health problem. When my blood-oxygen levels sporadically dropped, I was surely on the verge of hypoxia,” Ginn wrote.
Ignoring what your body is telling you can be a slippery slope—one that can lead to self-doubt and even burnout, says Sekely, if you use the metrics on your watch to dictate your workout routine or daily mindset.
“We almost start to take their word over our own body,” Sekely says. “If you’re just solely thinking about the numbers, the numbers are one piece of the full puzzle. You’re missing the entire picture.”
You panic if you don’t have your tracker
People on TikTok have joked that they feel their workouts “don’t count” unless they’re wearing their fitness tracker. While seeing the metrics post-workout can provide that sense of accomplishment, it isn’t the healthiest mindset to have—and it can actually lead to a sense of dependency that interferes with building a sustainable workout routine.
“I find that many people have a poor relationship with metrics and they end up being ‘married’ to them,” says Amanda Katz, certified run coach, fitness trainer, and instructor at Equinox in New York City.
Milyavskaya agrees that dependency on your tracker is usually a sign that something is wrong. “Imagine not wearing it for a day or two,” she says. “If that causes you distress, that may be a problem.”
When determining if you have a healthy relationship with your tracker—or if you should have one at all—Katz invites you to try a simple test: Go for a 30-minute run or gym session without your watch. If that creates panic or anxiety within you, then you might have to reevaluate the power your device has over you, she says.
“If you can recognize that your run still counts, your workout still counts, regardless of if you tracked it or not, I would say that you are a good candidate for a fitness tracker,” Katz says. “Or maybe you don’t need one at all to be successful.”
Read more from Fortune
You let the device dictate your behavior
Milyavskaya says that a lot of the unhealthy behaviors associated with fitness trackers mimic addictions—specifically if your obsession starts to interfere with your life.
That’s especially true if, says Milyavskaya, “you’re thinking about it all the time,” or “ if it causes conflict in your relationships with others or for your other responsibilities.”
Nicole, for example, says that even if it was 11 p.m. and she was exhausted, she would hop up and pace around her house at the watch’s prompting, just to hit her exercise and step goals for the day.
The number of calories she burned in a day also became crucial to determining how much she ate that day—prompting her to slip back into the type of thinking she had moved past as she recovered from an eating disorder.
“I’m realizing how much this is consuming me,” she says, looking back on when she decided to stop wearing the watch.
Katz has seen people let the numbers on their watch dictate their own self-worth.
“Is that helpful or harmful for you?” she suggests you ask yourself.
You are not sure why the goals are so crucial
Milyavskaya also encourages people to ask themselves not only what kind of relationship they’ve developed with their fitness tracker, but why they’ve become so obsessed with its metrics.
“Ask yourself, why do you care about achieving that goal? Why does it matter? How does this fit in with your other goals?” she asks. Milyavskaya says activities that do not depend on being tracked by your fitness device and are more in line with your identity or goals for the future are less likely to turn into an obsession.
“People have a much harder time disengaging from goals where they feel controlled—like it is something that they have to do,” she says.
Finally, Nicole prompts folks to ask themselves how much time they spend thinking about the numbers on the tracker.
“How much is that consuming you?” she asks. “Do you like that? Be honest with yourself.”
How to detox from your tracker
In case the relationship with your fitness tracker has indeed become problematic, experts have a few suggestions for how to dial things back:
- Milyavskaya suggests taking off the tracker for a day or two—or a week—and see how you feel. If you find yourself panicked, it might be a sign to keep it off for longer.
- Sekely recommends working out without your tracker and focusing on how workouts make you feel in your body, rather than the metrics you see at the end.
- Consider your goals, Sekely says: “If your goals are just to be active a couple times a week, I don’t think you need [a tracker].”
- And finally, Sekely wants people to remember that the numbers on your tracker are just one piece of the puzzle—they can be a friendly guide or supplement to your training, but they can’t tell you how much rest you need or how much progress you’re making.
More on fitness trackers:
- People are ditching their Apple Watches after feeling bullied to burn calories and ‘close their rings’
- The Oura Ring got a facelift. Here’s what to know about the newly released wearable
- Your Apple Watch or Fitbit may be a breeding ground for E. coli and staph bacteria. Here’s how to clean your fitness tracker