If tracking your health data gives you anxiety—what’s the point? Here, one writer investigates the limits of wellness and wearables.
I’ve been awake for less than 30 seconds, and it’s the first thing I check, my eyes still adjusting to the daylight. 73. 84. 95. If those numbers don’t mean anything to you, congratulations. If they do ring a bell, you already know: it’s my readiness score, my sleep score, and my activity score—three metrics that increasingly dictate not just how I plan my day, but how I feel about it before it even begins.
I am a prisoner to my Oura Ring—albeit a willing one.If my sleep score is low, it’s my main talking point. “I slept like shit last night,” I’ll text my husband, citing the data as proof. If my readiness is high, I’m checking off my to-do list at record speed. If it’s not? I’m already negotiating for an extra espresso shot before my feet touch the floor. I treat these numbers as gospel.But there’s a nagging irony here: I’ve made it through most of my 39 years on this planet just fine without a ring telling me how I felt. Now, I’m one of over 5.5 million people globally who have outsourced their intuition to the same titanium band. Between Oura, Whoop, and the Galaxy Ring, we’ve entered an era where we no longer trust our own grogginess. We need the app to validate the exhaustion we’re already feeling—or worse, to tell us we’re exhausted when we actually feel fine.It’s been almost a year since I embarked on this 'wearable journey.' Sure, I’ve had an Apple Watch for years, but this feels different. It’s more intimate, more obsessive. I have learned a lot about myself through my ring—my ideal bedtime, when my next menstrual cycle will be, what my HRV, a.k.a. heart rate variability, is . It has even flagged impending colds when I’ve convinced myself it was just allergies. And yet, despite how useful the insights can be, the constant stream of data sometimes feels like information overload. I find myself checking the app with the same Pavlovian twitch I usually reserve for Instagram. How stressed am I at this exact moment? Have I met my activity goal? I can even check my friends’ Oura Ring stats through a feature called Circles to compare. But is all of this access making us 'optimized,' or just more anxious?“When people check a readiness score before they’ve even checked in with themselves, it can shift everything. Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are all linked,” psychologist Rachel Goldman tells me. Goldman, an expert in stress and health behavior and author of When Life Happens, notes that this digital ritual can be a form of self-sabotage. “Instead of asking, How do I actually feel today?, people start relying on a number to tell them whether they should feel energized or tired. Psychologically, that can weaken our ability to trust our own internal cues.”She’s describing a psychological glitch that researchers call the “Expectancy Effect.” It turns out, if an app tells you that you slept like a zombie, your brain will actually make sure you act like one. In a study published in Cognitive Research, participants were given 'sham feedback'—they were told they’d slept poorly even when they hadn’t. The result? They performed significantly worse on cognitive tests. They weren’t actually tired; they just believed they were because a report told them so.There’s a word for this specific brand of data-obsession: orthosomnia. Coined in 2017 to describe a perfectionist quest for the 'perfect' sleep score, it triggers the exact sympathetic nervous system response—anxiety!—that keeps us awake in the first place. But even the experts who are interested in the data worry about how we're interpreting it. I spoke to Michael Breus—a clinical psychologist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, more famously known as “The Sleep Doctor.” He tells me that while wearables have made sleep more visible, they have also turned rest into a high-stakes competition.“It has made sleep into something you have to perform and score,” Breus says, “which can deepen anxiety and perfectionism when the numbers don’t look right.” His biggest gripe? The accuracy. He argues that wearables aren't always measuring sleep as precisely as we think, and treating a single night's data as an absolute fact is a mistake. “It becomes unhealthy when the number turns into a digital moral scorecard that overrides body awareness. I tell all my patients to look at the end of the week and notice trends—individual evenings are not helpful.”Both Goldman and Breus mention a specific type of person who should be wary of wearables—the kind who obsess over numbers, who are competitive, and who are overt perfectionists. You can’t see, but I’m raising my hand, guilty as charged, as you read this. “For those who are already anxious, constant data and alerts can amplify worry,” Breus warns. “If you notice that you’re constantly checking the numbers or letting the data determine how you feel about your day, that’s a sign the tracking may be doing more harm than good.”My friend Monica Wang was one of the first people I knew to wear an Oura Ring and has been wearing it for years. She is extremely health-focused and has built a following for her wellness tips. For Monica, the ring is a quiet assistant. When I ask her if there are any negatives, she genuinely can’t think of one. “I don’t obsess over the numbers,” she tells me. “I just acknowledge them and adjust where needed. I reflect on my activities to see what aligned with the good numbers and what may have contributed to the bad ones. I don't have too many feelings about it.” For Monica, a low score isn't a moral failure; it’s just a sign that she may have dealt with too many stressful moments that day.I decide I will try to be more like Monica. After all, having access to health data is a gift, especially in an era where healthcare, especially women’s, can feel dismissive. It’s empowering to have all of this information about myself at my fingertips and have tools like the Oura Advisor, which added a new AI model that can provide tailored insights for menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. While AI's broader applications remain controversial, I think this is a clear case of technology being used for good.Even so, I realize that the most sophisticated technology can’t replace all the years of experience I've gained living in my own body. The future of wellness isn't just about having more data; it’s about what we do with it outside of the apps. I’ll keep my ring, and I’ll keep checking my numbers. I will just remind myself that while it’s great to know what my HRV and sleep cycles are, my ring still doesn’t know something fairly important: how I actually feel.
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