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A sense of building tension. I can see the cold breath emanating from my fellow runners as they do the "about to run" wiggle on the beginning point.

A rapid twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local Saturday morning race and I'm focused. The countdown begins...

Hold on. I need to adjust my watch. The same goes for the person next to me.

The person waiting expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… done! Signal acquired, away I go.

During the scramble, it's challenging to spot a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And it's not just us athletes who wear them.

It's a booming, massive sector. Names like Garmin lead the market, featuring an wide selection of different versions to fit a variety of budgets. According to how feature-packed the device you choose, price tags can vary between a hundred pounds to a significant investment.

"It makes me crazy, I'm unable to switch off."

"It provides solace… It's like a friend guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've had a poor sleep."

A handful of the responses people have shared from other smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My thoughts on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's indicating I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the trees I'm passing under are disrupting my GPS connection.

Millions of us strap these small devices onto our wrists and wear them 24/7, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're constantly tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we depended on them only to give us an estimation of our step count. Today, they can track our sleep quality, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), our VO2 max.

It's tricky to find a bodily function they don't track.

But can they do what they say they do? And are the statistics we analyse a true reflection of our actual health? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of readings and motivational messages just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a bit fixated with mine," an individual admits.

While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "daunting" at times - a feeling first discovered during a major life event.

Until she found out she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be energetic enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I have a six-month old, there's no point to be informed I'm tired," she says. "I know that all too clearly."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"It's possible, theoretically, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether the additional features it can now do is possibly overkill for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your health metrics and interpreting your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually project minute LED lights onto your arm which can monitor blood flow, detecting your pulse rate. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to gauge your recovery state.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the continuously improving tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more vulnerable of a stroke in the long term.

But how to understand these readings is complex. The expert concerns that as more functions are incorporated, people may not be able to fully understand their data.

"I have some doubts that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a positive development," he says.

A health researcher studying cardiology echoes this sentiment. Research into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "far more likely to use medical services".

She identified a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate increased. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their anxiety went up again.

"If we see data about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."