Digital Health Anxiety: When Wellness Tech Becomes A Stressor

In today’s hyper-connected world, technology promises us a clearer insight into our health and well-being. With a glance at our wrist or a quick tap on our phones, we can get a snapshot of our heart rate, the quality of our sleep, or the number of steps we’ve taken in a day. These tools, designed to empower us, can sometimes have an unintended consequence: they can become sources of anxiety and stress. Lacing up your running shoes, you head out for a morning run. Looking forward to feeling the wind in your hair, the sun on your face, to enjoying the time to connect with nature and yourself. But the real-time feedback from your wearables starts to distract. You can monitor your current/average pace, the distance covered, and your heart rate. Instead of the surroundings, your focus drifts to these metrics. The joy of the run diminishes under the weight of performance metrics. Exercise turns into an eternal quest for Personal Bests, leaving you questioning if you’re doing well enough even before you’ve returned home. Or consider the days when you wake up feeling fine, ready to tackle the day ahead. But then, your sleep tracker shows that your sleep was less than ideal. A shadow of doubt casts over your mood, and suddenly you start to feel tired. What should have been a tool for understanding becomes a source of self-doubt. These scenarios underline a growing concern known as “digital health anxiety”, where the very tools meant to ...
Source: The Medical Futurist - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: TMF digital health anxiety smartwatch wearables Source Type: blogs