Opinion | Even the Best Smart Watch Might Be Bad for Your Brain - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...smartwatch-health-body.html
wearable devices tracking fitness health metrics psychology brain science social media technology
shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 22
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one major downside to all this quantification: It can interfere with our ability to know our own bodies. Once you outsource your well-being to a device and convert it into a number, it stops being yours.
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With my smart watch, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and check my app to see how I slept — instead of just taking a moment to notice that I was still tired
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It’s an extension of our hustle-oriented culture, said the executive coach and performance expert Brad Stulberg, author of “The Practice of Groundedness.” “Our culture promotes the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the predominant arbiter of success, and these devices play right into that,
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“It’s like you’re trying to win at this game instead of living your life. Instead of learning what your body feels like, you have a number.”
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Add a social or competitive component, as in the fitness app Strava or the community features on Peloton, and the feelings of control and empowerment that fitness can foster can morph quickly into the opposite.
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If it feels like an addiction, that’s because it can work similarly to smartphone and other digital addictions. Dependency is what these devices are designed to foster.
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in fact, we very much can become compulsively fixated on these wearable devices — in a way that is akin to addiction.”
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These devices don’t just record your behavior — they influence it and keep you coming back. You become dependent on external validation.
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I know I got fitter. But I started to feel that my health wasn’t grounded in my own body anymore, or even in my mind.
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Of course these watches can be useful: for health data, reminding you to move more or maybe even that emergency call if you wind up falling in the woods. Many of us make better choices when we know we’re being watched.