I've ditched my activity tracker because it made me stop listening to my own body

My days are spent chasing information, spotting patterns and trying to answer questions that other people either can't or won't. I genuinely love data. Give me a spreadsheet, a timeline or a graph and I'm happy.

So when I bought a Whoop activity tracker a few months ago, it felt like the perfect gadget for someone like me. I wasn't interested in becoming an elite athlete. I just wanted to know whether I was sleeping well, how active I was and whether there were small changes I could make to be a bit healthier.

For the first few weeks, that's exactly what it was. I'd glance at the app over my morning coffee, look at how much sleep I'd had, see how many steps I'd done the day before and think no more about it. It was interesting without being intrusive.

Then, almost without noticing, the whole thing changed.

I remember waking up one morning feeling alright. Usual routine, coffee, shower, ready for work. Then I checked the app. Recovery in the red. Within five minutes I'd convinced myself I actually was tired.

Within minutes I found myself wondering if I actually was tired after all.

That's when I realised something quite strange was happening. Instead of using the data to understand how I felt, I was using it to tell me how I should feel.

It became a habit. Every morning I'd zoom in on the graphs like I was investigating a story. Why had my heart rate jumped at 3.27am? Had I eaten too late? Was I coming down with something? Had I been too hot? Was work stressing me out? Had I woken up and just not remembered it? There always seemed to be another graph to examine and another theory to test, even though there often wasn't a meaningful explanation at all.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I spend my working life investigating things because that's literally my job, but I'd somehow started treating my own body like another investigation.

Then came the part that surprised me most.

A few of my friends bought activity trackers too, or just admitted to using them in the WhatsApp groups. None of us are particularly competitive people, but it didn't take long before we drifted into comparing recovery scores, sleep performance and strain. It wasn't malicious, and nobody was showing off, but it became part of everyday conversation.

"What recovery did you get?"

"I was in the green today."

"I only needed six hours."

Stop and think about that for a second. We've actually reached the point where people are comparing how efficiently they were unconscious.

Something that should be the most natural thing we do had become another metric to optimise and another scoreboard to climb. If your recovery score was lower than everyone else's, it was surprisingly easy to feel as though you'd somehow failed before you'd even left the house.

That's when I decided enough was enough.

I took the Whoop off and put it in a drawer. I expected people to tell me I was mad or that I'd miss the data. Instead, something completely different happened. Once I admitted to my mates that I wasn't enjoying wearing it any more and that it had become another source of pressure rather than motivation, several of them admitted they'd been feeling the same way. Some had become obsessed with chasing better scores. Others found themselves worrying about sleep they'd never have questioned before. More than one quietly stopped wearing theirs altogether.

It made me wonder how many of us are privately exhausted by the constant pressure to optimise ourselves while publicly pretending we love every minute of it.

Don't get me wrong. I still think wearables have real value. They encourage people to exercise, they can highlight genuine health issues and, for plenty of people, they're an incredibly useful tool. This isn't an argument against technology. It's an argument against forgetting that it's only a tool.

At some point, I'd stopped trusting the oldest and most sophisticated monitoring system I'd ever own, my own body. If I woke up feeling refreshed, that should have been enough. If I felt tired after a busy week, perhaps I didn't need a graph to explain why.

These days I still go for walks, I still exercise and I still try to get a decent night's sleep. The only difference is that when I wake up in the morning, the first question I ask isn't what my recovery score is.

I just trust my own judgement, and that’s the most useful insight of them all.

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