I used to wear a Fitbit every single day. It was part of me for years.
The little screen wrapped around my wrist told me how many steps I took, how fast my heart was beating, how well I was sleeping. And I believed it. I trusted the numbers more than I trusted myself.
Until 2020. That was the year my health anxiety really flared. Watching my heart rate jump on that tiny screen sent me into spirals I couldn’t claw my way out of. A spike meant panic. A little blip meant catastrophe. The Fitbit wasn’t actually keeping me healthy. It was keeping me terrified.
So I stopped. I had to. One day, I took it off and never put it back on.
I went without any trackers for a few years, and it felt almost rebellious. Who doesn’t have some kind of wellness tracker? It was like I was reclaiming something I didn’t even know I’d given away. But eventually, curiosity tugged at me again. (And if I’m being completely honest, I was in a bit of an impulsive spending phase, but that’s for another day.) I’ve never been a great sleeper. I toss and turn, I dream in technicolor, I wake up already tired. So I convinced myself it wouldn’t hurt to track just my sleep. No instant heart rate available on my wrist anytime I wanted. No steps. Just a quiet little ring to tell me what my nights were like.
I’ve been wearing it for a week.
And here’s what I’ve learned: every morning, my app tells me my sleep score was great. Every morning, it cheers me on with a message about how ready I am for the day. And every morning I feel like I’ve been run over. Heavy, groggy, stumbling around with a brain full of fog.
It’s a strange kind of gaslighting.
And then, just to make it more absurd, the night before last, I got less sleep than on any other night since I have been wearing the ring. Way less. The app gave me my lowest score yet. But I woke up feeling better than I have in days. Clear. Energized. Steady. Almost normal.
So which is it? Do I trust the numbers, or do I trust my own body?
That’s the quiet trap of wellness technology.
Maybe “optimization” is a myth.
What unsettles me most is how quickly these devices slip into the role of authority. It’s subtle at first. You glance at the score, you nod, you move on. But after a while, the number starts to outweigh your own sense of yourself.
You wake up feeling fine, yet the app insists you’re not recovered. And suddenly you wonder: Am I actually okay? Should I cancel? Should I hold back? The doubt creeps in, and the score wins.
Or you wake up a wreck, and the app beams at you with a big green bar of approval. You start the day believing you should feel good, so maybe what you’re experiencing is laziness or lack of willpower. Again, the score wins.
That gap between sensation and data is where self-trust starts to erode.
And let’s be honest, these apps aren’t built just to help us feel better. They’re built to help us perform better.
The language gives it away: recovery, readiness, strain, optimization. It’s the vocabulary of productivity. Not rest. Not presence. Not care. These tools might sit under the banner of “wellness,” but often they’re really just another way to squeeze more out of us. Another way to measure how well we’re keeping up.
When I look at it like that, I can see why it hooked me. I wanted to believe there was a neat little system that could explain why I’m tired, why my body feels the way it does. A breadcrumb trail that could lead me back to energy and ease. But that’s not what’s happening. The app is trying to impose a digital script on my own truth that doesn’t actually fit me.
If you’ve been nodding along so far, and you want more of these messy reflections on being human in a culture that wants us optimized, go ahead and subscribe. You know you want to.
There’s another layer too, and it’s one I can’t ignore.
The intimacy we give away
Think about how much we hand over to these companies. Our heartbeats. Our menstrual cycles. Our most private moments of rest and strain. Our mental health struggles. We upload them into a system we don’t control, to corporations that profit from them in ways we’ll never see.
It’s like leaving the door to your most intimate rhythms unlocked and inviting strangers to walk in and take notes. And I don’t just mean corporations.
And yet, somehow, the creepiness isn’t even the part that unsettles me most. What unsettles me is how quickly I’ve started to doubt myself again. How easy it is to slip into the belief that the app knows best.
I keep circling back to yesterday morning when I woke up refreshed after my so-called “worst” night. If I’d gone by the score alone, I would have told myself a story about being depleted. Instead, my body was telling me another story entirely. And if I’m honest, yesterday was my most productive and creation-driven day in weeks.
Which means the real work is in remembering which story to believe.
It’s not that the data is useless. Sometimes it’s helpful to see patterns spelled out in numbers. Sometimes it gives us language for what we already know. But data should never be the boss of lived experience.
The body speaks in its own ways: the weight of our limbs, the steadiness of our breath, the clarity of our mind, the tug of our hunger. The app doesn’t get the final word on any of that.
And yet so many of us have been trained to second-guess ourselves. We’ve inherited this deep cultural belief that our sensations need external validation. Especially if you’ve grown up in systems that dismissed your pain, ignored your instincts, or told you you were overreacting. It becomes second nature to believe the chart, the test result, the score, the authority figure.
Wellness tech is just another face of that same story. The algorithm takes the place of the doctor, the rabbi, the teacher. You don’t feel how you feel. You feel how the app says you feel.
I’m no longer interested in living that way.
I want to wake up and check in with my own body before I check in with a device. I want to honor the mornings where I feel steady, even if the score disagrees, and take it easy on the days I feel off, no matter how many green bars glow at me.
I want my body back.
Maybe that’s the quiet act of rebellion: to dethrone the data. To let the information be there without letting it take over. To use the app like a tool but never like a ruler.
Because my body is not an app. Neither is yours.
And no matter how sleek the tech, no matter how persuasive the metrics, the truest measure of life is still the pulse of your own being.
Love today,
Heather 🌸
If this stirred something in you, will you share it with someone else who might need the reminder? These essays grow when you pass them along.