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An atmosphere of nervous excitement. Visible is the chilled vapour emanating from my rivals as they perform the "about to run" shuffle on the beginning point.

A swift twitch of the hips.

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

Hold on. I have to start my device. As does the runner next to me.

The person in the line tuts. I won't start until… there! GPS ready, and I'm running.

During the scramble, it's hard to spot a arm without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us runners who use them.

This is a thriving, massive market. Companies like Garmin lead the market, each with an broad selection of diverse models to cater to a range of budgets. According to how feature-packed the watch you choose, costs can range from an affordable sum to a significant investment.

"It makes me crazy, it's impossible to relax."

"It comforts me… It acts as a friend encouraging me."

"I wish it wouldn't say about a bad night's sleep."

A small sample of the comments people have shared from other tracker enthusiasts when I question what they their opinion is on theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My current opinion on my own device? At this moment, frustrating. It's reporting I'm off pace, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm passing under are blocking my GPS connection.

A vast number of us fasten these small devices onto our wrists and wear them constantly, apparently unconcerned with the fact they're perpetually recording us.

Gone are the days when we depended on them only to give us an estimation of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can track our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

It's a challenge to find a health indicator they don't track.

But do they do what they advertise? And are the data points we obsess over a true reflection of reality? Do they improve our overall health, or do the plethora of measurements and motivational messages just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a quite obsessed with mine," one user confesses.

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

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a young baby, it's unnecessary for me to be notified I've not slept," she says. "That fact is perfectly well."

Couldn't she just take it off?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I've got this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether the myriad other functions it can now do is possibly too much for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of monitoring your health metrics and processing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually project minute LED lights onto your arm which can detect capillary action, recording your heartbeat. Higher-end devices detect changes in the bioimpedance that flows through the skin to gauge your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could realistically prevent illness, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the years to come.

But how to make sense of these figures is not straightforward. The expert fears that as further capabilities are introduced, people may struggle to fully understand their data.

"I remain sceptical that the ability to monitor so much data is such a good idea," he says.

A clinical psychologist specialising in patient behaviour agrees. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She identified a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM went up. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their anxiety went up again.

"Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."