Wearables and Wellness: Are We Tracking Our Health or Just Collecting Data?
By Angela D. Mazza, DO, ABAARM, FAAMFM, ECNU
Can your smartwatch really tell you how healthy you are?
From smartwatches and fitness trackers to continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and sleep-tracking rings, wearable technology has transformed the way we monitor our health.
We can track our heart rate, count our steps, estimate sleep quality, monitor glucose fluctuations, and receive daily assessments of our recovery and readiness.
But here's an important question: Does having more health data actually make us healthier?
In a recent episode of Thyroid Talk with Dr. Angela Mazza, we explored the growing world of wearable technology, its potential benefits, its limitations, and the surprising ways that tracking our health can sometimes create more stress than clarity.
The Rise of the Quantified Self
The concept of the Quantified Self refers to using technology and personal data to better understand our bodies, behaviors, and health patterns.
Wearables have made this approach accessible to millions of people.
Devices such as the Apple Watch, Oura Ring, Fitbit, Garmin, and WHOOP can provide information about physical activity, heart rate, sleep patterns, and estimated recovery.
Continuous glucose monitors offer another layer of information by showing how glucose concentrations change throughout the day.
These technologies can be useful, particularly when they help people recognize patterns they might otherwise overlook.
For example, someone may discover that inadequate sleep is associated with higher resting heart rates, that regular walking improves their activity consistency, or that certain meals produce larger glucose excursions.
However, identifying a pattern is not the same as establishing its clinical significance.
And that distinction matters.
What Wearables Can—and Cannot—Tell Us
One of the greatest strengths of wearable technology is its ability to provide longitudinal information.
Rather than relying on a single measurement during an office visit, clinicians and patients may gain insight into patterns that develop over days, weeks, or months.
But wearable measurements are not all equally reliable.
Heart rate and step counts may be reasonably accurate under certain conditions, while estimates of sleep stages, energy expenditure, stress, and recovery can be considerably more variable.
Many devices also generate proprietary scores based on algorithms that are not fully transparent.
A recovery score of 65 does not necessarily mean your body is functioning poorly.
Likewise, an excellent sleep score does not guarantee that your sleep was restorative.
Wearables measure selected physiological signals. They do not measure your overall health.
The Thyroid Connection: Why Context Matters
As an endocrinologist, I frequently see patients who are trying to understand persistent fatigue, weight changes, poor sleep, or reduced exercise tolerance.
Wearable data may provide useful clues, but it cannot independently diagnose thyroid dysfunction.
For example, changes in resting heart rate can occur with thyroid hormone excess or deficiency, but they can also reflect physical conditioning, medications, illness, hydration, stress, and numerous other factors.
Similarly, fatigue or reduced exercise tolerance may involve thyroid physiology, sleep disorders, menopausal changes, anemia, metabolic dysfunction, or other conditions.
A wearable may identify that something has changed.
It cannot reliably determine why.
This is where clinical interpretation becomes essential.
The goal should be to integrate wearable information with symptoms, medical history, examination findings, and appropriate laboratory testing—not to replace established diagnostic methods.
When Tracking Becomes Stressful
One of the more surprising consequences of wearable technology is that it can sometimes increase anxiety about health.
Consider someone who wakes up feeling rested and energetic, only to discover that their sleep tracker assigned them a poor sleep score.
Suddenly, they begin questioning how well they slept.
They may feel less confident about exercising, become preoccupied with improving their score, or start monitoring every nighttime awakening.
Researchers have described a related phenomenon called orthosomnia, in which an excessive focus on achieving ideal sleep-tracker results may contribute to sleep-related anxiety and maladaptive sleep behaviors.
The concern is not that sleep tracking is inherently harmful.
It is that the pursuit of perfect data can sometimes interfere with the very behaviors we are trying to improve.
Our bodies are dynamic biological systems, not machines expected to produce identical measurements every day.
Not All Stress Is Bad Stress
Another limitation of wearable technology is the interpretation of physiological stress.
Many devices estimate stress using heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and other physiological signals.
However, these measurements cannot reliably distinguish between emotional distress, physical exertion, excitement, and other forms of physiological activation.
A challenging workout, an exciting concert, or an enjoyable social experience may produce changes that a wearable interprets as increased stress.
But these experiences are not necessarily harmful.
In fact, appropriately dosed physical activity and other meaningful experiences can contribute positively to health and well-being.
Physiological activation is not synonymous with pathological stress.
Context matters more than a single score.
Continuous Glucose Monitors: Valuable Information, but for Whom?
Continuous glucose monitoring has transformed diabetes management.
For many individuals with diabetes, particularly those using insulin, CGMs provide clinically valuable information that can improve treatment decisions and help identify hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia.
Their increasing availability has also generated interest among people without diabetes who want to understand their metabolic responses to food, exercise, and sleep.
While this information may be interesting, the clinical benefits of routine CGM use in metabolically healthy individuals remain uncertain.
Glucose naturally fluctuates throughout the day.
A temporary increase after a meal is not automatically evidence of metabolic dysfunction.
Without appropriate interpretation, individuals may begin restricting nutritious foods or attempting to eliminate normal physiological variation.
The goal of metabolic health is not to produce a perfectly flat glucose curve.
It is to maintain effective glucose regulation and reduce clinically meaningful metabolic risk.
Data-Informed, Not Data-Driven
Perhaps the most important message from our podcast discussion is that wearable technology should support health decisions rather than dictate them.
Before acting on a wearable measurement, consider three questions:
Is this measurement reliable? Understand what the device actually measures and what it estimates.
Does the information fit the clinical context? Consider symptoms, medications, medical conditions, and changes over time.
Will this information meaningfully change what I do? Data are most valuable when they support appropriate, sustainable decisions.
If tracking your activity encourages regular movement, that's a meaningful benefit.
If monitoring sleep helps you establish a more consistent bedtime, that's useful information.
But if checking your recovery score creates anxiety, discourages physical activity, or makes you distrust how you actually feel, it may be time to reconsider how you're using the device.
The Bottom Line: Your Body Is More Than a Dashboard
Wearable technology represents an exciting intersection of digital health, physiology, and personalized medicine.
As these technologies evolve, they may become increasingly valuable for identifying patterns, supporting clinical monitoring, and encouraging healthy behaviors.
But more information does not automatically produce better health.
A number without context can mislead.
An algorithm cannot replace a thoughtful clinical evaluation.
And a daily readiness score cannot capture the full complexity of human physiology.
At the Metabolic Center for Wellness, we believe in understanding the relationships among hormonal signaling, metabolism, sleep, physical activity, and overall health.
Wearable technology can contribute to that understanding—but it is only one piece of the puzzle.
The best health technology is the technology that helps you live better, not simply measure more.
And as we discussed on the podcast:
Wear your wearable. Just don't let it wear you.
Listen to Thyroid Talk with Dr. Angela Mazza available on your favorite podcast channel or on YouTube https://studio.youtube.com/video/uMNQJLcMX8M/edit
Want to learn more about the science behind wearables, tracking devices, and their effects on our health?
Listen to our episode “Tracking Your Health: Are Wearables Helping or Hurting?” on Thyroid Talk with Dr. Angela Mazza.
Discover how to use health technology thoughtfully, understand what your wearable data really mean, and recognize when it's time to look beyond the numbers.
Because your health is about more than the data you collect—it's about how you feel, function, and thrive.
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