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A sense of nervous excitement. I can see the frosty air exhaled by my rivals as they execute the "pre-race" shuffle on the beginning point.

A swift twitch of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. It's almost time...

Hold on. I need to sort my device. So does the person beside me.

The person in the line tuts. I refuse to go until… there! Signal acquired, away I go.

Amidst the crowd, it's hard to see a arm without a wearable on it. And it's not just us athletes who use them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion dollar sector. Names like Apple Watch are prevalent, featuring an wide selection of diverse devices to suit a spectrum of needs. According to how advanced the model you select, price tags can start from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It makes me crazy, I'm unable to relax."

"It provides solace… It's like a companion encouraging me."

"Please don't notify me about a poor sleep."

A small sample of the comments I've had from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I question what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on mine? Right now, frustrating. It's reporting I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm passing under are disrupting my location tracking.

Millions of us fasten these little devices onto our wrists and use them 24/7, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we depended on them solely to give us an idea of our pedometer reading. Now, they can analyse our sleep quality, heart rate, glucose levels, our recovery score.

It's difficult to find a physical metric they don't track.

But can they do what they advertise? And are the data points we analyse a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of metrics and constant notifications just increase our sense of overwhelm?

Addiction or Aid?

"I find myself getting a bit preoccupied with mine," an individual confesses.

While she values how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other features "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Until she found out she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Later on, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I've got a infant, I don't need to be told I've not slept," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"It's possible, theoretically, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its fitness insights, I sometimes question whether all the other things it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Each model of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your health metrics and interpreting your data, but the most use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually emit small, green LED lights onto your skin which can monitor capillary action, recording your pulse rate. Higher-end devices detect changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the continuously improving tech could actually save lives, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic signals in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the long term.

But how to make sense of these figures is complex. The expert worries that as more functions are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

"I remain sceptical that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A professor specialising in wearable tech echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a worrying figure on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse increased. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their anxiety rose further.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."