How do you use technology? Do you feel it benefits you? This week I share my experience using fitness trackers and the ways it has both helped me and stressed me out.

How was my life different when I could only use analog feedback like writing down my workouts and weighing myself on the scale each day? What is it like now when I have instantaneous and constant feedback for how my body is moving, resting, breathing and otherwise functioning?

In a lot of ways, over time I became increasingly dependent on the numbers the tracker gives me. But instead of using it to improve my fitness, which is where I started out – eventually, I found I was judging myself for my numbers and feeling obsessed with looking at it while not changing a whole lot about how I live my life. Now I was living the same way but feeling worse about it than if I wasn’t tracking.

I ask myself now, can I trust my own perception of my health, body, and movement? Can I trust if I slept well or feel good even if I don’t have a tracker telling me how good or bad the night was in terms of heart rate, oxygen levels, and REM sleep?

There are benefits to tracking, and I am finding that I ought to use mine for the specific benefits that make me feel good about myself. I am letting go of the obsessive need to check the app and judge myself for how good or poorly I seem to be faring that day.

Instead, I am choosing to assess how I feel for myself before checking, and if my feeling and the tracker’s perception of the state of affairs differs, I am choosing to defer to my own feelings first and take the tracker’s input as an advisor but not an authority over me. Take that, step goal!

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