While this may seem like a great way to improve health by tracking sleep, calories, and exercise, it has potential harm
Smart watches are being touted for their features in tracking health indicators and their role in improving physical fitness by providing features that help monitor various motor activities. But what is the impact of using smartwatches on mental health?
While having a smartwatch seems like a great way to improve health by tracking sleep, calories and exercise, the potential negative effects of using it are not mentioned.
Whether you’re considering buying a smartwatch or owning your own, it’s important to be aware of the potential side effects of owning a wearable device. Here are 4 ways smartwatches can negatively affect your mental health:
Calisthenics (EyeStack)
1- Smart watches focus on tracking calories
For many people, focusing on burning calories and constantly reminding them can negatively affect their mental health, especially if they suffer from eating disorders or can’t do daily exercise to burn more calories, and the Apple Watch in particular can be a problem. Because it doesn’t allow you to disable the calorie tracking feature.
2- Smartwatches constantly distract you and disrupt your day
Having a smartwatch gives you another device to constantly access notifications, which can affect your mental health and distract you, as receiving too many notifications from your phone and smartwatch can lead to anxiety, depression and other psychological issues. And it also reduces your focus while doing various tasks.
3- Smart watches lead to excessive exercise
If you use a smartwatch regularly, you run the risk of becoming obsessed with exercise, considering that many smartwatches feature features that encourage you to increase your fitness goals each week, making you more active, and completing sports goals makes you happy. It’s easy to become obsessed with reaching your fitness goals at the expense of your mental health.
4- Smart watches present a risk of addiction to their use
With motivational badges and engaging animations that appear on smartwatches every time you reach a certain goal, it’s easy to get addicted to using smartwatches.
You can have mixed feelings between happiness and a sense of accomplishment every time you hit your goals, feelings of anxiety when you fall short of your goals, and panic when your smartwatch fails to track your activity or track it properly. Your progress towards your goal.
Smart watches can give you many benefits, but due to increased focus on exercise, increased activity and calorie burning, smart watches can be detrimental to your mental health.
If you feel your smartwatch is taking a toll on your mental health, turn off the notifications on it, remove the watch from time to time, or reduce the sports goals you follow on your watch.
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