It’s been a minute since all fitness bands could do is count your steps and show you your heart rate. Now, you can count on your wearable (or wearables, based on how dedicated you are to the cause) to give you everything from hourly updates on your blood sugar, to the quality of your sleep last night. They’re even playing cameos in your favourite shows—Tag Winbury (The Perfect Couple) made a narrow escape from a possible murder conviction thanks to the sleep tracker on his Apple watch.
Wearables have been on the market for a while, getting your hands on one has never been easier. “You can get [a device] with all the magical tracking features for just ₹999 with seven-minute delivery,” says Fabian Rodrigues, a writer based between Mumbai and Goa, referring to their availability on services like Swiggy Instamart. With the rise of trends like sleepmaxxing, seed cycling and biohacking, we’re witnessing a culture increasingly fixated on monitoring life’s most minute details, blurring the lines between self-care and self-surveillance.
Mumbai-based Kabir Sachar, got the Whoop 4.0 after he saw Virat Kohli wearing it at the World Cup last year. Sachar, who runs a fashion brand, says that he struggles to get quality sleep, and while the band helps him monitor his slumber, he wouldn’t go as far to say he made solid changes to his routine because of it. “If I haven’t slept well and my recovery score is low, Whoop asks me to go easy. I still go on with the same routine but with a slightly lower intensity—it’s more like a thought at the back of my head,” he says. Even so, he finds himself checking his metrics eight to 10 times a day and enjoys that compulsion as he appreciates data. “I can totally see how this can be borderline unhealthy for the average person, though,” he says.
In an interview earlier this year, Callan Malone, founder of eyewear line Thistles, admitted that she had fallen into the trap of getting “a little obsessive” over her sleep after she started tracking it. Dubai-based biohacker Rohini Gehani also shares that trackers stress her out. “I get a bit obsessive,” she confesses. Her coach was surprised at the amount of data she had collected and posited that the reason she wasn’t getting a good night’s rest was probably because she was obsessing over it. This preoccupation with quality sleep has led to a very specificc phenomenon, called, orthosomnia, which is the pursuit of optimal sleep as dictated by sleep trackers. Ironically, this often leads to bad sleep. “It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation,” she explains. Now, she wears her Oura ring and her continuous glucose monitor every few weeks in a year. “I track them both at the same time, just to see where I’m at,” she said.
“Staying healthy has always been a surrogate for validation,” says Rodrigues, pointing out how people want the coolest footwear to hit the gym and how mirror selfies suddenly become part of one’s online persona when they start working out. Fitness professional Bhavna Harchandrai agrees, adding that the gratification we feel when we look at the metrics achieved on a tracking app is akin to a goal accomplished.
Harchandrai wears a GOQii smartwatch whose virtual rewards programme converts points achieved by the wearer into points they can spend in the app’s in-built store to buy health products. “Protein bars, supplements—it’s all there,” she says. “If something is priced at ₹700 and there’s a discounted price of ₹200 on the store, I will need to earn 500 points and then pay ₹200 of my actual cash to buy it.” It incentivises her to stay on track as points translate into goodies and savings. By gamifying prompts and goals, the platform itself pushes wearers to want to engage with it.
It’s not all Black Mirror-esque, though. There’s another side to these devices—where they become a first-person emergency response system. For instance, Rodrigues’s mother’s life was saved after her watch conveyed to him, she was “not doing so good” and that she’d had a fall. “It helps a great deal for people living alone,” he says, also mentioning how there was another instance where 10 people got his location and an emergency message after he fell into a ditch during heavy rains in Goa.
The community aspect is something many users appreciate. Rodrigues enjoys the shared fitness challenges on the Apple Watch Ultra, which he is currently using. “It’s like having an unspoken bond over who can max out their outdoor walk first.” Whoop, meanwhile, allows users to create groups to compete. Dubai-based Maahir Jagtianie and his friends, who are in different parts of the world, often check each other’s parameters on the group. They talk about their recovery scores, especially after weekend nights out, poking fun at the one with the least. One of his friends, Vipul Kamani, merely bought the device because people around him were using it. “It’s a cool talking point.” But for Jagtianie, if his recovery metrics aren’t great on the tracker, it bothers him. “If I’ve had recovery at over 60 per cent for the week and a night out causes my next recovery to drop down to seven per cent, it’s stressful,” he says. What is usually supposed to function as a gentle reminder then becomes a constant preoccupation.
But can a device replace a coach? While Gehani doesn’t feel one needs a trainer during the initial stages of using such devices, former varsity-level squash player Aryaman Pandya, who also uses the Whoop 4.0, believes that if one has never been into fitness, supervision might help. Otherwise, Whoop also has a GPT-powered ‘coach’ that can interpret one’s data. “It’s very important to understand your body,” says Bengaluru-based yoga influencer Tanny Bhattacharjee. “The days you feel very high in energy, don’t just rely on those steps—go for high-intensity workouts. But the days you feel very exhausted, you don’t have to panic seeing the unachieved steps.” Bhattacharjee, who started using a Fitbit Versa 3 after a collaboration with the brand, says it’s important to not let the device overwhelm the mind. “Just relying on the device is not enough,” she says. “Having a professional guide along with the watch will help you not overdo things.” And above all, listen to your own body.
