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A sense of nervous excitement. I can see the chilled vapour emanating from my competitors as they execute the "pre-race" shuffle on the starting line.

A rapid twitch of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I must adjust my device. So does the person next to me.

The person waiting sighs. I won't start until… there! Connection established, I'm off.

In the mele, it's hard to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us athletes who rely on them.

It's a booming, multi-billion dollar industry. Brands like Samsung Galaxy dominate, all offering an broad range of various devices to fit a variety of needs. According to how high tech the watch you go for, prices can range from a hundred pounds to a small fortune.

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

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

"Stop telling me about a poor sleep."

A handful of the responses I've had from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they think of theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My feelings on my own device? At this moment, frustrating. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the overhead branches I'm running below are disrupting my location tracking.

Millions of us attach these little devices onto our arms and keep them on 24/7, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're constantly recording us.

Long past are the days when we depended on them only to give us an estimation of our pedometer reading. Today, they can measure our sleep quality, blood pressure, heart rate variability (HRV), our VO2 max.

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

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we scrutinise a accurate representation of reality? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of measurements and cheerleading alerts just increase our sense of overwhelm?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a bit obsessed with mine," one user confesses.

While she values how her device monitors her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Until she found out she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently productive enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I have a six-month old, I don't need to be informed I'm tired," she says. "That fact is perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"It's possible, perhaps, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I love it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your bodily functions and analysing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the underside of the watch.

They typically project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can monitor blood flow, identifying your heartbeat. More advanced devices measure changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to get an idea of your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually aid early diagnosis, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is abnormal signals in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more susceptible of a heart problem in the future.

But how to understand these numbers is complicated. The expert fears that as more functions are introduced, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A professor specialising in patient behaviour concurs. Research into the influence of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse increased. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their heart rate increased again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."