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Smart watches are promoted for their features in tracking health indicators and their role in promoting fitness by providing features that help track various motor activities, etc. But what is the impact of using smart watches on mental health?
While owning a smartwatch seems like an ideal way to improve health by tracking sleep, calories, and exercise, the potential negative effects of using it aren’t mentioned.
Whether you’re thinking about buying a smartwatch or owning one, it’s important to be aware of the potential harmful effects of owning a wearable device. Here are 4 ways smartwatches can negatively affect your mental health:
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 perform daily exercises to burn more calories, and the Apple Watch in particular can be a problem. them, because it doesn’t let you disable the calorie tracking feature.
2- Smartwatches constantly distract you and interrupt your day
Having a smartwatch means having another device to constantly access your notifications, which may affect your mental health and distract you, as receiving a large amount of notifications from your phone and smartwatch can lead to anxiety, depression and other psychological problems, and will reduce also your attention while performing various tasks.
3- Smart watches can lead to excessive exercise
There is a risk of becoming obsessed with exercise if you use a smartwatch on a regular basis, given the characteristics of encouraging you to increase your fitness goals each week that many smartwatches feature, you may resort to overexertion and given the completion of sports goals it makes you happy It’s easy to become obsessed with achieving your fitness goals at the expense of your mental health.
4- Smart watches expose you to the risk of addiction to their use
Given the encouragement badges and attractive animations that appear on smartwatches whenever you reach a certain goal, it’s easy to become addicted to using smartwatches.
You can experience a mix of mixed feelings between joy and a sense of accomplishment whenever you reach your goals, feelings of anxiety if you fail to reach your goals, and you can also feel panic if your smartwatch fails to track your activity or monitor correctly your progress towards your goal.
Smart watches can give you multiple benefits, but due to excessive focus on exercise, increased activity and calorie burning, smart watches can have a detrimental effect on your mental health.
If you think your mental health has been affected by your smartwatch, turn off notifications, sometimes remove your watch, or reduce the sports goals you track on your watch.
