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There's a feeling of anticipation. Visible is the frosty air emanating from my rivals as they execute the "about to run" wiggle on the starting line.

A swift flick of the hips.

I'm participating in my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. It's almost time...

Wait a second. I must sort my device. As does the guy beside me.

The person waiting expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… there! Signal acquired, and I'm running.

In the mele, it's difficult to spot a arm without a wearable on it. And this extends beyond us runners who wear them.

This is a booming, multi-billion dollar market. Companies like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, each with an broad array of different devices to suit a spectrum of lifestyles. According to how advanced the watch you go for, prices can start from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It makes me crazy, it's impossible to stop checking."

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

"Please don't notify me about a restless night."

A handful of the comments I've received from other smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's telling me I'm off pace, making me wonder whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are interfering with my satellite signal.

Millions of us strap these small devices onto our arms and use them constantly, apparently unconcerned with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Gone are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Today, they can analyse our sleep quality, blood pressure, glucose levels, our recovery score.

It's difficult to find a health indicator they fail to monitor.

But do they do what they say they do? And are the numbers we obsess over a true reflection of reality? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the plethora of readings and cheerleading alerts just add to our sense of overwhelm?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a bit fixated with mine," an individual reveals.

While she loves how her device tracks her workouts, she finds some of its other functions "excessive" at times - a feeling first discovered during a significant period.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently productive enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a young baby, I don't need to be told I'm tired," she says. "That fact is only too well."

Why doesn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, I suppose, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I love it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe too much for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of monitoring your health metrics and processing your data, but the vast bulk use optical sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically project minute LED lights onto your skin which can observe blood flow, identifying your heartbeat. Higher-end devices detect changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to gauge your recovery state.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially save lives, "detecting disease before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not mean someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a stroke in the long term.

But how to interpret these figures is complicated. The expert worries that as additional features are incorporated, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so much data is such a good idea," he says.

A clinical psychologist studying patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the influence of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they saw a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse increased. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate rose further.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."