HOW TO DO DATA RIGHT

The deluge of numbers from your wearables can tell you a lot-but not everything. Read what you need. Optimize your life.

- CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN

IF SOMEONE ASKS you, "How are you doing?" and you feel the need to pull up your tracker app, we get you. Humanity has entered the golden age of health and fitness tracking. Everybody wears a tracker now, whether strapped around the wrist or cuffed around a finger. The global tracker industry was already worth $41 billion in 2021, and it is forecast to grow to more than $138 billion by 2028. A legion of companies-Garmin, Fitbit, Whoop, Oura, Amazfit, and so many more-advertise wearables that promise to quantify everything from heart rate and stress level to metabolic rate, fitness level, recovery status, and sleep quality.

And that promise is alluring: If you can track it, you can improve it, these brands argue. Except that some experts are now seeing the symptoms of overtracking. "One risk of all this measuring is that you become so obsessed with metrics that you forget the reasons you're out there-things like recreation, fun, hanging out with your buddies," says Michael J. Joyner, M.D., a human-physiology researcher at the Mayo Clinic. Even sleep is no refuge, because you feel pressure to attain a high sleep score.

Yet there is a way to make your tracker work for you. Follow the new rules to streamline what it tells you, optimize your life, and stay in control of your device not the other way around.

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