Are health apps making us healthier or more anxious?

YOUR smartphone buzzes.

- DR JAY MATTHEW

"Stand up! You've been sitting for an hour." Your fitness tracker flashes red because your heart rate spiked during that stressful work meeting.

An app reminds you to log your water intake, check your blood pressure, and rate your mood on a scale of one to ten.

We are now living in the age of digital health monitoring, where technology promises to change us all into perfectly optimized human beings. But are we actually getting healthier, or just more anxious about every bodily function? What I see in daily clinical practice tells a slightly different, more nuanced story.

With dozens of health metrics at our fingertips, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Your wearable device might track everything from steps and sleep stages to heart rate variability and stress levels. But which numbers should you actually pay attention to?

I would suggest that you start with the basics. Steps, sleep duration, and resting heart rate provide valuable baseline information about your overall fitness and recovery.

Most adults benefit from 7 000 to 10 000 steps daily, not necessarily the often-cited 10 000, which was originally a marketing slogan for a Japanese pedometer company in the 1960s.

Sleep quality also matters more than quantity, for the most part. While sleep tracking can help identify patterns, don't obsess over achieving the "perfect" sleep score every night.

Natural variation is normal. Focus on consistent bedtimes and wake times rather than micromanaging every sleep stage.