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A sense of feeling of anticipation. Visible is the cold breath emanating from my competitors as they do the "about to run" jiggle on the beginning point.

A swift movement of the hips.

I'm at my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I have to start my tracker. So does the runner alongside me.

The person in the line tuts. I won't start until… there! GPS ready, away I go.

During the scramble, it's difficult to see a person without a wearable on it. And this extends beyond us runners who rely on them.

This is a explosive, multi-billion pound market. Brands like Samsung Galaxy lead the market, featuring an extensive selection of various devices to suit a range of budgets. Depending on how advanced the device you go for, price tags can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, it's impossible to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It feels like a supporter supporting me."

"I wish it wouldn't say about a restless night."

A handful of the responses people have shared from other tracker enthusiasts when I question what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on mine? Currently, irritating. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are blocking my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us fasten these small gadgets onto our wrists and use them 24/7, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're constantly recording us.

Gone are the days when we relied on them solely to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Now, they can track our nightly rest, heart rate, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

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

But can they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a true reflection of reality? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the multitude of metrics and constant notifications just contribute to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a bit obsessed with mine," a wearer reveals.

While she loves how her device monitors her workouts, she finds some of its other features "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a pregnancy.

Until she found out she could change its configuration, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I have a six-month old, there's no point to be told I'm tired," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Couldn't she just take it off?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this complicated dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether all the other things it can now do is maybe excessive for me."

How Do They Work?

Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your bodily functions and interpreting your data, but the most use optical sensors on the back of the watch.

They typically shine small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, recording your heartbeat. More advanced devices measure changes in the electrical current that runs through the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could actually save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can carry out tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the years to come.

But how to make sense of these figures is not straightforward. The expert fears that as additional features are introduced, people may struggle to fully understand their data.

"I have some doubts that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a good idea," he says.

A clinical psychologist studying patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use doctor's time".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM rose. They got even more concerned. They looked a second time, and their anxiety went up again.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."