My Fitness Tracker Was Making Me Anxious, So I Quit

About a year after graduating college, I was looking to “get serious.” I was 23, with a decent entry-level desk job, and ready to be a Real Adult™. In true Scorpio fashion, I fell hard and fast, getting attached quickly and investing more of my energy into the relationship as time passed. But after 12 years together, navigating countless highs and lows, I realized we were just not working out. The commitment had morphed into control. Something that was supposed to be healthy, positive, and life-affirming was, in fact, stirring up more internal anxiety than I’d ever suspected it could. So I’m splitting up with my fitness tracker.

Sure, we’ve had a good run, but I just can’t be tied down anymore. My decision stems from lots of self-reflection and therapy, predominantly on the topic of control. Perhaps, I delusionally tell myself, if I can control everything in my life to a certain degree, I can account for every single possible scenario and variable. This way, I am less likely to fail, get hurt, and let myself down. Right?

In my early twenties, I “discovered” fitness. One of my job perks at the time was access to a gym. Up until that point, the extent of my exercise regimen was the occasional at-home ab workout. Everything changed when I walked into that modest on-site gym, which was really a glorified garage. But Elle Woods had been right all along: Exercise gives you endorphins, and endorphins make you happy.

As I ventured further along my so-called fitness journey, I kept upping the ante. I needed to lift heavier, run faster, and be better, constantly. Within a few months’ time, it wasn’t enough to simply do the workout and relish the endorphins. I needed proof that it happened, and I needed to keep pushing myself while I was at it. Enter the data.

For years, I couldn’t show up to the gym unless I was equipped with an assortment of tools, all of which I’d deemed absolutely essential for tracking my progress. I couldn’t complete a powerlifting workout without writing down each exercise and rep in a carefully categorized fitness journal, denoting the difficulty and/or intensity level. I wouldn’t go for a run or take a HIIT class without pressing “start workout” on my tracker.

Over the course of 12 years, I used three different fitness trackers. The first one I very giddily purchased in 2013. I loved the understated design—a seamless black band—and that it was all about the straightforward data points I was looking for: heart rate, running pace, calories burned, miles walked. No email, social media, or text alerts.

A few years later, I upgraded. My new tracker did everything the previous one did, plus alerts and features like answering calls and controlling music. In 2016, I fully transitioned to my first and only smartwatch. My meticulous record-keeping ultimately motivated and helped me to achieve specific goals. At my fittest, I could deadlift 300 pounds, squat 225 pounds multiple times, and run a 5K in 28 minutes (I’d never been much of a runner, so achieving that modest-yet-respectable pace was a big deal to me). I’d hold a two-minute plank with ease and spend half an hour on the StairMaster like it was nothing.

Of course, I was also in my mid-twenties and had the gift and energy of youth. I had the time to be fitness-obsessed; the trackers sneakily played into my desire to be in control of every aspect of my newfound fixation. Eventually, I struggled to engage in exercise without requiring numbers backing it up. On the rare occasion when I left home without wearing my smartwatch, I felt a pit of disappointment in my stomach. Well, now these steps won’t count, I’d catch myself thinking. Or if I forgot to put my fitness journal back into my gym bag and didn’t have it for a lifting session, it’d throw me off my game. I was so used to having these tools readily at my disposal to prove that I was, indeed, making progress. Not having them somehow signaled a lack of progress, and my brain didn’t like that.

I became anxious about working out because I was hyperaware of the goals I wasn’t meeting. Every ping from my wrist indicating that I hadn’t moved enough or had merely walked 2,000 steps instead of the prescriptive 10,000 added up, collectively shaming me for my “inactivity.” This anxiety was noisy, and frequently morphed into a total lack of motivation. If I couldn’t keep up with the data points that my previous self had set, it dampened my desire to work out in the present day.

According to a 2025 study by Newcastle University in the U.K., “Using fitness technologies is associated with negative emotions such as anxiety, body dissatisfaction, and even rumination,” all of which can arise from the very features intended to promote activity and attention to health, such as “feedback systems, goal-setting functions, and gamified or social elements.” The study found that unmet goals can lead some people to feel anxious, guilty, and stressed, driving them to “focus solely on cold, numerical goals, thereby imposing psychological burdens and ultimately undermining people’s psychological well-being.”

Like me, Kristina Lopez was a relative latecomer to the tracking universe when she bought her first tracker in June 2025. For her, the purchase wasn’t even related to exercise. Lopez, 39, had been having heart palpitations, which were “unsettling enough” that her cardiologist advised tracking her heart rate.

“It felt like a way to get answers, or at least some sense of control over something that felt unpredictable,” says the founder and CEO of House of Puff. “When your heart feels like it’s misfiring, even occasionally, it’s hard not to spiral. The tracker felt like a safety net—if I could see the data, I could understand what was happening and maybe calm myself down.”

Initially, the metrics comforted and reassured Lopez. Soon, she was checking in more frequently. However, when she focused on her sleep data, the feedback could be bewildering. On occasion, Lopez would wake up feeling rested, clear, and “even proud” of how well she slept. The accompanying app, however, portrayed another story.

“It would tell me I had a ‘poor’ night of sleep,” Lopez recalls. “Suddenly, I started to trust the tracker more than I trusted my own body. What started as a tool for awareness had turned into something that made me anxious, hyperfocused, and, at times, almost hypochondriacal. I was constantly scanning for problems that didn’t exist.”

Pooja Shah, 34, had a similar experience when she “became obsessed” with reaching her daily goal of 10,000 steps—even through the fatigue of her first trimester. If she didn’t track or do a workout, she felt she’d “failed for the day.” The persistent notifications and perceived shortcomings, combined with the demands of pregnancy, became mentally overwhelming for the commercial lawyer and freelance writer.

“In reality, my focus should have been my growing baby,” Shah says. “At first, I felt naked without my tracker, but I soon realized the mental strain of trying to reach this arbitrary goal that only I cared about wasn’t there. It didn’t determine my external value.”

Last fall, I made the breakup official, calling it quits with my smartwatch after nearly a decade of ongoing use. The decision had been months—perhaps even years—in the making, going back to my first workouts back in the gym after the COVID-19 vaccine had been distributed. I’d mostly given up my fitness journals by then, overwhelmed with where to even store the stacks of journals after I’d filled them with notes and numbers. Soon enough, being beholden to a device for my workouts was more burdensome than beneficial.

When I hung up my smartwatch for good, I stashed it away in some nondescript drawer, far away from my nightstand, where it had lived for the last 10 years. I felt more relief than I anticipated. One less way for people to reach me, I thought. I couldn’t even tell you where it is right now.

The reality is, getting more and more data won’t automatically optimize my life, despite what the tech companies spout. Sometimes data is just information, not a means to consolidate and exert more control. “We call it the paradox of control,” says Edson Filho, associate professor of sport, exercise, and performance psychology at Boston University. “You try to control something, you lose control. You try to get in flow, you get out of flow.” In essence, the more you think you’re controlling something, the more likely it is that you, in fact, are not controlling it, which can seriously affect outcomes.

After using two trackers (one smartwatch, one other wearable) on and off for five years, communications consultant Micah Gause, 34, realized she’s “more or less the same amount of inconsistent” with her workout regimen, regardless of whether she wears one. “I’m in an ‘on’ period with the gym, but still ‘off’ as far as trackers go,” says Gause, adding, “It’s one less thing to charge.”

Freeing myself from fitness trackers has altered my approach to setting goals and achieving them. For one, I no longer associate achievements with numbers alone. They might be helpful, but they can never tell the whole story. Losing the data has been liberating in that now, any time I engage in physical activity, I’m fully present with my body alone and how it’s existing and moving in the world without any tech interference.

What this experience has revealed, so far, is that I am much more interested in learning and speaking the language of my body because no one else on the planet will ever be capable of speaking it the same way I do. An algorithm certainly doesn’t know how to tune in to my body’s concerns and cues like I do. Is my body craving activity or rest? What’s that look like? How does that manifest physically?

It turns out the more I learn how to be present in my body, and not busy chasing metrics flashing on a screen, the more in control I feel. I’m not saying I’ve meditated my way out of my fundamental need for everything to be good and right in the world, but ridding myself of just one more device has certainly been a helpful starting point.

While my high-impact and high-intensity workouts have waned in my thirties, I’ve managed to stay (mostly) consistent with my weekly yoga practice for 12 years this September. I don’t feel this is coincidental. Through vinyasa yoga and learning the art of flowing one breath to one movement, I’m much more adept at listening to my body and understanding what it’s communicating in its own peculiar language. Once, after class, my yoga teacher said that my practice looked “like a love letter” to my body. Her observation was deeply moving and affirmed that I am on the right path.

Today, I don’t jot down each and every rep in a journal or count my daily steps. I don’t measure a workout’s success by heart rate or calories burned. I sometimes go a week or two without going to the gym and it isn’t the end of the world. Not tracking every little metric has reminded me that I can go for a nature walk without a device strapped to my wrist, be infinitely more present, and still log the miles (even if I don’t literally log them in an app). I can lift heavy, and it’s all right if I don’t have a record of every last rep and set. That doesn’t mean the workout didn’t happen. I’m not letting myself down by not tracking. I’m letting myself down by convincing myself that any of this is necessary to lead a healthy lifestyle.

My choice has made fitness more expansive, not less. Because now, I could not be more disinterested in data. Instead, I am focused on the simple yet radical act of looking and feeling good and healthy in my body—and I don’t need numbers to qualify that for me.