When Wellness Tracking Stops Feeling Healthy

What happens when wellness tracking starts making you feel less well?

In this solo episode of Wellness in Every Season, Autumn Carter explores the question so many people quietly wrestle with: are our wellness metrics actually aligned with human wellness, or are they pushing us toward guilt, comparison, and exhaustion?

After walking nearly five miles and still being told by her Apple Watch that it “wasn’t enough,” Autumn began questioning smart watches, movement goals, recovery scores, step counts, calories burned, sleep tracking, and the pressure to constantly optimize. She shares how default settings on Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung, Oura, Whoop, smartphones, and other devices may not reflect real human needs, especially for people navigating stress, burnout, hormonal shifts, chronic illness, disability, neurodivergence, caregiving, postpartum recovery, or pain.

This episode unpacks how wellness technology can be helpful when personalized, but harmful when it becomes another voice saying we are failing. Autumn explains how to think about movement goals, exercise minutes, stand reminders, steps, heart rate, HRV, sleep tracking, readiness scores, and notification settings in a more compassionate and sustainable way.

Listeners are invited to use their devices as tools—not scoreboards—and to reconnect with the body’s wisdom beneath the numbers.

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Transcript

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Today we're talking about when wellness tracking stops feeling healthy. And it goes to this question of are our wellness metrics actually aligned with human wellness. Welcome to Wellness in Every Season. We talk all things wellness to help you align yourself, align with your goals, get find balance in your life, and just recalibrate yourself. If you are listening for the first time, welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. And let's get started in the rest of the podcast. Recently, I walked almost five miles and my Apple Watch basically told me it still wasn't enough. And that sent me down a huge rabbit hole about smartwatches, health tracking, movement goals, stress, recovery, and whether the numbers we are chasing are actually helping us become healthier or just more exhausted. For me, it was more exhausted. Did you know that many smart wellness devices use generalized default settings that may not actually fit your body, hormones, health conditions, stress levels, nervous system, gait, meaning how your distance when you're walking between your legs, recovery needs, or lifestyle. Did you know it is easy to change? I will tell you how to change your settings and provide you with a checklist later in this episode, so keep listening. They never adjust their movement goals, exercise goals, including length and intensity, step goals, heart rate zones, sleep targets, standing reminders, calorie assumptions, stride length, recovery notifications, sensory and notification settings. Yet these settings directly affect accuracy, stress levels, motivation, perceived success or failure, nervous system load, and how healthy or well we believe we are. And if you're anything like me, which I assume you are because you're listening to a wellness podcast, you probably want to optimize your life, but you also want it to feel doable and easy. You want better health, better energy, better longevity, better daily rhythm, without turning your entire life into one more exhausting project. I feel you, that's what this episode's about. So today we're going to look into why this matters, what your smart devices may be getting right or wrong, and how to set them up so they support your wellness instead of working against it. Anything we can make easier in life, I'm all for it, and you are too. So let's do it. Research is increasingly showing that wellness is not one size fits all. And because I do not expect you to remember everything, I created a document to go with this that you will find linked in the show notes. And let's talk about examples with this. Women often need more sleep on average than men, and sleep can be affected by hormonal fluctuations, carelow giving, stage of life, maybe barometric pressure, like the stage of life I'm in right now. Hormones can significantly affect sleep, recovery, heart rate, body temperature, and energy needs across menstrual cycles, postpartum recovery and perimenopause, as well as menopause. Wearable calorie burn estimates can be inaccurate and may vary widely between individuals. I definitely found that to be the case between my husband and I. Chronic stress, trauma, illness, disability, neurodivergence, and burnout can all impact how bodies respond to movement and recovery. Somewhere will sensors have historically been less accurate on darker skin tones because certain optical sensors can struggle with melanin differences. Body size, age, fitness level, medications, health conditions can all affect heart rate, recovery scores, and activity tracking. And those are just some examples. Sometimes the issue is not that we are failing our wellness goals. Sometimes the technology was never personalized for us in the first place, which is what led me down this rabble hole in this episode. So maybe the deeper question is this are we adapting wellness technology to humans or adapting humans to wellness technology? And let me go back to my Apple Watch story. And keep listening because this will relate to you, even if you don't have Apple anything. I have had my watch face set up for years, so I can quickly see the time, date, weather, text, across my workout app, or access to my workout app and check how close I am to closing my activity rings. But here's the problem. I mistakenly thought the red move ring was basically tracking my steps. It wasn't. I was so tired and frustrated because I was walking almost five miles and still not meeting the goal. Was not doing this daily. Not that kind of crazy. This mattered to me because research increasingly shows that sedentary, so sitting down, behavior is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, cognitive decline, and earlier mortality, meaning death. Studies also show that regular movement throughout the day, including walking, standing breaks, can help improve circulation, blood sugar regulation, mobility, metabolic health, and overall longevity. And here's the part that should motivate you. Even relatively small increases in daily movement can make a meaningful difference, especially for people who spend large portions of the day sitting for work, commuting, or just on screens. That made me start questioning whether the wellness metrics on our devices are actually encouraging sustainable human wellness or just rewarding intensity and constant optimization. What do you think the answer is? Because you may notice from my story, I was focused on intensity and checking off a goal. One morning while getting dressed, I asked Alexa, because I was trying not to be on my screen, how many miles I needed to walk to reach the commonly recommended step goal each day. She told me about five miles. Your height, stride length, and walking pattern all affect how many miles it takes for you to reach a step goal. And with the step goal, it's not taking into account are you going uphill, downhill, are you hiking, are you walking on a flat surface? So there's there's a lot in there. But she told me it's about five miles. For me, because of my height, Alexa's estimate was fairly close. But then one day, while I was sitting in my massage chair after a walk, beating myself up and feeling sore, that I was and I was nowhere close to my move goal. I asked Chat GPT, hello AI, what I needed to do to meet that goal, because walking five miles was not doing it. And to make it worse, I noticed my husband had more than met his goal. So not fair. So this is what I learned that the move goal is based on active calories burned, not distance walked or step goal. For those of you that already know and are laughing at me, oops. But I know I'm not the only one who's thought that. My watch estimates calories using things like height, weight, age, heart rate, movement patterns. So it makes you wonder for anybody else who has a smart device, have you put those things into your smart device? Your height, your weight, your age, your heart rate. It should already be tracking your heart rate and movement patterns. But what is your goal and your heart rate? Once I understood this, I changed my move goal and it became 300 calories lower than it had been before. Let me tell you, I can meet that move goal now. It could not before. And here's another reality we do not talk enough about. People with chronic stress, fatigue, pain, injury recovery, nervous system dysregulation, hormonal shifts, burnout often burn energy differently and recover differently. Your body may be working incredibly hard internally while your device only sees moderate movement. For this group of people, more is often not better. And I include myself in this group. So we will talk about what may actually support you in a minute. And by the way, just reminding you again, I created a checklist to help you figure out what settings you may want to adjust and what apps you may want to add to your smart device so it better supports you where you want to go. And you can find that in the show notes. After adjusting my move goal, I looked into whether I could change my Apple Watch move ring into a step count ring instead. I felt like that'd be a lot more helpful for me. And I learned that Apple does not allow that. Your device might. So look into it. If you want to know what your specific smart device can do, I recommend going to AI and asking it. Or you can look at YouTube videos and they can walk you through it. I found that to be very helpful to then modify everything the way that I want. So going back to my app watch, I found a free app called Pedometer Plus Plus. For some reason it has the two pluses, that I could add to my watch face. Now I can quickly see how close I am to my step goal without making calories the main focus. And again, I had to choose my own step goal after thinking about my own gait, lifestyle, and wellness needs. Because the 10,000 steps goal was originally marketing, not magic science. I don't know if everybody knew that. I did not. That's why I was asking Alexa for 10,000 steps, how many miles is it? And that's not practical for most people. So let me correct it for you. Large studies now suggest that major health benefits often begin much lower than 10,000 steps. Hallelujah. It's around 4,000 to 7,000 steps for many adults, with benefits leveling off differently depending on age and health status. Some studies have found mortality, so how the age that you die, benefits leveling off around 6,000 to 8,000 steps for older adults, and 8,000 to 10,000 steps for younger adults. This is huge because so many people feel like they failed if they only hit 6,500 steps. But science is increasingly showing that wellness is all not all or nothing. For stress-sensitive seasons, recovery seasons, parenting seasons, caregiving seasons, pregnancy seasons, burnout seasons, busy work seasons, consistency often matters more than heroic numbers. So we're getting ready for that pendulum idea. A step-focused mindset often feels more like, did I move and support my body today? Instead of, did I burn enough calories to deserve rest? And that distinction matters. So let me ask you a few questions. Does your current device screen help or hinder your wellness goals? Are your notifications supporting you or stressing you out? Are you prioritizing consistency over perfection? Is your device helping you listen to your body or teaching you to ignore it? Because technology should support wellness, it should not become another voice telling us we are not doing enough or something that's just simply distracting us. And here is something important wearables are generally better at tracking steps than calories. Super important because most people forget this. Research suggests step counting is generally more reliable, heart rate tracking is reasonably useful for trends, calorie burn estimates are much less reliable. One study found energy expenditure errors near 28%. So maybe step consistency matters more than obsessing over calorie rings. Because really, when we're talking about calorie rings, it kind of feels like the 90s, doesn't it? Where we're all worried about being thin instead of being healthy. And that lines up with what major health organizations emphasize. The WHO and CDC focus on 150 to 300 minutes of moderate movement weekly. And it's up to you how you divide it out with your schedule and everything. Strength training about twice a week, reducing sedentary time, so how long you're sitting, and remembering that some movement is better than none. They do not say close your rings every day or you failed. That distinction matters psychologically. Wearables can absolutely help. They can increase motivation, improve awareness, encourage consistency, and help us notice patterns. But they can also trigger guilt, create anxiety, increase obsessive behaviors, reinforce perfectionism, and contribute to over-exercising or disordered patterns in vulnerable individuals. When I notice that my smart device is getting in the way of my wellness, it gets a timeout. So maybe you should think about that for yourself as well. Because different people need different movement goals and different wellness goals in general. For example, adults 65 and older often benefit from balance, mobility, strength, and fall prevention work. There's a lot of examples here: yoga, tai chi, Pilates, walking, resistance bands, body weight, strength training, light weight lifting, sit-to-stand exercises, stair climbing, dance, waerobics, gentle functional fitness, stability exercises, and single leg balance work. And this helps with the fall prevention, the balance, mobility, strength that I just talked about a second ago. People with chronic illness or disabilities often need adaptable movement goals, especially because one day all the rings might be at nothing, and the next day they might be able to hit all of them, depending on where they're at, how their body's functioning for that day. Women's movement and recovery needs may shift during postpartum recovery, perimetapause. When where you're at in your cycle, high stress or burnout. People under chronic stress may tolerate high-intensity goals poorly. Sedentary individuals may gain huge benefits from small increases in movement. So think about it. You can start small. Now let's talk about wellness goals. Smart devices commonly track and how to set them to work for you instead of against you. And don't forget, there's a list that goes along with this to make this easier for you so you don't have to keep going back 15, 30 seconds and pausing and doing the thing. And this goes far beyond Apple Watch. Today's most popular devices include Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Google Pixel Watch, Aura Ring, Whoop, Amazon Fit, and even smartphones using Apple Health, Google Fit, Samsung Health, or other built-in apps. Each one tracks health data a little differently. Some focus heavily on movement, some are on performance, some are recovery, sleep, readiness, clothes rings, strain, behavior change, but none of them fully understand your life stage, hormones, chronic stress load, trauma history, disability, neurodivergence, work schedule, caregiving responsibilities, burnout level, recovery capacity, current season of life. And that's why personalization matters. One of the healthiest things you can do is stop treating default settings like universal wellness prescriptions. Instead, use your device as a tool that adapts to you. And honestly, this is where AI can go in. And none of this is a workaround for a health professional. If you need a professional to help you with your wellness goals, nutrition goals, chronic pain, whatever. So this is to help you with that stopgap before, in addition to working with them, whatever. You can ask tools like Chat GPT, Claude, whatever. How should I personalize my smartwatch settings for burnout recovery? What movement goal makes sense for a postpartum mother with my height and weight? How should I adjust my wearable during perimenopause? How can I reduce notification stress on my garment? I worked on this because notifications were distracting me. What wellness metrics should I prioritize with chronic illness? How do I change my step goals on a Fitbit? How do I make my Apple Watch focus more on steps instead of calories? How do I set up my Samsung Health app for movement breaks? AI can walk you through your specific device step by step and help you think critically about whether your current settings actually support your health. The caveat with this is that you need to know enough about yourself and put that information into whatever AI you're using. So for me, I had to put in about my height and weight. And I use screenshots of past statistics within my health app to help AI to recalibrate things for myself. Again, it's not a replacement for medical care, physical therapy, mental health support, or working with a qualified professional, but it can help you ask better questions and find the settings that are already setting quietly in your device that are wrong. So let's get into those. There's the first one, the movement goal or active calories. These are common on Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung, and Pixel Watch. They estimate calories burned during through movement above resting metabolism. And this is something that I'm realizing that I need to change within the heart rate setting for me because it will ask if my husband wants to log a walk way before I do, if I forget to log it already. So it's already telling you some settings are off, or telling me that settings are off. The problem is that calorie estimates are often accurate. Do you remember what I said before? Devices tend to favor elevated heart rate and intensity, while gentle movement may be undercounted. This can cause people to accidentally tie their self-worth to closing rings, burning calories, or doing more. That's where I was stuck. Two people can walk the exact same distance and get completely different results based on age, body size, medications, hormones, conditioning, disability, chronic illness, pace, and heart rate. So a lot of reasons there. A better approach is to use movement goals as awareness tools, not moral scoreboards. Someone recovering from burnout may need a lower activity goal temporarily. A postpartum person may need to prioritize gentle movement and recovery. Older adults may need to focus more on mobility, balance, and consistency than calorie burn. Athletes may intentionally use higher exertion targets during training seasons. And the second one is exercise minutes or active zone minutes. I've had to change this for myself because it was distracting me in the middle of hour-long classes when it was a 30-minute move goal. And this will be helpful for you to take the minutes per week recommendation that I talked about earlier, and then think about how does it fit into your schedule during your current season of life? How are you going to split it up during the days of the week? And then have that be your move goal within your smart device. And those are commonly tracked by Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung, Pixel Watch, and many others. They usually measure moderate or vigorous activity sessions and is actually one of the metrics most aligned with public health guidelines, but it depends on how you want to split it out throughout the week. Because the general recommendation is about 150 minutes of moderate activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity. So remember this, depending on your stress load throughout the week, are you looking at more moderate or are you looking at vigorous? And I've taken it to, well, how many minutes do I actually have during the week? And then plan it out that way. But if you're really looking at wellness goals, can your body handle more rigorous or does it need moderate? I would start there. And remember that anything you are willing to do is better than you're doing right now. So you're already going to be up-leveling your wellness. And many devices only count exercise when your heart rate crosses certain thresholds. So it can be very frustrating. That means yoga, mobility work, rehab exercise, slower walks, or strength training with longer rest periods may not fully count, which is why I cheat and I start the workout in my smart device. So it's logging it, even if it would not log it without me manually setting it to log, if that makes sense. So remember, if your body benefited but your device ignored it, it still totally matters. The third one, stand goals or sedentary breaks. Apple calls this a stand goal, but many devices have movement reminders and activity alerts or sedentary time notifications. So they can call it different things. Research strongly supports reducing prolonged seating because movement breaks may support circulation, metabolic health, insulin sensitivity, stiffness, pain, and energy regulation. Plus, it gets you to actually get up and go to the bathroom. But standing every hour is not realistic or safe for everyone. Plus, if you are neurodivergent, it can be very distracting. Desk workers may benefit from stand reminders. Disabled individuals may need alternative movement reminders. People with sensory overload may need fewer notifications. Some people may prefer reminders every two or three hours instead of hourly interruptions. You can change those things. You can ask whatever AI device, how do I change my stand goal or whatever your device calls it within this device? And it will walk you through how to do it. And if it seems too techy, you can ask the AI device, talk to me like I'm five years old, and give me bullet points. You can tell it how you want it to talk to you, too. So, fourth one is the step count. This is one of the most common metrics across wearables and smartphones, and one of the strongest wellness metrics because it's simple, flexible, understandable, and accessible. Many health benefits begin, again, well below 10,000 steps. A sedentary beginner may start around 4,000 to 6,000 steps. An active adult may feel good around to 7,000 to 10,000. A highly active person may naturally exceed that, so you can change the setting. Someone with chronic illness, disability, pain, or burnout may need to focus on sustainable movement patterns instead of fixed numbers. And maybe they need to acknowledge that some days they're going to be able to walk and some days they can't. Fifth, the heart rate. This is the one that I need to go back in and change. Most devices track resting heart rate, workout heart rate, and sometimes recovery heart rate. This can help identify fitness trends, illness patterns, stress load, and overtraining. But heart rate naturally changes with stress, hormones, sleep, hydration, illness, caffeine, medications, and life stage. Very interesting, right? Lower is not automatically better. An endurance athlete may have a naturally lower resting heart rate. A stressed or sleep-deprived person may see temporary increases. Hormonal shifts can affect heart rate during the menstruation cycle, postprim recovery, and perimenopause. The sixth one, heart rate variability or HRV. HRV is popular on Aura, Garmin, Whoop, Apple Watch, and other devices. This is also one that I need to go back and mess with. It measures variation between heartbeats and is often used as a recovery or nervous system metric. Generally, higher HRV may suggest greater adaptability and recovery capacity. But HRV changes consistently with stress, illness, alcohol, sleep, hormones, trauma, overtraining, and burnout. This metric becomes unhealthy when people obsess over daily fluctuations instead of long-term trends. So what I've done is I've taken my health data and I've changed it to B for a week and for a month, and I've uploaded it into AI and asked, like, what does this actually mean? I've done this specifically for sleep when I didn't understand what all of that graph meant. And it was very interesting. For some people, HRV can be helpful for noticing stress patterns. So this is where you could put it into an AI to notice those patterns. For others, especially those prone to anxiety or health fixation, it may be better to check trends less often. Here's another one: sleep tracking. This is number seven. Sleep is tracked by Apple Watch, Fitbit, Aura, Garmin, Samsung, Whoop, SmartBeds, and many phone apps. Sleep tracking can increase awareness around consistency, duration, habits, and recovery patterns. But researchers now talk about something called orthosomnia, which is an unhealthy obsession with perfect sleep scores. Ironically, stress about sleep tracking can make sleep worse. I actually took out the alarm clock in a room decades ago and instead use my smartphone and turn it upside down because I notice when I'm not sleeping well, I'm staring at the alarm clock and stressing about not sleeping well. So it makes sense that stressing about sleep makes sleep worse. Women may need more sleep on average and may notice hormonal fluctuations in sleep quality. Parents and caregivers may need flexible expectations during certain seasons. Neurodiversion individuals may need highly individualized sleep routines. Shift workers may need very different structures than standard recommendations. And here's the eighth one recovery or readiness scores. These are popular on Garmin, Aura, Fitbit, and Whoop. They estimate things like stress load, recovery, strain, and readiness for activity. These scores can be helpful, but they can also cause people to outsource body awareness to an algorithm. Technology can support body awareness, but it should not replace listening to yourself. Athletes may use readiness scores to guide training intensity. People healing from chronic stress may use them to encourage recovery, but some individuals may need to hide or reduce recovery notifications if they increase anxiety, guilt, or perfectionism. Now let's zoom out even more. These devices are not measuring wellness differently. They're defining wellness differently. Does that make sense? It's not measuring, it's the defining that's different. Apple Watch tends to emphasize closing rings and daily activity. Fitbit often emphasizes consistency and behavior change. Garmin often emphasizes performance and optimization. Whoop emphasizes recovery and strain balance. Aura emphasizes sleep and readiness. Samsung and Pixel Watch emphasize integrating health integrated health monitoring. A MassFit offers more budget-friendly tracking for casual wellness users. And I'm not sure if I pronounced that correctly, so sorry. And smartphones are a part of this too. So if you don't have a wearable device on you, smartphones can do a little. Many people think they started tracking their health when they bought a smartwatch, but they but many of us have been quietly participating in health tracking through our phones for years. Smartphones can track steps, walking distance, flights climbed, walking speed, walking steadiness, sedentary patterns, sleep estimates, menstrual cycles, mood check-ins, mindfulness habits, screen usage, app usage, notification load, focus time, location and lifestyle patterns. So a lot. That means the same device helping you meditate may also be dysregulating your nervous system with hundreds of notifications a day. This paradox matters. Wellness tracking can create awareness, but it can also become surveillance. It can support self-connection, but it can also make us distrust our bodies. It can help us notice patterns, but it can also train us to chase numbers instead of wisdom. So the question is not simply which wearable is best. The better question is which wellness philosophy is the healthiest for you in the season of life you're in. Because the goal is not perfect to perfectly optimize every number. Something I need to remind myself up to. The goal is to create healthier relationships with your body, your movement, your energy, your recovery, your spirit, your life. The healthiest wellness setup is usually not the one with the most data. It is the one that supports your well-being in the season of life. So as you look at your own smart device this week, I want you to ask: is this helping me live more fully? Is this supporting sustainable wellness? Is this encouraging movement, rest, and self-awareness? Or is it quietly adding pressure, guilt, comparison, and disconnection? Because technology should support human wellness. It should not train us to distrust our bodies. How are you feeling with all this? Have you thought of things that you want to quickly go in and change? Have you thought about how your technology is impacting you for good and bad? For many of us, it's a mixed bag. Totally understand it is for me as well. And it's the reminder that we can optimize so many things in our life for ourselves. We can over-optimize as well. We can overuse things. And remember, at the end of all of this, check in with yourself and you know the answer. If you need to seek professional help in whatever area, if you need to optimize, tweak different things, if you need to spend time making sure that you have mindfulness reminders in your smart device. There are so many devices have that as well. Know that you're not alone on this journey and that you matter. Your wellness matters. And by taking care of yourself, you can better take care of the things on your task list. But you need to start first. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you found the answers that you needed and you had some amazing aha moments. Please share this episode with others because it helps us align ourselves and then better align the world so that we can seek the healing that we really are looking for. As part of the legal language, I am a certified life coach with a bachelor's in applied health. That is what I am leaning on for this. This is general advice taken as such. See you in the next episode.