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A sense of building tension. Visible is the frosty air coming from my competitors as they do the "pre-race" jiggle on the start line.

A swift flick of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. It's almost time...

Hold on. I need to adjust my watch. So does the person next to me.

The person behind us expresses impatience. I won't start until… there! Connection established, I'm off.

Amidst the crowd, it's challenging to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us participants who use them.

This is a explosive, multi-billion dollar sector. Brands like Apple Watch are prevalent, featuring an broad range of different versions to cater to a variety of budgets. According to how high tech the watch you go for, costs can vary between £100 to a significant investment.

"It makes me crazy, I'm unable to stop checking."

"It provides solace… It feels like a companion supporting me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a restless night."

A small sample of the responses I've had from fellow device users when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? Right now, irritating. It's reporting my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the overhead branches I'm running below are disrupting my location tracking.

A vast number of us fasten these little monitors onto our arms and use them 24/7, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Today, they can track our nightly rest, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's a challenge to find a bodily function they don't track.

But are they able to do what they advertise? And are the statistics we analyse a faithful picture of reality? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the avalanche of measurements and motivational messages just add to our sense of overwhelm?

Addiction or Aid?

"I do get a a little preoccupied with mine," one user admits.

While she appreciates how her device records her workouts, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a major life event.

Until she found out she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was failing to be productive enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a young baby, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that only too well."

Is it not possible to just remove it?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is maybe excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Each model of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of monitoring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the back of the watch.

They commonly project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can detect blood flow, identifying your heartbeat. More advanced devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that flows through the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

One expert says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could realistically save lives, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which constantly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not automatically signal someone is about to have a cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more at risk of a stroke in the long term.

But how to interpret these readings is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are added, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist specialising in patient behaviour agrees. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a set of heart condition patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She noted a pattern with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM increased. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their anxiety went up again.

"When people are presented with data about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."