When did being healthy start feeling like getting a grade?

You wake up after six hours of sleep. You feel fine. Then you check your Oura Ring: your Readiness Score is low. Suddenly, you do not feel so fine anymore.

Wearable devices have become much more than step counters. Fitness trackers, smartwatches, smart rings, and other devices can now monitor everything from heart rate and exercise to sleep and recovery. Products like the Oura Ring, WHOOP, and Garmin watches take this data and turn it into daily scores designed to tell users how rested, active, or prepared their bodies are. Instead of simply asking ourselves, “How do I feel today?” we can now open an app and get an answer in the form of a number. These devices can help us understand our bodies better, but they also raise a strange question: when did being healthy start feeling like getting a grade?

There are clear reasons why this technology can be useful. Wearables make information about our bodies visible in a way that was impossible before. A student athlete might notice that their recovery decreases after several intense training days. Someone using an Oura Ring might realize that going to bed an hour earlier consistently improves their sleep, while a Garmin user may use training data to decide when to choose a lighter workout. Even simpler features such as daily step goals and activity reminders can encourage people to move more. One 2024 meta-analysis examining 21 studies and more than 3,600 children and adolescents found that wearable activity trackers were associated with increases in daily steps. For students balancing school, sports, homework, and extracurricular activities, having access to this information can encourage healthier routines and make progress easier to recognize.

However, knowing more about our bodies does not always mean having a healthier relationship with them. When every workout, night of sleep, and rest day becomes a number, it can be tempting to constantly try to improve the score. A student might wake up feeling energetic but become worried after seeing poor sleep data, or feel guilty for taking a rest day because a device says they have not reached their activity goal. Wearables can also introduce comparison through leaderboards, shared workouts, challenges, and other social features. Research involving 84 adolescents who wore fitness trackers for eight weeks found that, although goals and competition could initially motivate some participants, students also reported feelings of pressure, guilt, and obligation. Their autonomous motivation to exercise actually decreased over the course of the study. The problem, then, may not be the technology itself but what happens when exercise changes from something we choose to do into another number we feel responsible for improving.

Wearable devices can give us valuable information. They can reveal patterns, encourage movement, and help athletes understand the importance of rest and recovery. But whether someone uses an Apple Watch, Fitbit, Oura Ring, WHOOP, Garmin, or any other tracker, the data should remain a tool rather than a judgment. A recovery score cannot know exactly how you feel, and missing an activity goal does not mean you had an unhealthy day. Perhaps the best use of wearable technology is not allowing it to make decisions for us but using its information to make better decisions ourselves.

Our bodies can produce data. They should not become data.