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There's a nervous excitement. Visible is the cold breath emanating from my rivals as they execute the "starting line" jiggle on the beginning point.

A rapid twitch of the hips.

I'm participating in my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. Three, two, one...

Hold on. I need to start my device. So does the person next to me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… yes! Connection established, away I go.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us participants who wear them.

We're witnessing a thriving, multi-billion pound market. Companies like Apple Watch dominate, all offering an extensive array of various devices to cater to a variety of lifestyles. According to how feature-packed the watch you go for, costs can vary between an affordable sum to thousands of pounds.

"It drives me insane, I'm unable to switch off."

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

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

A small sample of the responses people have shared from fellow smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on my own device? Right now, irritating. It's reporting I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the overhead branches along my route are disrupting my location tracking.

A vast number of us attach these little devices onto our arms and wear them all day and night, apparently at ease with the fact they're continuously monitoring us.

Gone are the days when we used them only to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Currently, they can track our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

It's tricky to find a bodily function they aren't designed to measure.

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we analyse a accurate representation of reality? Do they boost our overall health, or do the plethora of metrics and motivational messages just increase our daily stresses?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a a little obsessed with mine," an individual reveals.

While she loves how her device monitors her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "daunting" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a pregnancy.

Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was failing to be productive enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I am caring for a six-month old, I don't need to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Couldn't she just take it off?

"I suppose I could, theoretically, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is possibly too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your vitals and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically shine small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can monitor blood flow, recording your pulse rate. Higher-end devices measure changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the continuously improving tech could realistically prevent illness, "detecting disease before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "worried well".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic impulses 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 preliminary indication they might be more susceptible of a blood clot in the years to come.

But how to understand these numbers is complex. The expert worries that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data.

"I remain sceptical that having the capacity to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A health researcher focusing on wearable tech concurs. A study into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She identified a cycle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate went up. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their heart rate increased again.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."