Are Stress Monitors The Best Way to Understand Stress?
Jessica Boston spoke to Health & Wellbeing Magazine about modern Stress Detecting Machines and whether or not they are worth the hype.
74% of UK adults have felt so stressed they’ve been unable to cope. First came monitoring our steps, with many of us strapping on fitness watches and aiming to reach that Golden number of 10,000 a day. Then nutrition tracking arrived, followed by sleep, which brought with it the advantages of knowing how much rest you were getting, but also the anxieties of discovering you haven't had enough!
Now, it's stress that's at the forefront of wearable tech developers’ minds in 2021, and for good reason. Even before the challenges of 2020, stress had been described as an epidemic in the UK back in 2018, a survey by mentalhealth.org.uk found that 74% of UK adults have felt so stressed at some point over the last year they felt overwhelmed or unable to cope. However, before we get caught up in the hype, we turned to the experts to find out how accurate these trackers really are and whether or not it's beneficial for our wrists to inform us of our current stress levels.
Stressing about stress
When sleep trackers became popular, they had the unfortunate side effect of creating a new disorder in some users, termed orthosomnia. This occurred when people became unhealthily obsessed with getting the perfect night's sleep, to the extent that it actually caused sleep issues. Could something similar happen with stress trackers and cause users even more anxiety?
Is it better not to know how tense we are? Like anything, it's always better to know, but knowing without application isn't what will make the difference, says Jessica Boston, a multi-award-winning therapist and hypnotherapist at jessicaboston.com. It's like knowing how to make a recipe you never end up cooking what will really help is what you do with that information and what action you take as a result. If you just sit with that knowledge and say I'm stressed, and this device confirms it, this is who I am. There is nothing I can do about it and spend time reinforcing that belief; nothing much will come of it, but if you use the information like a detective to determine how and why you are stressed and in which contexts, you will be able to change your life.
Fit Kit - Wearables have made big strides away from their humble beginnings as pedometers, but why have stress monitors been included in what is essentially a piece of equipment for looking fitness? Mental health is physical health; the mind and body are one unit working together,
Jessica tells us that understanding more about how, why, and when you do stress is going to have an impact on your body working at the peak physical state available to you. However, are these trackers actually necessary, or can we continue relying on how we're feeling inside rather than an external monitor?
Jessica says she thinks it's always a good thing if people are more aware of their stress. If people are able to take their emotional temperature, so to speak, it will lead to a better society if we are more self-aware. It is positive that people are becoming more proactive about taking responsibility for their stress and realizing that they have more power than they might have previously believed to do something about it.
Jessica doesn't believe that you need a tracker in order to do this. It's something you can do by paying attention to your patterns of behaviour and being gently curious about your body and mind. She says I can see how trackers might be helpful to someone who doesn't know where to start a comma, but it's something you need to be able to have a conversation about with the unconscious mind comma, which is behind the powerful process is in charge of the stress responses.
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