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There's a building tension. I can see the frosty air exhaled by my competitors as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the starting line.

A swift movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I have to adjust my tracker. So does the guy beside me.

The person behind us tuts. I'm not moving until… yes! Connection established, and I'm running.

During the scramble, it's challenging to see a arm without a wearable on it. And this isn't only us participants who wear them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion dollar market. Brands like Samsung Galaxy dominate, each with an broad range of different models to suit a variety of lifestyles. According to how feature-packed the watch you select, prices can start from £100 to a significant investment.

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

"It reassures me… It's like a friend supporting me."

"Please don't notify me I've experienced a poor sleep."

Just some of the reactions I've received from fellow device users when I question what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on mine? At this moment, annoying. It's telling me I'm off pace, leading me to doubt whether the trees along my route are interfering with my satellite signal.

A vast number of us attach these little monitors onto our wrists and wear them 24/7, apparently at ease with the fact they're continuously recording us.

Long past are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an estimation of our daily steps. Currently, they can track our sleep quality, heart rate, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's a challenge to find a physical metric they aren't designed to measure.

But can they do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we scrutinise a faithful picture of the truth? Do they improve our overall health, or do the avalanche of readings and constant notifications just increase our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I find myself getting a quite preoccupied with mine," an individual admits.

While she appreciates how her device monitors her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a major life event.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I have a young baby, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is only too well."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"I could, I suppose, but I'm in this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I love it for its workout tracking, I sometimes question whether the additional features it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of measuring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the majority use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can detect blood flow, detecting your pulse rate. More advanced devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to assess your stress levels.

Expert Perspectives

One expert says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could realistically prevent illness, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the future.

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

"I remain sceptical that the ability to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist studying wearable tech agrees. A study into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of heart condition patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced greater stress and were "had a higher tendency to use healthcare resources".

She noted a cycle with her patients - they saw a concerning reading on their watch. They became worried. Their pulse increased. They got more worried. They looked a second time, and their reading rose further.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a vicious cycle."