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A sense of feeling of anticipation. I can see the cold breath coming from my fellow runners as they execute the "starting line" jiggle on the beginning point.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm participating in my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. It's almost time...

Oh, hang on. I must sort my tracker. So does the person beside me.

The person behind us sighs. I won't start until… done! GPS ready, I'm off.

In the mele, it's hard to see a wrist without a wearable on it. And this isn't only us participants who rely on them.

This is a explosive, multi-billion dollar market. Companies like Garmin lead the market, each with an broad array of different devices to suit a variety of budgets. Depending on how advanced the watch you select, costs can vary between a hundred pounds to a significant investment.

"It drives me insane, I can't relax."

"It reassures me… It feels like a friend guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've had a bad night's sleep."

A handful of the responses I've received from like-minded device users when I question what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? At this moment, frustrating. It's reporting I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the overhead branches along my route are disrupting my location tracking.

A vast number of us attach these little gadgets onto our arms and use them constantly, seemingly at ease with the fact they're constantly tracking us.

Long past are the days when we depended on them solely to give us an rough count of our step count. Now, they can measure our nightly rest, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

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

But do they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a faithful picture of the truth? Do they boost our overall health, or do the plethora of readings and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

"I do get a quite preoccupied with mine," a wearer admits.

While she values how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a pregnancy.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I have a infant, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that all too clearly."

Is it not possible to just take it off?

"I could, I suppose, but I have this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I love it for its fitness insights, but I'm unsure whether all the other things it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your wrist which can monitor pulsation, detecting your pulse rate. More advanced devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that flows through the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

A Fine Balance

One expert says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is abnormal impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is on the verge of a cardiac event, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more at risk of a heart problem in the years to come.

But how to understand these readings is complicated. The expert worries that as more functions are introduced, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I have some doubts that being able to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist specialising in cardiology echoes this sentiment. Research into the influence of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they saw a concerning reading on their watch. They became worried. Their pulse rose. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their reading rose further.

"When people are presented with data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."