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An atmosphere of building tension. Visible is the frosty air exhaled by my fellow runners as they perform the "about to run" jiggle on the starting line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm participating in my local weekly parkrun event and I'm focused. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I have to adjust my watch. The same goes for the guy alongside me.

The person behind us tuts. I refuse to go until… done! Signal acquired, away I go.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us participants who use them.

It's a booming, multi-billion dollar sector. Companies like Garmin are prevalent, each with an broad range of different models to fit a spectrum of lifestyles. According to how feature-packed the device you select, prices can vary between a hundred pounds to a small fortune.

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

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

"Please don't notify me about a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the comments I've received from other device users when I ask what they their opinion is on theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My current opinion on mine? Right now, irritating. It's indicating my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the trees I'm running below are disrupting my GPS connection.

Millions of us strap these compact gadgets onto our arms and keep them on all day and night, seemingly at ease with the fact they're perpetually recording us.

Gone are the days when we used them only to give us an idea of our pedometer reading. Now, they can track our sleep quality, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a physical metric they don't track.

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we obsess over a faithful picture of the truth? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the plethora of metrics and constant notifications just add to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

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

While she values how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "excessive" at times - a feeling first discovered during a significant period.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be energetic enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I am caring for a six-month old, there's no point to be told I'm tired," she says. "That fact is perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I've got this complicated dynamic with it," she explains. "I love it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether all the other things it can now do is possibly excessive for me."

How Do They Work?

Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of measuring your vitals and processing your data, but the vast bulk use optical sensors on the back of the watch.

They typically emit tiny, coloured LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually prevent illness, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which constantly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the long term.

But how to make sense of these figures is complex. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully understand their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so many things is such a good idea," he says.

A clinical psychologist studying patient behaviour agrees. Research into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use medical services".

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 more worried. They looked a second time, and their reading went up again.

"When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We look, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."