Liberty Lifestyle: The New American Hobby – Tracking Everything

Do you need to know how many calories are in that chicken dinner you ordered? There’s an app for that. How about tracking how many steps you’ve walked today? There’s an app for that, too. In fact, there’s a way to follow just about everything in your life, thanks to modern technology. Americans have become obsessed with this new hobby of tracking everything, but is it beneficial or detrimental?

Self-Improvement Becomes a Full-Time Job

Tracking parts of our lives is not a new trend or hobby. Twenty years ago, people monitored their weight, bank accounts, bills, and perhaps kept a food diary. Today, however, some people are obsessed with watching and knowing everything around them. We can track sleep, heart rate, stress level, blood oxygen levels, how many steps we’ve walked, calorie intake, hydration, spending, how productive we are, fertility, glucose levels, bowel movements, and even our moods. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg on things we can follow.

When did we stop trusting ourselves and our bodies? Many people now check a sleep score just to decide whether they’re tired, or a calorie tracker before deciding if they’re hungry. They might even look at a productivity app to determine if they’ve accomplished enough on a particular day. While these devices can be helpful and even become a fun hobby for some, too much checking can lead to fatigue.

Are We Measuring Ourselves to Death?

The younger a person is, the more likely they are to use modern technology, and, therefore, health tracking devices.

A study in the Journal of Public Health Indonesian studied how tracking technology affected Generation Z and involved 240 participants from that age group who regularly used the tools. This technology was designed to improve life, but what researchers found was that the more people used them, the more likely they were to experience “self-tracking anxiety.” Constantly checking health data and worrying about the scores and results wreaked havoc on users. In fact, researchers found that tracking health more often did not necessarily make people feel healthier and often had the opposite effect.

“[S]elf-tracking anxiety has a significant negative effect on health perception,” the study found. People become too dependent on whatever the devices tell them and stop relying on their own instincts.

In another article published in International Journal of Adolescence and Youth journal, teenagers claimed “the tracking was in control of me.” The paper focused on 29 adolescents from the United Kingdom through online interviews.

Several of the participants described feeling pressure from goals, streaks, and daily metrics. They didn’t feel healthier by tracking their health, instead the constant measurements sometimes made them feel as if they were failing. If they didn’t meet numbers or metrics set by the app, stress and anxiety followed to try and catch up.

Self-Surveillance as a Hobby

In a world where there are cameras and recording devices everywhere, and the internet and social media platforms capture just about every information about us, using a plethora of apps to track our health, finances, and productivity is another way of embracing self-surveillance in a society already saturated with data collection. It is collecting a detailed digital record of our lives, often without considering who might have access to that information. We are voluntarily participating in a culture of constant surveillance where we have turned ourselves into both the observer and the observed.

Monitoring our health is a great hobby and way of life, but if we become too focused on it and turn it into self-surveillance, it can cause issues. Previous generations used to judge success on how they felt, if they completed a task, their experiences, and relationships. We didn’t need to ask an app whether we slept well because our bodies would tell us. We didn’t rely on technology to let us know if we were productive today to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Self-tracking as a lifestyle hobby shouldn’t be an all-consuming endeavor that creates stress and anxiety, but a helpful way of taking better control over our health and wellness. But are Americans really gaining more control over their lives and wellbeing this way, or simply replacing personal judgment with algorithms, scores, and notifications? Have we lost the ability to trust our instincts? After all, if a watch tells you that you slept poorly but you feel great, which one do you choose to trust?