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There's a feeling of anticipation. I can see the frosty air emanating from my rivals as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the starting line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm at my local weekly parkrun event and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I must sort my watch. As does the guy alongside me.

The person in the line sighs. I'm not moving until… there! Signal acquired, I'm off.

Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And this extends beyond us participants who wear them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion dollar market. Brands like Apple Watch lead the market, each with an wide array of different models to fit a spectrum of budgets. Based on how feature-packed the model you choose, costs can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune.

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

"It provides solace… It feels like a friend supporting me."

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

A handful of the comments I've had from other smartwatch wearers when I question what they feel about theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My feelings on my own device? At this moment, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the trees along my route are interfering with my location tracking.

A vast number of us attach these small devices onto our wrists and use them all day and night, seemingly at ease with the fact they're constantly recording us.

A distant memory are the days when we depended on them solely to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Today, they can measure our sleep quality, stress levels, glucose levels, 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 data points we scrutinise a accurate representation of the truth? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the plethora of readings and constant notifications just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a quite fixated with mine," one user reveals.

While she values how her device tracks her workouts, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Prior to discovering she could change its configuration, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch frequently reports her she's had a restless night.

"I've got a young baby, I don't need to be told I'm tired," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I sometimes question whether the additional features it can now do is possibly overkill for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your health metrics and processing your data, but the majority use detectors on the back of the watch.

They usually project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can monitor capillary action, recording your pulse rate. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to gauge your stress levels.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could actually aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can carry out tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which regularly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the long term.

But how to understand these figures is complex. The expert fears that as additional features are added, people may not be able to fully understand their data.

"I have some doubts that having the capacity to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A professor focusing on wearable tech concurs. Her work into the influence of wearable tech on a cohort of heart condition patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use medical services".

She identified a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse rose. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their reading went up again.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We check, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."