Is it Okay to Be in Love with Numbers?

            Basically everyone has a watch now, and not only do they tell time, but they also tell us the amount of steps we take, the amount of calories we burn, how far we ran, how much sleep we got, our HRV while sleeping and awake, and that is just some of the numbers. There is a whole list that can be scrolled through on your watch or on the app on your phone. There is also an expansion of these fitness devices, so it is not only just watches now. There are heart rate straps, there are rings, and even the Whoop band is different from a GPS watch. Data can be a great asset. It can be super helpful to keep track of all these things, but they can also be overly relied upon as well and addictive.

            Let’s start with sleep. I still do not know how I feel about the sleep numbers that I get accuracy wise. There are days when it says that I fell asleep almost immediately after turning everything off, and I know that is not the case. There are also times when I know that I woke up in the middle of the night or like an hour before my alarm goes off, and I do not go back to sleep, but that is not recorded when I look at it.

Despite knowing there are some serious inaccuracies, the number I see in the morning has a significant impact on how I think I feel. I know there have been times when I felt fine and then seen the number, and it will say that I got less sleep than I thought I got or that my sleep quality was low, and then I immediately started to feel more tired. Sadly it does not work the other way either. If I wake up and do not feel rested, and my watch says that I had a great night of sleep, that does not make me feel better. Funny how that works.

Also it is very rare for it to tell me that I had a good night. That could just be a personal problem, but like I mentioned there are definitely times when I wake up, and I feel like I had a good night of sleep, but it will just say fair. Apparently, I almost always have a high amount of light sleep and a high amount of awake time, which I think is accurate, but it recommends that I do breathing meditation before bed and to have a firm routine. To be fair to me though, there are many nights when I do a breathing meditation before bed, and I do have a regular routine, so I guess I am just left to toil with my high amount of light sleep and awake time.

The sleep numbers have helped me in some ways though. Sleep Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is one of the main measures the watch uses to judge how restful the sleep was, and basically if I drink more than one alcoholic drink past a certain time in the afternoon, then I am almost guaranteed to have a reduced HRV if not poor. So this is now a thought that infiltrates my head whenever I am drinking. Now I am more likely to drink less (sometimes) and do it at an earlier hour. For a fun comparison, on winter break, I had five beers on back-to-back days. On the first day, the beers were closer to the end of the day, and they were of a stronger variety, and my HRV that night was low, but then the next day, I started to drink earlier, and the beers were much more spread out, and I had a normal HRV. So it is interesting how that works, but I guess it akes sense. National Geographic has coined the term hangxiety, or the stress of thinking about getting a hang over and when I think about my sleep numbers in association with drinking, that is what I get, which I guess is a good thing?

Recovery numbers themselves on the watches are interesting. I use a Coros watch, and it talks about recovery as a percentage. The closer to zero, the more exhausted a person is, and it also gives a recovery time for the body to feel 100%. Just like sleep numbers, I find these percentages to be wildly inconsistent. I would do a similar workout or run, and there were times when it would say it exhausted me more at variable levels. Or on a high milage week, when I know that my legs are burnt, it would tell me that I was recovered, when I knew my legs were very far from being recovered. So I think out of all the numbers that the watch gives us, this is probably the one I take with the biggest grain of salt. The watch just does not know how sore a person’s legs feel.

The number that probably started this whole movement was steps. Someone said that people needed to hit X number of steps a day, and thus the whole trend of pedometers started. I remember back in elementary school, when teachers and other adults started to wear pedometers around to keep track of this data. I also remember begging for a pedometer, because even at a young age I thought the numbers were fun to keep track of, but some of those numbers were juiced, because I knew I could just shake it, and the numbers would start to rise.

            At the point when I was running the most I ever had, my goal was to get 20,000 steps a day, this was very attainable when I would run twice in a day, and I would usually get pretty close when I would just run once too. Running 8 or more miles a day, plus having a job where I must move around a ton helps to get those numbers up. Now that I am hurt though, I still try hard to get to 10,000 steps, which also takes constant movement at work and a copious amount of pacing at the gym between sets, but it is possible.

            While I am hurt or on an off day of running, there is one number that I care about the most, and that is calories burned. Typically, the goal was not to gain weight, although that has changed this time around as all of my exercise centers on lifting weights, so I have started to train to gain muscle mass, I still have to make sure that I am burning the fat calories off from still eating the foods that I love like pizza and peanut butter though. Initially, my calorie burn goal was 1,000 on days when I was not running, but as the workouts have become longer and harder, now I do my best to burn 2,000 active calories a day. This is really only possible on days when I work though, because on the weekend I just am not moving around and being as active as I would be on a day when I have work, at least for now when it is so cold outside, but even still, it is hard to hit this number.  

            The number of active calories burned is my current addiction. It plays a significant role in how I feel about my day. If I have not burned well over 1,000 calories, I start to feel worse mentally, and I start to over analyze everything that I have eaten. Although I look in the mirror every day, and there is like no discernable change between a day when I burned 1,500 calories and 2,000, I think about it constantly. It is the one number that I keep visible on my watch face with the time so I can constantly keep track of it. Also I am not sure how accurate the number is though. I know on my watch when I do a weights workout, they have to use a calories formula, because they give some muscle groups higher calories burned for a workout of similar length of time and number of reps, so if it is on legs, it will say more calories were burned than arms, but sometimes legs is just lame calf exercises, and I know that is not burning more than a hard arm exercise, so there is high level of error in these calorie calculations that I pay way too much attention to and base too much happiness upon.

The one aspect of my Garmin watch that I miss is the move notification. If I was sedentary for an hour, my watch would buzz and tell me to move. Then if I did not move, for each 15 minutes after that it would buzz again, and again, until it got to 2 hours, then it would give up on me. This was a very effective system though. It would make me feel guilty for not moving, and there were many times when I would get up and jog in place until it went away. Not the most active thing to do, but it broke up the sitting. Now my watch has nothing like this sadly.

            So I would say that the numbers are very important, but they should all be taken with some skepticism. The system can be gamed, and it cannot always be accurate in gaging your heart rate, sleep depth, and fatigue level. Only you can really tap into how your body feels. The numbers should just be used as an accessory, not the end all be all. Also I can safely say that numbers should not be used as the basis for a successful day or emotional happiness like I use them for, but I do not really know how to stop. So I will continue to use my watch and over analyze all of my numbers and do my best to remember that they are just estimates and not set in stone.