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A sense of building tension. Visible is the cold breath coming from my rivals as they do the "starting line" shuffle on the beginning point.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm focused. It's almost time...

Oh, hang on. I need to adjust my tracker. So does the person alongside me.

The person waiting tuts. I refuse to go until… yes! GPS ready, and I'm running.

During the scramble, it's hard to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us participants who wear them.

This is a thriving, massive market. Names like Samsung Galaxy dominate, all offering an extensive selection of different models to cater to a spectrum of lifestyles. Depending on how feature-packed the watch you choose, price tags can start from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

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

"It provides solace… It acts as a friend guiding me."

"Stop telling me about a poor sleep."

A handful of the responses I've received from other tracker enthusiasts when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on my own device? Right now, frustrating. It's telling me my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the trees along my route are interfering with my location tracking.

Millions of us strap these small devices onto our wrists and wear them all day and night, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

Long past are the days when we used them solely to give us an rough count of our step count. Now, they can analyse our nightly rest, stress levels, glucose levels, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a health indicator they aren't designed to measure.

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the data points we analyse a accurate representation of reality? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the plethora of measurements and motivational messages just add to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a quite preoccupied with mine," a wearer reveals.

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

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Later on, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I've got a young baby, I don't need to be notified I'm tired," she says. "I know that only too well."

Is it not possible to just take it off?

"It's possible, I suppose, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I value it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is possibly excessive for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of tracking your bodily functions and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the back of the watch.

They commonly project small, green LED lights onto your skin which can detect pulsation, identifying your heartbeat. Sophisticated devices measure changes in the electrical current that runs through the skin to gauge your stress levels.

The Professional Viewpoint

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually save lives, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like heart rhythm analysis, which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the long term.

But how to interpret these figures is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as more functions are introduced, people may not be able to fully comprehend their data.

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

A professor specialising in patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Research into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of heart condition patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use healthcare resources".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM went up. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their anxiety rose further.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."