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

A swift flick of the hips.

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

Oh, hang on. I need to adjust my tracker. As does the person beside me.

The person waiting tuts. I'm not moving until… done! GPS ready, and I'm running.

During the scramble, it's hard to spot a arm without a wearable on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who wear them.

It's a booming, multi-billion dollar industry. Brands like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an wide array of various models to suit a range of lifestyles. Based on how feature-packed the device you go for, prices can range from an affordable sum to thousands of pounds.

"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to switch off."

"It provides solace… It's like a supporter guiding me."

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

A small sample of the reactions I've had from other device users when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? Currently, annoying. It's telling me I'm off pace, making me wonder whether the foliage I'm passing under are disrupting my location tracking.

Millions of us strap these small gadgets onto our wrists and use them constantly, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're continuously recording us.

A distant memory are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Now, they can track our sleep quality, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a health indicator they don't track.

But do they do what they advertise? And are the numbers we analyse a true reflection of the truth? Do they enhance our overall health, or do the plethora of metrics and cheerleading alerts just add to our sense of overwhelm?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I find myself getting a quite preoccupied with mine," a wearer reveals.

While she values how her device monitors her workouts, she finds some of its other features "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently active enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a young baby, I don't need to be notified I'm tired," she says. "I'm acutely aware only too well."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"It's possible, I suppose, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I value it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Every device of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the majority use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can observe blood flow, recording your BPM. Higher-end devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that flows through the skin to get an idea of your stress levels.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially save lives, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can conduct tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not mean someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the future.

But how to understand these figures is not straightforward. The expert worries that as additional features are added, people may struggle to fully comprehend their data.

"I remain sceptical that the ability to monitor so many things is such a good idea," he says.

A professor specialising in wearable tech concurs. Her work into the influence of wearable tech on a set of individuals with health issues suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced increased anxiety and were "more inclined to use medical services".

She identified a vicious circle with her patients - they spotted a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM increased. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their reading increased again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We check, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."