I I love running, but ask me about running times or distances and I’ll have no idea. For me, running means working out a busy schedule, clearing my mind, and being in nature. You don’t need to measure it.
But unfortunately, I’m not immune to the intensely pleasurable hit of dopamine that comes with discovering a new piece of wearable technology, personalizing the app for hours, and thinking this might change my life — the new, calmer, fitter, stronger, smarter dangling me. Excitingly within reach. One such scenario occurred after research into the importance of human connection on mental and physical health: less stress, less inflammation, less disease. I learned that human communication can be stimulated and facilitated by the vagus nerve, a primitive part of the nervous system.
Naturally, this research was divided into subreddits, podcasts, scientific studies, and ultimately, into wearable technology that would hack the vagus nerve to achieve mental and physical harmony. I was really excited that I might have found a possible way to be calmer. It turns out that vagus nerve activity can be measured by detecting a person’s heart rate variability (HRV) and stimulating it with specific breathing exercises.
Low heart rate (HRV) is associated with chronic diseases and depression. The good news is that my baseline HRV was decent. I thought this would be fun, because I was already excelling at it. I wanted to get it better.
The breathing exercises were very difficult. My app will tell me if I’m breathing at the rhythm needed to stimulate the vagus nerve; Most of the time, I wasn’t. I did a little better when I ditched the visual prompts for inhalation and exhalation and got into my own comfortable deep breathing rhythm. It didn’t make sense to me, but I continued to work hard, night after night, even though it was eating up my reading time.
Many factors—sleep, alcohol consumption, diet, exercise, stress levels, illness—can affect heart rate, so suddenly there was an obsessive urge to get my entire lifestyle in consistently excellent order. This will definitely change my life! It happened, but not in the way I had hoped.
I would wake up every morning and check my heart rate. If it fits, great! If not, anxiety will creep over me. Was I feeling sick? Did I not rest properly after exercise? Did I allow myself to be hurt so badly by children? Shouldn’t I have had a nice evening with a friend last night? But I thought the connection was good for the vagus nerve – maybe human contact is only good if you’re an early nighter too? And so on.
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Using the device has also opened the door to tracking countless other biofeedback data. To measure my heart rate, I had to wear it overnight, which meant I received the sleep results every morning. Although I had always slept well and never felt the need to track my sleep, I was now told that I wasn’t getting much deep sleep, which could be a problem. Also, I would have to correct my sleep log if my sleep duration was clearly wrong. All this before a cup of tea
Elsewhere in the app, it began recording menstrual cycles and headaches, something doctors have long suggested to help identify hormonal migraine triggers. Suddenly I had a lot of add-on functions that all required complex thumb work while staring at a small screen, when I could have just stood back and moved the animal reels.
The result? I started to feel like a frustrated failure who couldn’t hack her nervous system. I suddenly suspected that all sorts of things might be wrong with me, even though they were probably just symptoms of being alive. I longed for my pre-HRV self, who felt generally healthy, if sometimes stressed and overwhelmed.
So, after a few months, I gave up chasing the HRV dream and ended my interest in biofeedback. I felt liberated immediately – from all those annoying little jobs and all that biofeedback that brings up the uniquely human worry that you’re not doing your life right, when there’s no such thing.
These days, it’s good to listen to my instincts. And come to think of it, maybe the reason why running never grows old is because I do it the way I want – without ever giving a second thought to the metrics.