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An atmosphere of feeling of anticipation. I can see the chilled vapour coming from my rivals as they perform the "starting line" jiggle on the starting line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. It's almost time...

Hold on. I have to adjust my watch. The same goes for the guy beside me.

The person behind us sighs. I refuse to go until… yes! GPS ready, I'm off.

In the mele, it's hard to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us athletes who use them.

This is a thriving, multi-billion pound industry. Brands like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, each with an wide range of diverse versions to suit a range of needs. Depending on how feature-packed the device you select, prices can start from £100 to a significant investment.

"I find it infuriating, I can't switch off."

"It provides solace… It's like a friend encouraging me."

"Please don't notify me about a poor sleep."

A small sample of the comments I've had from other smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on my own device? Currently, frustrating. It's reporting my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm running below are blocking my GPS connection.

Millions of us strap these little devices onto our wrists and wear them all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're continuously recording us.

Long past are the days when we used them only to give us an rough count of our step count. Today, they can measure our sleep patterns, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), our body battery.

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

But do they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a accurate representation of reality? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the avalanche of readings and cheerleading alerts just increase our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

"I do get a quite preoccupied with mine," one user admits.

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

Prior to discovering she could change its configuration, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be productive enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I have a infant, there's no point to be notified I've not slept," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I have this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I value it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is maybe too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of tracking your health metrics and processing your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually shine small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can detect blood flow, recording your BPM. More advanced devices analyse changes in the skin conductance that flows through the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the continuously improving tech could realistically prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the years to come.

But how to understand these readings is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as more functions are incorporated, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

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

A professor focusing on patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. A study into the influence of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate increased. They got increasingly anxious. They checked again, and their heart rate increased again.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."