Hello and welcome back to Ask Dr Hazel our mini episodes that drop each week between our main episodes

where I answer all your burning questions. So let's jump into this week's listener question.

Hi Hazel, I really wanted to get your take on fitness tracking technology and how to use it to optimise your health.

It's something I've been on the fence about because of past experience of using podometers during lockdown, for example,

and beating myself up for not hitting my goals like step count or activity level.

I understand that fitness tracking technology can really help to understand what's going on in

our bodies, giving us better awareness so that we can take action. However, can tracking take its toll?

For example, I might wake up and say that I've not gotten enough sleep that night. You know,

it could worry me and have the opposite effect of knowing that I didn't have enough sleep that night.

And therefore, the following night might be up thinking that I've not had enough sleep.

Or I didn't get enough recovery time and it becomes more of a negative than a positive.

This is maybe more about mindset, but I'd be interested to get your thoughts and advice on the use of metrics,

not only for our physical health, but mental

health as well. I'm loving all these questions related to fitness and I'm loving the fact that

a lot of you are taking your health really seriously, but this question does raise a really

important point and I'm really excited to get into it in a bit more detail. So on the

whole, research suggests that wearables tend to leave to positive improvements in our health

behaviours like physical activity levels, for example, which I guess is pretty obvious. However,

there's not a huge amount of research looking at the psychological impact

of these wearables. Now, when I was doing my research for this question, there's quite a few

anecdotal reports in the media. For example, an article published in the conversation reported

results of a survey that indicated that users experienced feelings of guilt and pressure to achieve their daily

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