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A sense of building tension. I can see the cold breath coming from my rivals as they execute the "starting line" jiggle on the starting line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. The countdown begins...

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

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

During the scramble, it's challenging to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us runners who wear them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion pound industry. Names like Garmin dominate, each with an extensive range of diverse devices to suit a range of budgets. According to how high tech the watch you choose, price tags can vary between £100 to a small fortune.

"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It's like a companion supporting me."

"Stop telling me about a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the reactions I've had from other smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on my own device? Currently, irritating. It's reporting my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the overhead branches I'm running below are disrupting my GPS connection.

Millions of us fasten these little gadgets onto our arms and wear them all day and night, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're continuously recording us.

Gone are the days when we depended on them solely to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Now, they can analyse our sleep quality, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), our recovery score.

It's difficult to find a physical metric they don't track.

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we analyse a accurate representation of reality? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the plethora of metrics and motivational messages just add to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a quite preoccupied with mine," an individual reveals.

While she loves how her device tracks her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a pregnancy.

Until she found out she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was not being energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I have a six-month old, there's no point to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just take it off?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is possibly too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your health metrics and processing your data, but the vast bulk use optical sensors on the underside of the watch.

They usually project minute LED lights onto your skin which can detect pulsation, recording your BPM. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not mean someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a stroke in the years to come.

But how to understand these numbers is complicated. The expert concerns that as additional features are introduced, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

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

A clinical psychologist specialising in cardiology concurs. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a set of heart condition patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate increased. They got even more concerned. They looked a second time, and their reading went up again.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We look, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."