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There's a building tension. Apparent is the chilled vapour emanating from my fellow runners as they perform the "about to run" shuffle on the start line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I mean business. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I must start my tracker. The same goes for the runner next to me.

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

During the scramble, it's challenging to see a arm without a wearable on it. And this isn't only us runners who rely on them.

This is a explosive, multi-billion dollar market. Names like Garmin dominate, each with an broad selection of different models to cater to a variety of lifestyles. Depending on how feature-packed the watch you choose, price tags can start from an affordable sum to thousands of pounds.

"I find it infuriating, I can't stop checking."

"It comforts me… It feels like a companion supporting me."

"I wish it wouldn't say about a poor sleep."

Just some of the responses I've received from fellow smartwatch wearers when I ask what they think of theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on mine? Right now, frustrating. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the foliage along my route are interfering with my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us strap these small monitors onto our wrists and wear them constantly, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Currently, they can analyse our sleep patterns, blood pressure, heart rate variability (HRV), our recovery score.

It's a challenge to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But do they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of metrics and constant notifications just add to our daily stresses?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a a little preoccupied with mine," a wearer confesses.

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

Prior to discovering she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be energetic enough. Later on, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I have a six-month old, I don't need to be told I'm tired," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just remove it?

"I could, I suppose, but I'm in this complicated dynamic with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Each model of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your vitals and processing your data, but the most use optical sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually emit tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can observe blood flow, identifying your pulse rate. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could actually prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which constantly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the years to come.

But how to make sense of these figures is complex. The expert fears that as more functions are introduced, people may not be able to fully comprehend their data.

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

A professor studying cardiology concurs. Her work into the influence of wearable tech on a specific group of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced increased anxiety and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She noted a cycle with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their pulse went up. They got increasingly anxious. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate increased again.

"Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."