How Can Your Smartwatch Help You Heal?

Your Apple Watch, Fitbit, Whoop, Oura Ring, Garmin or Polar smartwatch can all be really helpful. Understanding your personal data has been very useful and I personally have made changes but also have seen countless patients make big changes when they SEE what is happening in their body.

A device like this can really shed light into your sleep, stress, activity levels. You can also use it to track habits, cycles, patterns and then see how small changes show up in your body. Does an evening yoga program get you more deep sleep? Does that glass of wine affect your sleep? How is my stress at work, driving, at home, around different people. You cannot fake the data and it can be transformative.

Here is my take on the smartwatches:

1. Garmin- Winner. Any Garmin with a Body Battery. This allows real time day and night data. When we are working with you on how to provide a healing environment, your nervous system requires healthy stress and recovery. This allows us to see what your nervous system is doing in a 24 hr cycle. Huge! It also monitors sleep, activity, your cycle and a couple other baseline health metrics that we can track over time.

2. Oura Ring- Good stuff. I like the ring. It is really set it and forget it, good battery life and consistent data. This one is great for sleep. It dives deep into sleep but you can also do your cycle, temperature changes and for those who are overwhelmed by data, this is a good option. For the same reason, I find it limited.

3. Fit Bit- Most improved. It is best at tracking activity but has started to integrate solid information about sleep and other health metrics such as stress. I don’t find it as user-friendly for the other health metrics as the Garmin but with new features being added all the time this has become a very good option especially if you already have one.

4. Whoop- again it depends. For me, I really did not like the band. It was irritating, too tight and it did not have a watch feature which I liked= when I’m in session with patients. The data that the Whoop gathers and presents to you is quite thorough and easy to read but it is challenging to have real-time data and again the watch just really irritated me.

5. Apple Watch- Last place! This is more of a technology device than a health metric device. It does an okay job tracking overall activity goals but the other aspects such as stress sleep and HRV a fairly inaccurate and difficult to really analyze on a daily basis. So if you want the internet and a phone on your wrist this will be the best, if you really want to dive deep into your health get something else!

HRV is a measurement of how healthy your nervous system is. It is a great tool when you are trying to heal. Some of these devices claim to measure HRV but the devices listed about don’t all do it well at a gold standard level but some can be used to monitor trends in your own body. We can help you choose the one that works best for you and use use it to help your healing journey!