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A sense of building tension. Apparent is the frosty air coming from my fellow runners as they execute the "starting line" jiggle on the starting line.

A swift flick of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. Three, two, one...

Hold on. I need to adjust my watch. The same goes for the runner alongside me.

The person waiting tuts. I won't start until… there! Connection established, away I go.

Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to see a arm without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us athletes who rely on them.

It's a booming, multi-billion pound market. Names like Garmin lead the market, each with an wide range of various versions to fit a range of budgets. Depending on how high tech the device you go for, price tags can start from £100 to a significant investment.

"It drives me insane, it's impossible to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It acts as a friend guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've had a poor sleep."

A handful of the reactions people have shared from fellow device users when I question what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on my own device? Right now, frustrating. It's indicating I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the overhead branches along my route are blocking my satellite signal.

Countless individuals of us fasten these small gadgets onto our wrists and keep them on all day and night, seemingly unconcerned with the fact they're continuously recording us.

Gone are the days when we depended on them only to give us an estimation of our daily steps. Now, they can analyse our sleep quality, blood pressure, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

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

But can they do what they advertise? And are the numbers we analyse a accurate representation of reality? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the plethora of metrics and cheerleading alerts just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a quite preoccupied with mine," a wearer reveals.

While she values how her device records her runs, she finds some of its other features "excessive" at times - a feeling initially realised during a major life event.

Until she found out she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being active enough. In a new phase, the watch frequently reports her she's had a restless night.

"I have a young baby, I don't need to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that only too well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I could, theoretically, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I value it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether the myriad other functions it can now do is possibly 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 most use sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually emit small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can observe pulsation, detecting your pulse rate. More advanced devices detect changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially aid early diagnosis, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can conduct tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which constantly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a heart problem in the future.

But how to make sense of these readings is not straightforward. The expert fears that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may struggle to fully understand their data.

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

A professor studying cardiology echoes this sentiment. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "far more likely to use medical services".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they noticed a concerning reading on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate increased. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their reading went up again.

"If we see data about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."