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There's a feeling of anticipation. Apparent is the cold breath emanating from my competitors as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the start line.

A rapid twitch of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. It's almost time...

Wait a second. I have to adjust my tracker. As does the guy alongside me.

The person waiting sighs. I refuse to go until… there! Connection established, away I go.

During the scramble, it's difficult to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us participants who wear them.

We're witnessing a explosive, massive industry. Companies like Samsung Galaxy dominate, each with an broad selection of diverse models to suit a spectrum of lifestyles. Based on how advanced the model you choose, price tags can vary between a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to switch off."

"It reassures me… It feels like a supporter guiding me."

"I wish it wouldn't say I've experienced a bad night's sleep."

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

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on mine? Right now, annoying. It's indicating my speed is wrong, making me wonder whether the trees along my route are disrupting my GPS connection.

Countless individuals of us attach these small gadgets onto our wrists and use them all day and night, apparently unconcerned with the fact they're constantly tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our step count. Today, they can analyse our sleep quality, stress levels, heart rate variability (HRV), our body battery.

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

But are they able to do what they say they do? And are the statistics we obsess over a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they boost our overall health, or do the avalanche of metrics and constant notifications just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a bit preoccupied with mine," one user admits.

While she values how her device records her workouts, she finds some of its other capabilities "daunting" at times - a feeling initially realised during a pregnancy.

Until she found out she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be active enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I am caring for a young baby, it's unnecessary for me to be informed my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"I suppose I could, theoretically, but I've got this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I love it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps too much for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your bodily functions and processing your data, but the majority use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They commonly project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can monitor capillary action, identifying your pulse rate. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially prevent illness, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is abnormal signals in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a stroke in the future.

But how to make sense of these numbers is complex. The expert fears that as more functions are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully understand their data.

"I remain sceptical that having the capacity to monitor so many metrics is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist studying cardiology concurs. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a specific group of heart condition patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they spotted a concerning reading on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM increased. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their anxiety rose further.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, of course, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a vicious cycle."