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There's a nervous excitement. Visible is the cold breath coming from my rivals as they perform the "pre-race" jiggle on the starting line.

A rapid flick of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I need to start my watch. So does the runner beside me.

The person waiting sighs. I'm not moving until… there! Connection established, and I'm running.

In the mele, it's difficult to spot a wrist without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us athletes who wear them.

It's a thriving, multi-billion pound market. Names like Apple Watch lead the market, each with an broad array of various devices to fit a variety of lifestyles. According to how feature-packed the watch you go for, prices can vary between a hundred pounds to a significant investment.

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

"It reassures me… It's like a friend encouraging me."

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

Just some of the reactions I've received from fellow smartwatch wearers when I question what they feel about theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My current opinion on mine? At this moment, frustrating. It's indicating my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are interfering with my location tracking.

A vast number of us fasten these small gadgets onto our wrists and use them constantly, apparently comfortable with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Gone are the days when we relied on them only to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Today, they can analyse our nightly rest, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

It's difficult to find a bodily function they don't track.

But can they do what they say they do? And are the data points we obsess over a faithful picture of the truth? Do they enhance our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of measurements and motivational messages just contribute to our sense of overwhelm?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a quite obsessed with mine," an individual admits.

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

Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch kept telling her she was failing to be active 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 my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I love it for its fitness insights, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Each model of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of measuring your bodily functions and processing your data, but the majority use detectors on the back of the watch.

They commonly project minute LED lights onto your arm which can observe pulsation, detecting your pulse rate. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to assess your recovery state.

The Professional Viewpoint

A professor says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually prevent illness, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which constantly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

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

But how to interpret these figures is complicated. The expert fears that as additional features are added, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

"I remain sceptical that being able to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist focusing on wearable tech concurs. Research into the effect of wearable tech on a specific group of heart condition patients suggested a significant portion 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 observed a cycle with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate increased. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their anxiety increased again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."