Doctors Explain Why Your Smartwatch Is Giving You Anxiety, and How to Stop It
Smartwatches and health-tracking wearables can increase health anxiety in some users, especially when constant alerts and data lead to obsessive checking. Experts suggest turning off non-essential health notifications and avoiding compulsive use to prevent anxiety from escalating. While these devices offer valuable health insights, they may harm psychological well-being if not used mindfully.
- ▪Dr. Lindsey Rosman notes that 24/7 access to health data from wearables may harm as much as it helps, particularly for those with health anxiety.
- ▪A patient performed over 900 EKGs on her smartwatch in one year, leading to ER visits and therapy due to anxiety from inconclusive alerts.
- ▪Dr. Karen Cassiday advises against compulsive checking of wearable data, as it can reinforce health anxiety rather than alleviate it.
- ▪Many wearable features, such as heart rate alerts and calorie tracking, can be customized or turned off to reduce anxiety triggers.
- ▪A 2024 study found that about half of patients with atrial fibrillation checked their heart rate daily out of habit, not symptoms, increasing anxiety.
CNET files mainly under tech. We currently carry 325 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | CNET |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnet.com/health/mental/doctors-explain-why-smartwatch-giving-you-anxiety-how-stop-it/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 12:28:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T12:52:13.115Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T12:52:13.115Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ZjJ5t2jw4Xj4 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Whenever I wear a smartwatch, I find that my anxiety increases -- specifically, my health anxiety. Also known as hypochondria or illness anxiety disorder, this type of anxiety makes me worry that I am or may become ill even when I’m healthy. What’s ironic is that part of my job involves testing health-monitoring wearables, including fitness trackers and smart rings. While I love exploring this technology and do think it can help you learn more about your body, I have to be careful about how I use it so my anxiety isn’t triggered. I know I’m not alone. “Healthy adults and individuals with pre-existing medical conditions are increasingly using these devices to manage their health,” says Dr.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNET.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from CNET
