Last year, I got an apple watch. The COVID pandemic left me at home feeling extremely unsafe. The gyms were closed, masks were up for debate, people were dying in masse and there were no precedents to handle the pandemonium that arrived at our front doorsteps.
The pandemic meant that typical places for socializing and group fitness were now a substantial risk. Since the coronavirus is airborne, being in spaces where there was dancing, sweating, yelling, singing and exercising were now counter to wellness. As public, group and community spaces switched to virtual formats or ended all together, I realized I needed to curate support from a different source.
These events are the context that catalyzed my desire for an Apple Watch. After 6 series of watches released, I finally felt compelled to hop on the bandwagon and see how this little gadget could help me reach my fitness and wellness goals.
The Apple Watch has several features. It tracks your active calories, total calories, exercise minutes, streaks, stand hours, sleep activity, heart rate and even has options for meditation via breath work and reflection. It’s a powerful tool for wellness. In addition to these tools, there are also badges or rewards that you can earn as you reach various goals. For example, there are rewards for doing a new exercise, for setting and achieving new personal records and more. As you reach your goals, the watch automatically tracks your progress & you can build streaks which motivate you to keep going.
Over the course of my year in the Apple Watch, I developed a regular exercise regimen. I started first by doing 3 sessions a week for 30-45 minutes. As I began doing more research, I increased my goal to 150 minutes of intense exercise per week.
In just a few weeks, I began working out everyday. The main motivator wasn’t to lose weight but rather to be strong. My other goals became shaped by the Apple Watch’s rewards. The Apple Watch rewards users for perfection and for increasing your intensity. For example, there are rewards for hitting your goals everyday, every month or for doing Yoga on World Yoga day. At first, I loved hitting the goals. I was embarrassed by how motivated I was by virtual badges and hitting my goal but I was glad to be putting an end to a sedentary lifestyle.
However, perfect month after perfect month, I began to feel a little wary. I wanted to take a rest day but my streak was already at 300 days or 10 months and I couldn’t imagine letting it lapse. This meant if I went on vacation, I ensured there was a fitness facility for me. It meant that if I had plans for the day, I worked out before hand. It meant if I couldn’t work out, I’d bring fitness bands, jog in place or queue up and8 fitness on youtube to ensure I wouldn’t let myself down… The truth is, I did let myself down, I stole rest from myself. I usurped softness. I eliminated low intensity from my vocabulary when I needed it the most. After 365 perfect days, I began pondering if this was an achievement or a highway to destruction.
I looked online to see how other Apple Watch users who were committed to wellness managed these thoughts. As I looked online, I was dismayed that so many people had similar stories as I did. They wanted to know if “perfection” was actually healthy and many of them disagreed. While our apple watches were pushing us to go further, harder and longer… our bodies needed rest, restoration and stretching. Many people suggested hacks, like lowering calorie goals, or even putting their watch on their animal companions. Those solutions were creative but seemed to prioritize maintaining perfection over being honest about our bodies need for rest.
In that moment, I realized that while I got the Apple Watch to be more aware of and committed to an active, healthy lifestyle, that it actually promoted perfection over wellness. This revelation was incredibly insightful because perfection is one of the characteristics of White Supremacy Culture (Jones& Okun, 2001). Perfectionism asks us to dehumanize ourselves and others in service of white supremacy. Some of the characteristics of perfectionism in white supremacy culture include:
- pointing out others’ inadequacies
- little acknowledgement of others’ work & contributions
- making mistakes is a personal defect rather than a normal learning opportunity that everyone encounters
- no learning from mistakes
- over-emphasis on negative
- limited ability to identify the positive
- making a mistake is confused for being a mistake
Perfectionism tells us that we aren’t enough. Perfectionism defines us by our mistakes and doesn’t leave room for growth. Perfectionism tells us we can’t be human and that our shortcomings matter more than our strengths. Perfectionism tells us there’s only way to do things and that mistakes always lead to failure. Fortunately, this isn’t true. We are enough. There are many paths to success, many of which are not linear. We are more than our mistakes. We can grow from our missteps and often, our missteps may reveal valuable insights on what it means to be human.
After 380 days of hitting my move goal, I gave myself permission to stop. I realized that perfection was actually destroying my wellness. While my Apple Watch helped me to develop some awesome habits, it also became a burden to meet the increasing caloric demands while balancing the pressures of my doctoral program, personal life, professional aspirations and a global pandemic. I realized that my goal wasn’t to wear an Apple Watch for the rest of my life. My goal of having my apple watch was to have support building healthy habits. Now that I’ve build them and have a wellness routine, I needed to interrogate my relationship to this technology.
While the Apple Watch been a helpful tool to help me reach my goals. It’s been important to reflect on the role this device played in my life. The Apple Watch is a double edged sword. While it promotes healthy habits and wellness, it’s also another source of EMF radiation that I don’t need. Additionally, COVID challenged notions of community and collapsed work and home thus challenging work-life balance. My watch would alert me to my phone’s notifications which often made it hard to feel alone, even if I was alone. It took a lot of intentionality to recreate my work-life balance whilst wearing an Apple Watch. While the watch helped me access data about myself that helped me maximize movement and breath work, with these drawbacks, I don’t intend to be tethered for much longer. My goal was to build healthy habits to counter the sedentary realities of COVID. Now that I’ve done that, I see the Apple Watch in a new light. I’m grateful for the support of technology in reaching my goals and I’m ready to hold myself accountable in community with others, by listening to my body and by rejecting perfection as a virtue. In fitness, we must learn to tune into our bodies so I’m tuning out my watch and paying attention to the messages and rewards I get from being consistent, strategic and honest about my wellness. I’m learning I don’t need to wear my watch all day or everyday or night. I don’t need to discard it either but my focus isn’t on what the watch says. My focus is my body, my spirit and ensuring I’m gentle and generous with myself when it comes to rest. I look forward to what the next chapter of my wellness will look like as I decenter data and numbers and refocus on my feelings, intention and recovery.