Do you compulsively check the Health app on your phone? It’s tempting to see the number of calories it thinks you’ve burned or a graph of your heart rate.
But is there evidence that using these apps can improve your health, beyond a more solipsistic interest in all aspects of yourself?
Let’s look at three of the most commonly studied metrics from health apps: heart rate (usually measured using a smartwatch), the number of steps you take per day, and how much sleep you get each night.
Pulse at rest
People with lower resting heart rates tend to live longer. You have a lower risk of various health problems, including heart disease, heart failure, and even cancer. Compared to a person whose resting heart rate is 50 beats per minute, a person with a resting heart rate of 90 beats per minute is approximately twice as likely to die prematurely.
From a scientific point of view, none of this is worth discussing: should I be happy that I am writing this, according to my smartwatch, with a resting heart rate of 51 beats per minute?
No need for. It’s unclear whether your heart rate is a cause or a result of health problems. Can poor health cause your resting heart rate to increase? Certainly. Can medications that lower your heart rate improve your health? Maybe. This probably happens in both directions at the same time.
More importantly, the connection between heart rate and health is not that strong. An increase from 50 to 90 beats per minute doubles the risk of death, but this represents a huge increase in beats per minute. Major changes within a person are worth reporting to your doctor, but the day-to-day changes your health app shows are probably not a cause for concern.
However, exercising more is one of the most important things people do to lower their heart rate, and it seems like a good idea for many reasons. This brings us to:
Ten thousand steps
I’m a simple guy who believes in the “calories in, calories out” theory of weight gain and loss: if you burn more calories or eat fewer calories altogether, you will lose weight. Losing weight improves all types of health indicators. Encouraging people to exercise more with a goal like “10,000 steps a day” seems like a good idea on the surface.
But does it make sense to choose a specific figure of 10,000? It varies greatly depending on age, occupation and country, but a healthy adult walks between 4,000 and 18,000 steps per day. Ten thousand is quite arbitrary and not a magical threshold at which you will experience health benefits.
According to one of the latest large-scale studies, published in March of this year, regularly walking more than 8,000 steps a day was associated with a lower risk of various health problems such as cardiovascular disease (not to mention premature babies). Mortality).
But as with heart rate, the opposite can be true: Poor health can cause you to run less. This is why randomized trials that ask people to walk more and measure it with a pedometer or app are useful. And overall, they show that adding steps is associated with better health outcomes, including (as I predicted) weight loss.
But they clearly don’t support the number 10,000. One says: “Aim for it A goal that represents an increase over the baseline is likely to be much more important. [than] exact target number.”
So don’t beat yourself up if you don’t walk 10,000 steps every day. But it might be a good idea to walk a few thousand more steps than usual if possible. And if you’re bored of running: haven’t you heard of podcasts?
Eight hours of sleep
Of course, podcasts are also a popular sleep aid. Some people believe that voices ringing in their ears helps them sleep at night (others, like me, actually find this very strange). You’ll even find an optional “sleep timer” in most podcast apps.
It’s all in service of our great social quest for more sleep: according to some wildly popular best-sellers, almost all of our ailments come from not getting eight hours of sleep.
And guess what? In this case, the actual number is not far off. A meta-review published in 2020 examined eleven previous systematic reviews of research on sleep and a range of health (and mental health) outcomes and concluded that “sleep duration of seven or eight hours per day is most positively associated with health.” . .
The relationship between sleep and health is an inverted U-shape: up to seven or eight hours means gradual improvement in health; but anything beyond that could be a sign that things aren’t going so well for you. And keep in mind that, as with both cases discussed above, most of this research is correlational research: there is less evidence about what would happen if we intervened to help people sleep longer.
One thing the meta-reviewers noted was that 96 percent of previous studies assessed sleep subjectively: People reported how much sleep they got without measuring it with any instruments. This leads to bias as people tend to overestimate how much sleep they actually get (new research done in the smartwatch era will be more reliable). In fact, just under eight hours can be a healthy amount of time.
One final point: everyone is different. Sleep research has yet to address the lucky ones who need less sleep than the rest of us and what sets them apart from others.
So a total of eight hours is about what the average person should aim for, but keep in mind that you are not necessarily the average person.
Delivered well
Doctors sometimes call this a “concerned source.” These are people who are almost completely healthy, but are still very worried about their health: for example, that they eat poorly or sleep little.
The downside of health apps is that they encourage anxious people to worry even more. Anything that allows us to analyze our heart rate in great detail or set an arbitrary goal like 10,000 steps or eight hours of sleep is designed for those of us looking for a reason to worry about disaster.
So as long as you keep the big picture in mind—many of the things your health app tracks will likely result in small, insignificant improvements and won’t change your life—a health app is great. However, if it’s causing you stress, the best advice is to simply remove it. Then you will immediately feel the benefits.
Source: I News
With a background in journalism and a passion for technology, I am an experienced writer and editor. As an author at 24 News Reporter, I specialize in writing about the latest news and developments within the tech industry. My work has been featured on various publications including Wired Magazine and Engadget.