Connection is Medicine
An Apple Watch Ultra lifestyle shot (image courtesy of Apple).
When my Apple Watch Ultra arrived on loan for this article, I did not want to open the package. In fact, I engaged in some light self-sabotage, leaving the unopened box to languish on my desk as my deadline inched ever closer.
I’ve had health issues this year. As January opened, I watched the frightening unravelling of a loved one’s sanity. In the grip of this ongoing crisis, my appetite evaporated, and I awoke each day with the blind panic of a monkey falling from a branch. My skin sprouted with acne, and when I did manage to eat, my belly bloated and gurgled painfully.
During this time I came face to face with the quaking, infantile animal that lives inside us all, who tenses for reverberations long after disaster has passed. It was a shapeshifter – sometimes a hummingbird beating against my ribcage, other times a baby deer curled in a knot in my heart, or a quivering rabbit in my throat. Often it was grotesque, roaring belches like a gassy dragon, and bulging like a digesting snake.
I spent many months despising this vulnerable part of myself that, reeling with grief, prevented me from responding to emails or socialising in spaces where I could not cry. I feared being asked what I’d been up to in case it revealed how inept I’d become at working. As activist Jessica Gaitán Johannesson puts it in her book The Nerves and their Endings, I struggled with “the ingrained knowledge that I’m worth less than what I produce, especially if I produce less than others.” Forgiveness was the only way out – forgiveness for needing time to recover, for struggling with problems that most people would rather not hear about, for being unable to save someone I loved.
Even though I was getting better, I knew my body still harboured stress. I felt my heart race at inconveniences that I had once found manageable, and I witnessed myself jumping out of my skin at the sound of my housemate entering the kitchen behind me. I started integrating earlier nights and regular exercise to help soothe my body, but forming new habits takes time. I tried not to punish myself for occasionally skipping a gym class when it was raining, or recklessly staying up past midnight so that I could finish reading a chapter of my book.
And so I feared the Apple Watch nagging me to stand up, exercise and burn calories, conjuring up new ways to fail within the day – and perhaps even revealing secret fault lines. The Move app frames clear objectives for its users, and infuses exercise with the pleasure of a game through rewarding messages, timely reminders, and the sheer satisfaction of closing the three multicoloured rings that track your movement, exercise, and the portion of your day you spend standing. The flip-side is that a lack of reward can feel like punishment; an ill-timed reminder or a gaping ring can deplete your self worth.
Apple markets its latest watch, the Ultra, as “an incredible tool for endurance athletes or those who aspire to push beyond their limits.” Its newest features help you backtrack when lost on a hike, or perceive the depth of your dive – tools I wish I had a use for in my sedentary work-from-home lifestyle. Although it’s optimised for athletes, the watch’s other features are more generally applicable – I can use it to make calls, read messages, and listen to music. It’s also marketed as “the ultimate device for a healthy life,” as it can monitor my fitness, heart rate, sleep and menstrual cycle. Yet I find being encouraged to push myself beyond my limits rather daunting.
When I finally start using the watch, I am pleasantly surprised. My daily circuits around my local park surpass its specified 30-minute exercise requirement. Given that I am prone to pacing, I easily meet my standing goals too. I feel great until I check my Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Although it may sound counterintuitive, greater fluctuation in the time between our heartbeats indicates that the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary processes such as heart rate and respiration, is functioning better. HRV should hover somewhere between 60 and 100 for a healthy person in their mid-20s. My HRV is currently 10, and has been perilously low for the last two days.
As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains in his book The Body Keeps the Score, the autonomic nervous system has two branches: “the sympathetic, which acts as the body’s accelerator, and the parasympathetic, which serves as its brake.” The sympathetic nervous system gears our bodies up into fight-or-flight, while the parasympathetic nervous system regulates functions that relax our bodies, such as sleeping and digesting. “Since the autonomic nervous system organises arousal in both body and brain, poor HRV[…] not only has negative effects on thinking and feeling but also on how the body responds to stress,” van der Kolk writes. With HRV, the more fluctuation, the better. Low HRV indicates susceptibility to potentially fatal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, as well as life-diminishing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is considered a harbinger of future illness.
Quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with the suggestion that I am 26 and hyperventilating my way towards an early death. The feeling that I am failing at living seeps in like rot, and I desperately want to rip off the watch and throw it in the nearest body of water. I feel a deep revulsion and I’m not entirely sure what it’s directed towards. Do I hate my body for malfunctioning or do I hate the watch for telling me about it? Do I hate myself or the device?
***
“Apple decided to make a watch and only then set out to discover what it might be good for (besides, you know, displaying the time),” writer David Pierce explains in Wired. But after tinkering with different ways in which people might relate to wristmounted technology, the team ultimately landed on the watch’s purpose as being a less distracting alternative to an iPhone. “People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much,” software developer Kevin Lynch told Wired back in 2015. “People want that level of engagement. But how do we provide it in a way that’s a little more human, a little more in the moment when you’re with somebody?”
The public first glimpsed the Apple Watch at Parisian fashion boutique Colette in 2014. Customers were only allowed to look at the device rather than try out its features, buy it or even glean its price; nevertheless, early morning queues formed. Fashion elites such as designer Karl Lagerfeld attended the event, and the watch had a 12-page ad in Vogue the next year. Wearable tech is still treated as a luxury fashion item – Apple has teamed up with Nike and Hermès to produce different straps for its watch, for instance, while its competitor the Oura ring is sold at Gucci stores. It makes sense: owning the latest tech is a status symbol, as is the luxury to prioritise one’s fitness and wellness. “Unfit behaviour like smoking or reclining in front of the TV with a beer [signifies] lower class status, while a dedication to health, even if evidenced only by carrying a gym bag or yoga mat, [advertises] a loftier rank,” Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. The Apple Watch is a perfect form of conspicuous consumption, indicating not only wealth but virtue.
Once the watch was finally released in 2015, Apple’s development and marketing placed greater emphasis on health and fitness as a way of competing with activity trackers such as the popular Fitbit. Subsequent editions offered ever more elaborate features, such as tracking your average lap pace when swimming. To bolster mental wellbeing, a 2016 update offered watch users guided meditations, and by the time of the Apple Watch Series 4 in 2018 it had evolved into a carer, offering fall detection and heart monitoring. When the watch was first conjured up, it represented wearable technology with no clear discernible purpose; now, however, Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams is unequivocal when he calls it “an intelligent guardian for your health.”
In the case of my own health, I discover that although regular exercise and sleep can help raise HRV, the technique that promises to provide me with the most instantaneous relief is actually offered through the Apple Watch’s Breathe app. Resonant breathing synchronises two rhythms in the heart rate that correspond to the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, triggering relaxation and emotional regulation. It is achieved by slowing your natural breathing rate from around fifteen breaths per minute to about six. And so I watch a mandala repeatedly bloom and wither on the screen, while the watch haptically tickles my wrist to encourage my inhales.
Tech moved into the wellness sphere with mindfulness apps such as Headspace, which was conceived by former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe and advertising executive Richard Pierson to spread meditation techniques to the masses. Headspace assures its users it won’t “ask you to chant mantras, burn incense or even sit cross legged,” instead marketing mindfulness as a “gym membership for your mind.” In 2014, the Muse headband was released, which measures the electrical activity produced by the brain to help people meditate properly. Users hear a light pitterpatter of rain when their brain is relaxed, building up to a storm to indicate wandering attention. Its competitor Mendi, first released in 2020, measures blood flow and oxygenation in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and is more explicitly gamified. While wearing it, you can visualise your brain activity on a game, using the focus of your mind to make a ball rise across the screen and earn you points. It is supposed to train your brain, “just like any muscle in the body.”
The 2022 Apple Watch Ultra.
But when spiritual practices come to be repackaged in the language of fitness, do they lose their true meaning? In Psychiatry, Colonialism and Indian Civilization: A Historical Appraisal, Shridhar Sharma explains the philosophy underpinning traditional practices such as breathing and meditation. “The ancient Indian emphasised the theory of unity of body and soul,” Sharma writes, “and also explained how to deal with the health and mental health problems in a psychosomatic way.” But the Breathe app – which is set by default to one minute of resonant breathing, and only stretches up to five – seems designed to offer quick relief between corporate meetings. Instead of marrying together body and mind, it encourages us to force our bodies to submit to our minds within a handy timeframe.
The Apple Watch is full of tech solutions to problems caused by tech: mindfulness to aid our waning attention spans; standing reminders so we won’t be endlessly hunched over our computers; breathing exercises to soothe the crippling anxiety brought on by technology itself. Tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls this “solutionism”, the short-sighted idea that technology can solve all of humanity’s many problems. But as Mindful Magazine highlights: “technology can be distracting, not only from where we are in any given moment, but from where we ought to be going.” Perhaps the insecurity about getting meditation “right”, which justifies the use of connected headbands, is mistakenly focused on brain activity instead of intention. “Buddhists differentiate between Right Mindfulness (samma sati) and Wrong Mindfulness (miccha sati),” management expert Ron Purser writes in his book Beyond McMindfulness. “The issue is whether the quality of awareness is characterised by wholesome intentions and positive mental qualities that lead to human flourishing and optimal well-being for others as well as oneself.” By offering its users tools to manage mental and physical wellbeing, the watch seems like a one-stop shop for self care.
The concept of self care was popularised by the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Aisha Harris describes in Slate Magazine how “women and people of colour viewed controlling their health as a corrective to the failures of a white, patriarchal medical system to properly tend to their needs.” Just as mindfulness practices were aimed at stopping our collective suffering, self care was also intrinsically linked to supporting our wider communities. The Black Panther Party, for example, used it as a tool to counter activist burnout through community care, by providing access to food and healthcare. But according to Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, self care became mainstream in the late 1980s and 90s as a means to improve quality of life. As self care was commercialised through expensive yoga classes and face masks, it became more emblematic of the white middle class than political activists. Nowadays, the message I hear the most is that taking care of yourself helps you to become more productive at work.
“We’re always paranoid. We live paranoid,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in 2015 about his company’s work culture. “We always want the very best product. And so if we’re not beating someone else we’re trying to beat the thing that we have currently shipping. Everybody here lives on edge.” I hate to say it, but my heart goes out to the tech bros, because that sounds horrible. Silicon Valley is the epicentre of biohacking – experimenting on one’s body through fasting, ice baths, meal replacements and more in order to reach professional goals and help to extend lifespan. Speaking of the drivers of biohacking to The New Economy, clinical psychologist Niketa Kumar calls out the culture of prioritising professional achievement above other areas of life. “When self-worth depends on our success professionally, we become motivated to go to extreme measures,” she says.
The Apple Watch entrenches the idea that we should handle our traumas privately and seamlessly, and if we fail to do so, well, that’s on us. “The doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment,” Ehrenreich writes in Natural Causes. In the UK, where I am based, the systematic depletion of benefits for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, and recent announcements that the only increase in mental health funding will be spent on getting people back into work, rather than helping the more than 1 million people on waiting lists for specialist mental healthcare, is evidence of this cruel mindset in action.
“Why should the mind want to subdue the body systematically, repeatedly, day after day?” Ehrenreich asks. The answer is simple: to meet life’s incessant demands more easily. The Apple Watch acts as an overbearing project manager coordinating between body and mind, using tools of liberation such as meditation and self care to help us submit to the status quo.
***
While I rage against tracking devices, I am painfully aware that one is currently being used to keep my uncle alive. Rik Kirkland has a loop recorder in his chest monitoring his faulty heart, which he’s previously supplemented with Noom, an app for tracking food and exercise habits. I ask whether having diagnosed health issues heightens his anxiety about missing his step count. “No, I’m too old for that,” he says, age 71. “When you’re younger, you’re afraid of not having lived.”
It begs the question: does the watch inadvertently play on fears of an untimely death? According to analysis by software company BrandTotal, the watch’s target market has stretched over time to concentrate more evenly on all age groups, but the product’s advertising still focuses most heavily on 19- to 54-year olds. In What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking, radical undertaker Rupert Callender describes modern society’s horror of the mundane realities of death. Writing of the traditional funeral industry in a way that is hauntingly applicable to the world at large, he decries “the hijacking of our mortality by corporate bodies that only pay lip-service to the sorrowed and only engage with the void in order to conjure it up to channel our fear and grief into unnecessary purchases.”
It’s worth focusing on who is suffering the most from the commodification of health and wellness, and the overconsumption it fuels. In Who is Wellness For? writer and poet Fariha Róisín explores how wellness culture is built on the wisdom of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, yet excludes their participation by marketing it as a luxury good. For Róisín, true wellness involves prioritising global wellbeing by reducing our environmental impact and redistributing wealth. “I’ve come to understand that wellness isn’t for anyone if it isn’t for everyone,” Róisín writes. “Otherwise it’s a paradox.”
True wellness also involves decolonising healing practices by embedding them in their histories and appreciating their true meaning. “The action of meditation is to reach a state of consciousness that’s outside your connection to mortality,” Róisín says. “It’s about the beyond.” According to some Silicon Valley leaders, however, all death is untimely and mortality is yet another problem to be fixed. The start-up Nectome, for example, promises to preserve its clients’ brains to upload onto computers in the future. “For Nectome’s procedure to work, it’s essential that the brain be fresh,” Antonio Regalado writes in MIT Technology Review. “Its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anaesthesia.)”
While wellness practices rooted in spirituality can provide a relationship with the divine and a greater acceptance of death, wellness practices powered by technology point toward a defiance of death itself. But death can be instructive about how to live. It orients us towards what is important, such as love and connection, and away from what is only fleetingly meaningful, such as the relentless accumulation of money and objects. Focusing on love and connection, incidentally, is a wonderful way to raise one’s HRV.
At the peak of my watch-induced anxiety, I was getting ready for a Halloween party. Having read that alcohol intake and an irregular sleep pattern both lower your HRV, I suddenly felt hesitant about going. Maybe the sensible thing to do would be to soberly contemplate my imminent demise and hope for an early night, I thought to myself as I walked to the corner shop.
“Hello princess! How are you?” Ozzy the shopkeeper asked, with genuine concern. “I haven’t seen you for a while and I’ve been wondering how you were doing.” I immediately felt my body start to exhale, and the smile I offered was sincere. Connection is medicine; even someone on the periphery of my life expressing care for me is profoundly regulating.
Our autonomic nervous system is influenced by the emotions of the people around us – it picks up on furrowed brows and rigid necks as well as curved lips and wrinkled eyes as signals that either stress or relax us. “Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms,” van der Kolk explains. “Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe.” Expanding on the ways in which we influence each other, Gaitán Johannesson conceptualises all of humanity and the planet as one expansive nervous system. “Everything an individual consumes[...] gains significance when you realise – as in, make emotionally real – the connection between your way of life and the risk of societal collapse,” she writes. “You do not end with your physical boundaries. Your nerves, then, seem to stretch beyond what is visibly yours.”
So no, I don’t hate my body. Its limitations aren’t a betrayal; they are an understandable reaction to an unreasonable world. But I do hate the watch, for perpetuating a society that doesn’t allow us to ail, fail, and recover.
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown
Photography courtesy of Apple
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.