Tracker-Free Days

It’s time to embrace tracker-free days. Take off your activity tracker, GPS watch, sleep monitor, the baby stalker, and every other device and get your body back. (Breathe, it’s going to be okay.)

We are obsessed with data. We can now track how many times we rolled over in the night, how many steps we took, the number of times our heart beat on our five mile run, how many times we changed the baby’s diaper (and what we found inside it).

I’m all on board – for the most part. I love being able to dig into my run and see where I faltered or where I did better than yesterday. My watch tells me how long I should recover before my next workout. It reminds me to move throughout the day, not just during my workout.

But it starts to be too much.

Instead of being something that motivates me to push myself a little harder or move a little more, it becomes all-consuming.

It’s so easy to get lost in the data and forget what really matters. I used to get up from my desk and walk around for a bit because my body felt like it needed to move, not because a device buzzed and told me to. I didn’t have to check my app to know if I got a good night’s rest, I could tell from how I felt when my alarm went off and if I made it through the afternoon with wishing I could take a nap.

Tracker-free days break the obsession – and the blindness. When I leave my watch at home I am reminded to listen to myself. I know my body best. The less I listen to it, the harder it gets to hear. The more I rely on my watch, the less I really know.

At least once a week I take a tracker-free day to break the cycle and tune back in to what my body’s saying.

If you’ve ever said:

“I can’t believe I am wasting all of these steps! Maybe I should go home and get my tracker.”

“Hold on, I just need four more laps around the kitchen until I get to 10,000 steps.”

“I stopped running because I couldn’t figure out my pace. My watch kept losing its signal!”

You might just want to try it too.