The scores lighting up our wrists aren't measuring what most of us think they're measuring. When you check your smartwatch and see that your stress level spiked, you might assume the device somehow detected your anxiety about some direct stimulus, like a difficult conversation or frustrating traffic. But that's not totally accurate.
"Part of the discrepancy can be explained by different definitions of how stress is conceptualized," says Eiko Fried, who co-authored a 2025 study that found smartwatch stress measures did not align with self-reported stress scores for most individuals. The way most people understand the term "stressed"—as in "I was really stressed today!"—isn't the way Garmin defines its stress score, which measures physiological stress. So, your watch is not necessarily telling you how stressed you feel, just how your nervous system is behaving. "Such elevated activity can come from various sources," says Fried, "including many we would not typically consider a stressful experience."
The oversimplification becomes even more problematic when we consider that most stress algorithms fail to account for sex-specific physiology, particularly the menstrual cycle. Because hormonal fluctuations can meaningfully alter heart rate, heart rate variability, and temperature, "a perfectly healthy physiological shift can be interpreted by a wearable as 'high stress,'" says Emile Radyte, CEO at Samphire Neuroscience. This means women are more likely to receive misleading stress alerts for standard human biology, which can be confusing at best and anxiety-provoking at worst.
Can you trust your "stress score" at all?
"When you have problems with your heart, your cardiologist may ask you to wear a chest-worn device for a few days to monitor your heart rate and heart rate variability. This is a highly accurate medical-grade device," Fried says. "Your doctor will not ask you to wear a smartwatch, because there are many issues that make wrist-worn measurement less reliable. This affects in particular heart rate variability, for which we need highly accurate measurements."
So is your wearable useless? Of course not. My critique here isn't that wearables have no value—it's just that the value they provide is being misrepresented. Your smartwatch's "stress score" claims to tell you far more than the science really supports. And in some cases, a less-than-ideal score may even increase stress, rather than help people understand what their body is responding to. The great irony of the wellness industry persists.
The bottom line
This distinction doesn't make the data useless, but it should make you a more informed consumer. It'd be nice if companies could stop using the word "stress" for what they're actually measuring—perhaps "physiological arousal" or "autonomic nervous system activity," which would be more accurate, but less marketable, so I'm not holding my breath. (Although, if I did, I'm sure my stress score would skyrocket.)
A device marketed to help you manage stress may actually create more of it by generating anxiety-inducing alerts about normal physiological variation that it misinterprets as distress. The sooner we're honest about that gap, the sooner these devices can actually help us, rather than selling us a quantified illusion of self-knowledge they don't really have.
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