What first came to mind when you read the title of this article? Most of you likely thought about Fitbit, followed by Apple Watch and Garmin, given these are the fitness tracker brands that Americans are most familiar with. Beyond brand names, many of you likely considered which health metrics these fitness trackers can measure, including the number of steps you take in a day; the quality and amount of sleep you obtain each night; your real-time heart rate and daily heart rate variability; as well as the number of minutes you are active each day. In truth, these commercial fitness trackers can tell us a lot of information about our health and wellness – all from the comfort of our wrists!

Given the long-term consequences of unregulated emotional responses to minor daily stressors are well-established, stress-and-coping researchers have begun incorporating continuous physiological data into their study designs by asking participants to wear various commercial fitness trackers. Real-time health metrics from these commercial fitness trackers can provide several important insights into individuals’ daily stressors and emotion regulation in relation to their health, including:

• Heart Rate. When you experience stress, your body immediately releases catecholamines (i.e., Epinephrine, Norepinephrine), which powerfully stimulate your cardiovascular system. This increases blood flow, which efficiently delivers oxygen and nutrients to your heart, brain, and skeletal muscles. Information about daily heart rate obtained through fitness trackers, paired with self-reported information on the types of daily stressors you experience, as well as the strategies you use to regulate your stress, can offer important insights into the most effective strategies for regulating responses to specific daily stressors.

• Heart Rate Variability. Heart rate variability refers to the natural shifts in the time intervals between your heartbeats. Although this may initially sound less important than heart rate, heart rate variability tells a story about how effectively your body is adapting to the demands of your environment. Greater heart rate variability is indicative of greater resilience, and unregulated stress can lead to lower heart rate variability. Thus, collecting information on your daily heart rate variability via fitness trackers, paired with self-reported information about your experienced stressors and emotion regulation strategies, can teach us more about psychophysiological resilience and how to foster it.

• Step Count and Daily Active Minutes. Exercise helps us regulate our responses to daily stressors. The problem stress-and-coping researchers face with measuring exercise in daily life, however, is that people do not always know the exact amount or intensity of the exercise they got throughout the day! Cue fitness trackers, which passively collect information on the number of steps, as well as active zone minutes, that people get throughout the day! This information enables researchers to precisely assess the relations among daily exercise, stress, and emotions as they relate to long-term health and well-being.

• Quantity and Quality of Sleep. Similarly to exercise, sleep can also help us regulate our daily stress responses. Although researchers can ask participants how long they slept each night, as well as whether they felt they slept well, commercial fitness trackers objectively provide not only the amount of time people slept each night, but also the amount of time people spent in various sleep stages. With these data, researchers will be able to assess not only the effects of stress on the objective amount of sleep individuals get, but also the amount of time in the various sleep stages (and vice-versa!).

Interested in learning more about how stress can affect your health? Check out one of my favorite books: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky, Ph.D.