Can you believe there was a time that I would blog every single day? Without a break? And I’d do it without any desire for comments or page views or validation of any sort. This thought struck me so deeply earlier today when something happened. My smartwatch stopped pairing with my phone.

Okay, bear with me as I backtrack a little and share what I mean.

A few weeks ago, I bought a brand-new smartwatch. There was nothing wrong with the old one that I had. It’s just that I had resumed swimming after many months and I was looking for a watch that I could use while swimming. Why, you ask? Well, to calculate how much I swam, of course. The irony is that while the watch IS water-resistant, it turned out that there was no feature in the watch to actually track swimming as a form of exercise. Apparently, that only comes as an inbuilt feature with water-proof watches, not water-resistant ones. I know, right?

Anyway, I shrugged and decided to adapt to the new watch. It’s all in the learning, after all. And it was fairly easy too. Soon, I was tracking my step count, managing a decent walking streak and breaking records every few days. But, you know that thing about Murphy’s law. Yep! The watch would stop pairing with my smartphone at random times! Net result? All of that data would get reset and I’d be back to square one. I was getting annoyed and then it hit me.

Why was I getting obsessive about a device that I had strapped onto my wrist?

Surely fitness is about more than streaks and step counts!

So here’s the epiphany that came to me. A watch is a watch is a watch, until it starts becoming more than that! It was the wake up call that I needed to learn to let go of my addiction to step counts.

And the best part is, that this came around the same time that I read this piece : Do Fitness Influencers on Social Media really Inspire us?

After leaving Instagram two years ago, I came back to the platform in May this year. One main reason was that my daughter (who was moving away to another city for her higher studies) had finally gotten an Instagram account of her own. This was my way of staying in touch with her. But, slowly, the lure of posting on social media came back without my realising it.

So eager was I to share my learnings from the last two years that I was posting everyday! I honestly didn’t care about like counts or comments, but there was this insidious grip of the platform that came back to me. Before I knew it, my gadget time had crept back up. While I was managing to stay under 1 hour of phone time for the better part of two years, it was now inching back up to 3 hours per day.

Today’s smartwatch incident reminded me that my value didn’t lie in social media posting or even sharing my updates on a platform such as that one. Why was I so hung up on sharing updates anyway? What was the point of it all? Whom was I trying to impress or worse, ‘inspire’, with my fitness goals and achievements?

I thought back to my own time on social media, two years ago. I don’t recall ever sticking with a fitness regimen just because I saw someone else share their daily step counts. Change happened and stayed consistent only when I took the decision to take autonomy of my health and wellness. Gadgets and smartwatches had nothing to do with it.

They say everything happens for a reason. I don’t blame myself for falling for the smartwatch lure of step counts and tracking. After all, if it weren’t for the frustration I felt about the futility of it all, I wouldn’t have got this epiphany 🙂

Here’s to more such lessons, every single day.