My Health Tracker Knows When I’m Overstimulated

It’s a scene every parent has watched play out. For whatever reason, your kid who normally bounces into school happy as can be is just not wanting to detach from you one morning. My son is 3, and he usually bops into pre-K with his oversized backpack on, all smiles, no problem. But on this particular morning, he’s a wreck – tears and snot streaming, cheeks beaming red, the works. He bravely shuffles in before stopping a few yards inside his school’s gates, where parents can’t enter, crying for me instead of walking around the corner to his classroom.

In a matter of seconds, I feel my anxiety ratchet up and my brain runs through the possibilities: Will I be blacklisted from school grounds if I break protocol and run through the gates to hug him again? I’m about to say f*ck it and step inside when my purple-haired savior — my kid’s kind-hearted music teacher — takes him by the hand. Together they wave and head around the corner, where she gives me a big thumbs up before disappearing from view. My fight-or-flight state eases up. I walk back to my car.

Later that night, I scroll through my WHOOP app to see what’s what. My husband and I had some FSA money left over this year that wouldn’t roll over, so we each got ourselves a fitness tracker from the brand – a plain looking black wristband, basically — and I’m still figuring out how it works. I was recently diagnosed with hypermobility spectrum disorder and fibromyalgia, and I have a ton of new habits, like physical therapy exercises, to do each day. Maybe this gizmo could help me track them and see what helps the most over time, I thought. But it’s the note at the top of my home screen now that snags my attention: “You spent 15 minutes in the high stress zone today outside of exercise.”

I tap for more info, and the little line graph of my stress score throughout the day has a few huge peaks jutting up against the very top of the chart. When I check the timestamps, I realize one of them was during school dropoff. That heart-pounding, buzzing-in-my-ears moment of seeing my son beet-red and sobbing just out of reach really did set me on edge physiologically. (My fitness tracker bases your stress score on your usual heart rate variability compared to your real-time heart rate, or so it claims.)

In a phase of life where I’m learning to be gentler with myself, that’s exactly what I need.

Then I scroll to the right and see that two more peaks happened in the evening. They both fell at times when I felt my overstimulation beginning to boil over into rage. Nothing unusual happened, just that teeth-clenching buildup of tension you feel when your toddler is clamorously dragging a pirate ship toy through the house and whining “Mommyyyyy?” while your dog claws at the back door to be let in and the chickpea pasta no one wants starts to boil over on the stove. All needs met and a few deep breaths brought the graph back down to normal.

Not only does my fitness tracker notice these daily parenting stressors — moments that otherwise I might discount — but it actually gives them weight. All stress in your day gets factored into your daily “strain,” an amalgam of all the ways you exerted yourself that day, from doing household tasks, exercising, and your emotional stress too. And this, for me, has been so stupidly validating. It shows that those daily parenting moments that twist me up in knots aren’t just an emotional experience, but a visceral one too. And it adds a little context to those days I don’t feel like I really did anything, but still find myself splayed out on the couch at 8 p.m. completely exhausted.

I used to despise the idea of health trackers. As a new mom and someone who has always loved working out, I didn’t need to be reminded of my health and fitness goals, I needed the free time to be able to achieve them. But now, I kind of love my little wristband. No one else is there at the rough dropoff to notice how much it sucked. It did though, and at the end of the day, it encouraged me to take it easy, do something for my recovery, and maybe go to bed a few minutes early. Instead of pushing me to get up or work harder, it reminds me to prioritize rest. In a phase of life where I’m learning to be gentler with myself, that’s exactly what I need.