How (Not) to Use a Fitness Tracker

When Susan Dominus's devotion to her Fitbit turned the corner into obsession, she realized she needed to rethink her bond with it to save her sanity and her shins.

Fitbit obsession
James Worrell/Studio D

I did not look at the time; I had to write one more email; I could not find my wallet. And I was quite possibly going to miss my train.

For all of those things, I blame myself.

For what happened next, however, I choose to blame my Fitbit—a fitness tracking device I had started wearing on my wrist, one that was keeping track of the number of steps I took each day.

My plan, before I realized I was late, had been to stroll from my home outside New York City to the train station a mile away, racking up a precious portion of the 20,000 steps I had set for myself as a daily goal. But once it got late, I thought I might have to drive instead, because I needed to catch that train for a meeting in the city.

But somehow, I could not make myself get in the car. Since I had started wearing my Fitbit, I had soured on driving. What did I ever get out of driving? When I drove, things went down—my gas tank, my mood. When I walked, things went up! I accumulated steps, which made me feel cheerful and productive, even if I had not accomplished anything more impressive than putting one foot in front of the other for 20 minutes without falling on my face.

So I came up with what, at the time, seemed like a better idea: I would run to the train, even though I was already dressed for an appointment in the city; even though, more significantly, I was wearing some less than perfectly comfortable flats.

I had invested in a Fitbit, in the first place, to try to lose some weight by moving my body more often. My goal was not a smaller jeans size (though that would be nice too); it was more that I wanted to continue my lifelong love of running a few times a week, but with slightly less risk of injury. With every pound I lost, someone once told me, I would take pressure off my knees, which seemed crucial, as they had started making strange crunching noises, and sometimes hurt when I walked down stairs. Enter Fitbit: I would track my calories, track my steps, I would be motivated to walk more, and voil?, I would lose a few pounds and running would be easier.

I was motivated all right. Even before the day I was late for the train, the tidy innocuous band I wore loosely around my wrist had started to exert some kind of death grip on my thoughts. Fitbit suggests starting with a daily goal of 10,000 steps. That seemed too easy, so I upped it to 20,000. I was walking to the library where I was working, and walking home. When I felt I was in need of a boost, I walked around the library. My work—writing—was hard, its value wholly subjective. Walking was easy, its value celebrated by my Fitbit, which buzzed and whirred when I reached my 20,000 steps. It let me know how much it cared.

Susan at home in New York (sitting down for once).
Jesse Ditmar/Redux

And so, on that day I was late, I ran all the way to the train, feet slapping the sidewalk, an 18-minute walk condensed into an 11-minute jog-run (13,348 steps!). I was sweaty, I was disheveled, I was thrilled.

Until I sat on the train. My shins on both legs started to hurt: It felt as if the flesh was pulling away from the bone. I would not think about that, I decided. I was fine. I arrived in the city, walked 25 blocks to a lunch (17,000 steps!), and afterward, I walked another 25 blocks back to the train station. By then I was slowing down; I was feeling twinges of pain, and also regret.

Then I got on the train. My shins were speaking to me again, and this time I could hear what they were saying: You are an idiot. You have lost control of your senses. You have become a Fitbit nitwit. I arrived at my home train station, but not having brought a car with me, I had little choice but to walk home—slowly, wearily home. What had taken me 11 minutes to jog that morning was now a 25-minute slog.

I had a lot of time to think about how much the Fitbit had taken over my life when I woke up at 3 in the morning, aching from the severity of what I knew, from past experience, were shin splints. My mind is always whirring with schedules, deadlines, worries; on top of that, I realized, I had added a compulsive fretting about whatever number was showing up on my wrist. Not only would I not be able to run for several weeks while I rested my shins and did strengthening exercises; I was also going to have to lay off any heavy walking. So much for my brilliant weight-loss plan.

What exactly had come over me? I decided to ask a friend who knows pretty much everything, but also conveniently happens to specialize in studying people with compulsive behavior around exercise and dieting. "Your rewards system got hijacked," said that friend, Joanna Steinglass, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. She explained that getting a clear reward every so often over the course of a day is particularly effective in shaping someone's behavior—in fact so effective that it can overrun the quest for more general, long-term rewards, like spending time with a loved one. Certain vulnerable people can find themselves quickly at the mercy of less-than-ideal goals. And they (meaning I) can form habits that can drive them to disaster.

In my case, with the disaster still throbbing in my legs, it was relatively simple to reset my rewards system: I took off my Fitbit and stuck it in a drawer. Three weeks and many meditative leg-strengthening exercises later, I was ready to start walking again. I had made peace with my Fitbit and forgiven its manipulative, compulsion-feeding behavior.

Yes, I know I need to take some responsibility: The Fitbit did not tell me to up my daily goal to 20,000 steps. It did not tell me to check my tracking page 17 times a day. It was there for me, but I made it my everything; had we been in a relationship, Fitbit would have begged me for a little more space (or probably just texted me that it was going on vacation for some indeterminate time, but that maybe we could hang when it got back).

While I didn't go so far as to start wearing the Fitbit again, I was still grateful for much of what it had taught me. Instead of driving my children to soccer practice less than a mile away, we had started walking, and would never go back. In general, if we could walk to our destination easily instead of driving to it, we would—the Fitbit had changed not just my behavior, but my family culture, much for the better.

The key, I realized, is finding some happy balance between reevaluating old habits (sitting, driving) and a mindless devotion to counting and competing. There is something empty about the pleasure that comes from taking the easy way out. But depending on external signs of one's worth—whether it's the buzzing of a piece of plastic strapped to your wrist or a slew of "likes" on a Facebook posting—is just as hollow. It's all too easy to confuse the quantifiable with the worthwhile. Balance, contemplation, generosity: If only someone would come up with an electronic wrist tracker for those elusive goals.

Then again, gods of technology—please don't.

"Had we been in a relationship, Fitbit would have begged me for a little more space."

Watching steps add up is so fun! Until it's all you want to do…

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