Wearing your heart on your sleeve: tracking your stress with wearable devices
How has stress during your work day impacted your overall health? How sure are you of your answer?
After 5+ years of championing work-life balance as a federal employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I believed that I had a handle on work-related stress and felt effective at containing its negative health impacts…then came a global pandemic. In a matter of weeks, years of carefully constructed boundaries had crumbled and my workload had doubled. In the moment, I felt invigorated by the focus on my work and its suddenly increased importance. Little did I know that I was paving the way for burnout and my eventual departure from public service.
Fast forward — about one year and a career change later, to be precise — and I found myself beginning to evaluate the utility of wearables’ datastreams to better characterize the health and wellness of the wearer. Initially, this began from an academic perspective by digging into health science research but quickly turned into a personal one after purchasing my own wearable device (an Apple Watch series 6 back then, but more recently the Oura Ring).
While I was no longer a high strung CDC employee, and was happily building out the portfolio of the data science team at League, it became clear that I had residual health effects from the strain of that period of my life. For example, while working for Uncle Sam, I was spending more than half of my working hours with my heart beating more than 100 times a minute (>100bpm). Put another way, I was spending more than half of my working hours with an abnormal heart rhythm called tachycardia. Tachycardia-associated symptoms can be scary and include things which might be worth having a medical professional evaluate, such as lightheadedness, chest pain and heart palpitations.
I am happy to report that, since joining League, the average fraction of my day that I spend tachycardic (>100bpm) has dropped from 50–70% to around 5–8% (basically, an order of magnitude reduction!). As one might expect, that reduction in heart rate can be observed during every waking hour of the day when averaged by quarter…not just the working hours!
Here at League, the data science team is working to identify insights into health trends through the use of wearable technology. Once identified, we’ll pair those insights with appropriate content to drive positive health outcomes. Effectively, we want to package up my anecdotal experience of observing a concerning trend and then surface recommendations to help the member adopt healthier behaviors. We want to make understanding these data trends accessible for everyone so they can better observe and react early.
Ultimately, had I been wearing a fitness tracker and been paying attention to the data, I believe that I would have recognized the changes in my heart rate that would have negative impacts on my health. Alas, I was not and succumbed to burnout before moving on from the CDC and eventually joining League as the manager of the data science team.
Not only am I happy to no longer experience the sustained stress that I was, but I’m excited for the opportunities our team has to help people like me through data science!
