Health Tech, Embodiment, & Analog Wellness

In trying to optimize ourselves, we have tethered ourselves to tech and lost felt sense along the way.

In a box, that used to be a drawer, that turned into shelves in my closet, sit numerous tech and wellness wearables that I have been sent or purchased over the last decade. This box now also includes outdated headphones, meditation balls, battery packs, and cords that are no longer compatible or products that only worked with apps that did not carry over to new operating systems, rendering their use impossible without outdated software.

Sex toys that won robotics awards, three VR headsets, and multiple microcurrent skin devices are packaged in a box next to these items.

Tech has always seemed like the promise of a better future, and for many of us, the promise of a healthier, happier, more beautiful, and well-managed, optimized life.

In August 2022, Oura ring partnered with Natural Cycles and did a massive PR and social media marketing campaign to get girls and women off birth control methods and to use the Oura ring.

Oura ring has also partnered with American Express to offset the costs of the health tech wearable (that requires a subscription to even be used), all while data privacy is questionable, and people wonder about the true value of the subscription.

This is not by mistake.

I could see this propaganda coming a mile away. But in the land of fear mongering, and the righteousness of health (a status symbol and sometimes not obtainable with the basic American way of living…also all by design...) it is easy for us consumers to fall into the proposed perils of toxins, mistrust of science, and the false promises of optimal health all while our health data is being mined (and a war on women and our bodies is rapidly increasing in America.)

It is a story as old as marketing time, especially with female consumers, that it is not sex that sells, but fear. Fear sells. Your insecurities, worries, and fears are needed for capitalism.

The control of women and women’s bodies is now taking on a more sinister nature, but going about it through the guise of wellness seems to be working.

As a wellness professional, who has long tracked trends and watched the now trillion-dollar wellness industry unfold, I am certainly concerned about the surveillance state (why are we putting delicate health information into ChatGPT?) and aggressive data aggregation almost all these health tech platforms and wearables collect, but I am more so concerned about how these very wearables take us even further away from ourselves and our bodies and the very lives that make us human.

On top of the disconnection created by the reliance on an app or data collection, wearables can also create stress, induce worry, or decrease mental well-being.

We have become connected to tech and deeply disconnected from our bodies and ourselves.

I recently read a comment about the Oura ring, and a woman wrote – I don’t even have to think about how I slept when my boyfriend asks me. I can just look at the app!

Not only are we now outsourcing thinking about how we slept, we are also completely detached from the felt sense of what sleep might have felt like. How do you feel? Do you know how you feel?

Even before wearables, I saw firsthand how much we were disconnected from our bodies. Teaching yoga and being a personal trainer, I would ask someone the level of difficulty or how something physical felt for them to be met with an “I don’t know.”

And I genuinely believe….many don’t know.

Being able to check in with our bodies takes being able to listen to them.

Before wearables, we were already a checked-out and numb society, kept distracted by noise, media, chaos, unrest, and the manufactured drama on our TVs, phones, and computer screens.

Embodiment is hard enough in a modern world.

First, a quick refresher on embodiment. It’s common to think embodiment is just to be in the body, yet it is more akin to being aligned with the body, attuned to the body, and able to notice the body through the senses.

Here is an excerpt from my book (TBD on publishing, but stay tuned)

We live in a world that separates us from our bodies. To be grounded in our bodies, requires awareness and attunement. Though I believe embodiment is our truest nature, modern society has not been structured to support embodiment. With a workday set on hours and not bodily cues, there are values placed on stress, busyness, and rest becomes a reward, not a necessity. I often say, how can we live, laugh love in these conditions? Combine all of this with the ways bodies have become a commodity or a space to control, manipulate, and alter; it’s no wonder many of us struggle with embodiment. Embodiment allows us to be with the intelligence of the body, which fuels more intuition, presence, inner knowing, space for pleasure, and creates a deeper connection to the earth, to nature, and to the experience of living as a whole. Embodiment is a way of bringing all parts of the body into alignment.

Worse yet, health data can create fixation, rumination, obsessive habits, and overall anxiety.

When wearables gamify data, we get caught in loops of self-surveillance and a fixation on hitting certain numbers or measures, assigning morality to our own numbers.

Miss your 10K steps measure, and your mood can shift. Monitoring sleep scores (which are not the most accurate) can affect how we think we feel. Wearables can actually make us feel worse, not better. The aim of getting “better” scores or results may lead us to punishing ourselves, in thought and in action.

Obsessive tendencies can show up in being overly conscious of data that is variable and changes, such as our pulse, which can vary. A fixation on numbers and understanding them can lead to anxiety, irritation, worry, and a preoccupation with your personal data. For those already prone to anxiety, this compounds quickly. There is a particular cruelty in the image of someone opening ChatGPT to process fears triggered by data generated by another device, using one machine to manage the anxiety created by another, all while drifting further from the felt sense underneath it all.

It is not that I don’t think wearables have their place. I know my own family members who rely on wearables for managing heart rate, mapping heart irregularities, and being able to stay ahead of potentially dangerous heart rate changes such as AFIB.

Wellness tech is a tool, an accessory that isn’t necessary, nor is it the right fit for everyone.

A fixation on needing to know more about our bodies and trying to optimize these bodies has gained popularity, but it is simply too much.

There is no moral superiority in tracking more or knowing more about one’s health data or having the business of being alive optimized.

Sure, someone will say, this or that wearable alerted me to an illness before I felt sick, or, recently, I saw a video of a woman who went to urgent care when alerted by a wearable reading to make sure to catch something early.

This false sense of control is an issue in many areas of life. Also, belief is a powerful thing…if you begin to believe oneself sick after seeing your wearable data, how do you actually feel? You won’t know anymore, as how you feel is now being influenced, or maybe you will know, but it will become harder to parse out what is true felt sense and what you and your body actually feel vs what you’re being told you feel.

I also worry deeply about the implications of such data collection and who has access to such sensitive data. So often, we forget we are cogs in the machine of capitalism, and data is king.

Tech is now embedded in every area of our lives, but moving away from the reliance on health tech or wearables will create more space – mental space, actual space in the world of time we take back for ourselves, and psychological space from judgmental thoughts about our bodies, health, and morality or value. It will also decrease interruptions in your life and, hopefully, give you more time to find your way back to your own body, felt sense, and intuition.

What is Analog Wellness?

I see analog wellness as any form of managing health and wellness that doesn’t require a device, a phone, or an app. It does not require social media, it does not require a computer, there is nothing to charge, wear, update, or sync to input.

Workouts, periods, and other personal data can be kept in notebooks. Meals can simply be enjoyed rather than tracked. Meditations can be music or the sound of the world around us, or the noticing of our own breath. Walking, running, or hiking can be tracked by natural landmarks or by how we feel in our bodies.

I am aware it takes more space, there are more things to carry, and it’s not as easy to quickly aggregate data over long spans of time. Yes, tech has gifted us a few things, and seeing patterns over time we do not have to manually compute is one of them….

But is manually looking at your own data that bad?

For decades, people found ways to more quickly look at their own data…color notes, highlighters, specific stickers or codes in a notebook, paper with different sections or lines.

Furthermore, do we even need all this data about ourselves?

We see ourselves more than ever with social media apps, and with wearables, we know more about our bodies in ways we never have, yet we are drifting further and further away from the very bodies we are tracking, and the feelings we have always had embedded in ourselves that tell us all we need to know.

An analog lifestyle is one of intention and a deeper intimacy with living. We become more connected to ourselves when we are not outsourcing our experience or running our data to interpret how we feel.

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Return to your intuition. Learn to listen to your body.

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Even I cannot be fully analog. I like to keep my workouts in my phone app, but if I’m growing tired of having to type on a little keyboard and scroll with my face in my phone to see my workouts and miss the index cards I used for years with my workouts written on them.

It is February 2026, and I use no fitness trackers or health wearables. I love my meditation app, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice the days in a row I’ve meditated using this app, as my meditations are not always in the app. I use my notes app consistently as a writer, but my writing is scattered between multiple notebooks and the app.

However, embodiment has been a companion for years through my own healing and a constant in my work.

I know my heart rate by feel. After checking it a few times against cardio machines over the years, it’s easy to know when it shifts from 145 bm to 151 bpm. I know by how I am breathing and the exertion needed. It is not even aligned with a certain speed or pace, but more so with how my body feels at any given moment in exercise.

But I’ll be honest, I do not track my heart rate during exercise. I do not think about zone 2 cardio vs simply moving at a moderately challenging pace. I do not track anything at rest. I don’t track sleep and care more about how I feel upon waking, which is generally more connected to pillow quality, room temperature, and what time my neighbor starts walking before work. When I hear steps, it’s 7:45 am, and it's time to turn up my sound machine.

My life is not better or worse knowing how many steps I take a day, or what quality my sleep is. Sure, walking and sleep usually make me feel better, but I can assess how I feel as a metric to inform my choices. I can tune into my body that holds all the answers. I appreciate the intimacy I have with my body and how it feels inside and out.

It has been said we are drowning in information but starving for knowledge*. In the same way, we are saturated with and consumed by health data and optimization culture. Yet, we do not actually feel any better, and we continue to lose connection with our body and its senses – the very things that make us human. In that way, we lose touch with our humanity and that of others.

Tech promised ease, and yet we are dying to be free.

As Mary Oliver wrote in her poem Wild Geese,

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Put down the wearables and health tech. Stop treating your body like a machine, made of numbers, sleep scores, and step counts. Reframe the belief that you or your body is a project to be fixed.

Protect the sacredness of your body and the precious data that big tech wants to own and use to make more money. Remember who your body belongs to, and as I have always said, keep coming home to yourself.

* Adapted from the quote, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.” Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson.