My Smartwatch Rated Every Meeting I Had For A Month. It Ruined My Ability To Lie To Myself.

This also was not the intention, to be honest, it just sort of happened.

I got a new watch for my birthday, the kind that tells you your heart rate variability and what your little stress score is throughout the day, and mostly I was just interested in the sleep information.

I did not have work in mind at all when I first set it up.

Then a few days in, I noticed it spiked each day at the same time.

The stress number consistently followed the same curve each day at precisely the same time.

I checked my calendar out of sheer curiosity and in almost every case this Spike coincided with a recurring meeting.

Not a meeting I'd ever have described as stressful if I had ever directly been asked.

They would have described it as fine.

Long, perhaps.

A little dull perhaps.

Not dramatic.

It transpired that my body disagreed vehemently and had been disagreeing vehemently with that same meeting for months now without my knowledge whatsoever

The meeting I could have sworn was fine.

It is a Tuseday check-in, forty five minutes, it has been running now for about a year and a half.

Nothing on the face of it which screams stressful.

It's small, I know the people concerned well, nothing high-stakes riding on it.

But blunt the watch was about it in a way that I had failed to be on my own for months.

Every Tuesday, without fail, the score started to rise about ten minutes before the meeting actually began, peaked during the meeting itself and then carried on rising for almost an hour after it ended.

Not another meeting all week long, that was similar in time span, similar in format, had any effect on my levels at all.

Only that Tuesday meeting.

Every Tuesday morning.

Without fail.

It actually took a long time and something akin to a ridiculous level of contemplation to get to the bottom of why the stress score spiked so dramatically during that particular meeting because, when all is said and done, I had previously categorized it for so long as "fine", that I really did not even stop to reconsider it any more.

However, the long and the short of it is that I eventually put it down to a single individual in the group who tends to have a habit of being a little pointed with follow up questions that they say more often than not appear to be a little bit like an attack to my anxious systems despite not actually appearing that way to most people.

I had completely moved on and my body clearly had not.

The meetings that I actively dreaded barely registered.

This really sent a spanner in the works for me.

One monthly meeting that I had actively designated as 'the stressful one', the one where I'd really buckle down before it and feel a bit nervy going into it.

The watch score barely reacted even with this one; it just went up very briefly at the very start, returned to baseline and I did not notice anything else during it all week.

I think the truth of the situation is that stress and dread are different.

The meeting with the senior leadership was an uncomfortable one in the extreme, in its own way, that I had subconsciously tried to overcome by actively thinking about it, and perhaps as a result, it just wasn't a problem to me in the same way and, because the physical reaction in no way mirrored my thoughts on the matter I had been under the impression that I had not only successfully battled the negative feelings I associated with the meeting but indeed won against them.

In fact the body's reaction has been so little compared to others perhaps, that it has barely moved since.

The recovery time I had earmarked wasn't really anything of the sort.

I then wanted to check what happened between all the meetings and found that the 15 minute gaps that I had ear-marked for my own recovery had not worked whatsoever.

The levels remained elevated through most of the gaps in between meetings.

As I discovered this, however, I realised what I'd actually been doing to "recover" in those gaps: checking Slack, opening and closing emails, checking that I was ready for the next meeting.

In essence, what I had identified as "rest" was anything but.

It was simply a quieter form of the workday which I was convincing myself was indeed "rest" but is clear from the watch that that was anything but the case.

The only gaps that actually saw the level recover were ones where I had actively disengaged with the system and left the workspace for a few minutes, and just to make myself coffee or simply stood and stared out of the window or walked down another level as opposed to opening my laptop.

It was simply the act of walking away from the desk that has in some way shown that it is doing something the brain has failed to do; I think this is due to my mind's desire to stay and just do what is there to be done in the knowledge it will only affect me in a negative way during the meetings/calls.

The lasting effects of a month's worth of data.

Have I stopped going to the Tuesday meeting?

No.

Is that something within my control?

Probably not really and actually; when I really examine the facts the meeting itself is probably fine in the abstract.

However I have changed how I prepare myself and what I want to achieve from that meeting going in and this seems to have been working so far, according to the watch at any rate, for the past few weeks.

What the lasting effect is that I have definitely stopped filling these gaps and actually I'll leave the desk and 'walk away' for a few minutes, and that's something I have noticed working with the data after about a week.

The most pertinent information that has come from all this, however is how wrong I was about the things that bothered me; I would have told you for certain which meetings stress me out and that I am clearly wrong about at least some of them as and indeed have been for over a year and the only reasons why I did not find this out until now was down to the fact that my mind was making a joke of my thoughts by believing these feelings were stress but the watch disagrees and does not consider them to be so at all.

Worth giving it a try; the watch data is certainly interesting.