Her Apple Watch Became Handcuffs: Woman ‘Breaks Up’ with Watch After Battling Exercise Addiction

One of the selling points of an Apple Watch is its ability to monitor your health and fitness – you can use it to count your steps throughout the day, track how many calories you burn, and much more. It can motivate you to adopt a healthy lifestyle, but this non-stop tracking can be a prison for some.

The Apple Watch uses a ring-based system to represent the progress towards your daily exercise goal. There are three rings: red for Move, green for Exercise, and blue for Stand. From the Apple health app to the Fitness+ service, the emphasis always is on closing these rings.

The mantra to close your rings starts right on Apple’s website, where the company exclaims that you have three rings and one goal, and that is to “close them every day.” Apple then adds that closing the circles is so simple and fun “that you’ll want to do it all the time.”

For some people, this near-constant push to close their rings every day can actually damage their health rather than be beneficial.

The downward spiral was described recently by The Mighty author, Gabrielle Ferrara, who chronicled her ordeal in a recent post. Like most people, Ferrara loved her Apple Watch, wearing it all the time for more than two years. During this time, her joy quickly descends into torment as the need to close her rings took over her life.

Closing her rings became her addiction and her “drug of choice.”

My “drug of choice” was closing my rings. It was feeling the haptic vibration on my wrist, providing me with the positive reinforcement and the surge of happy chemicals that I craved. It was finally feeling worthy each time I engaged in my “addiction.” But, much like an addiction to drugs or alcohol, the relief was temporary. It would fade, and I’d have to do the behaviors again. And again. And again.

Gabrielle Ferrara

Ferrara eventually reached a place where her relationship with her Apple Watch became “unhealthy, toxic and unfulfilling.” At that point, she took it off and never put it on again.

She has since started down the path to recovery from exercise addiction and has not turned back.