I have a smart watch that gives me a real time connection to my body. I know how many hours I’ve slept; how many of those hours were spent in REM/deep/core sleep; I can check my heart rate in real time; estimate my stress levels; I can even see how well I recovered from my workout.
I have so much data on the functions of my body, I should be an expert on how to maintain optimal health and wellbeing, right? What I actually use my watch for is skipping to the next song on my workout playlist, reading texts while walking, and enjoying the little sizzle of digital fireworks across my display when I hit my daily movement goal.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because you are one of the over 200 million people worldwide using a smart watch or other wearable tracking device and, like me, you’re probably not taking advantage of the health data you’re constantly recording. But this data is useful, and with a little practice, you can start using it to recognize patterns and make adjustments to your lifestyle, ultimately achieving optimal health and wellness.
Nutritional biofeedback is a way to use information or data tracking to delve deeper into your energetic, nutritional, digestive and overall physical health and wellness. By harnessing your collected data (electronically or otherwise), you can better understand the way your body functions and then make informed choices to better support your overall health system. Some examples of this are sleep, stress management, nutrition/digestion and hydration.
Understanding sleep cycles is something that many of us struggle with. Even when practicing responsible sleep hygiene – going to bed on time, putting devices away well before sleeping, avoiding caffeine and sugar late in the day, et cetera – you can still suffer sleepless nights. Certain stages of life like teenhood and early parenthood, traumatic experiences and peri/menopause can also cause bouts of insomnia.
Nutritional biofeedback is a way to use information or data tracking to delve deeper into your energetic, nutritional, digestive and overall physical health and wellness.
Sleep is a necessity for the functioning of our overall system, and the unpredictability of sleep is primarily due to the delicacy of our circadian rhythm and how dependent it is to the regulation of our central nervous system. For example, chronic lack of sleep disrupts our cognitive function, which can result in poor decision making and desperation for quick energy, typically resulting in a higher dependence on caffeine, sugar and calorie-dense foods. We often consume these unconsciously because our nervous system is desperate to keep the body fuelled.
This cycle of chronic fatigue, caffeine and sugar consumption can disrupt all levels of bodily function, especially our ability to manage and process stress.
Both sleep and stress reactions in the body can be interpreted in similar ways, by measuring heart rate, breathing patterns, movement acceleration, et cetera. More specifically, wearables use the heart rate monitor to measure stroke volume and length between beats to calculate your heart rate variable (HRT), which is then able to gauge the state of your autonomic nervous system. They also use a built-in accelerometer to monitor movements and respiratory signals that determine your muscular and cardiovascular reactivity.
Stress management is something nearly all of us struggle with and some find stress monitors actually increase their anxiety. But understanding the data and recognizing improvements can propel a desire for action and ultimately empowerment. Studies have shown that even understanding how the body expresses stress leads to a more proactive approach to engaging in positive mental-health supports like physical activity, therapy and medication. This can be especially helpful for those who otherwise struggle to acknowledge their mental health needs.
Monitoring nutrition and digestion can be a bit more complicated than the above-mentioned systems, simply because it is much more difficult and invasive to gather the data needed to understand the complexities of digestion. For example, the breakdown of digestive flora and stomach acid levels, or the pH of pancreatic amylase, is impossible to gather via a watch. However, people tend to be acutely aware of changes to their digestive functioning and, while they may not be able to pinpoint the exact disruption, those who record their nutritional intake are more likely to develop the ability to understand and manage digestive health.
Recording nutritional and digestive patterns can be accomplished by keeping a journal, either electronically or with old-fashioned pen and paper.
The most effective way to record your food and digestive functions is via a food journal that includes what you ate, when you ate, how you felt, digestive reactions (gas, bloating, elimination) and energy levels. After recording for a couple of days, patterns can emerge around which foods may be more beneficial or harmful to your digestive system. This can show up in digestive reactions, but also in energy levels, sleep function and even mood.
Hydration is another self-monitoring system. We still don’t have complex enough technology to accurately monitor hydration levels in the body, but many tech companies are working at it. The best way to monitor your water intake is, therefore, to track it yourself via an app or simply have a prepared amount of water on hand to consume throughout the day. A few other ways to monitor your hydration levels are to pay close attention to the colour of your pee and to watch out for signs of dehydration, in the form of headaches, brain fog, fatigue, irritability and digestive upset.
Nutritional biofeedback offers a valuable tool for learning how to look at the entire body system through a combination of data collection tools. Each of these systems is an integral part of how the body works as a whole.
As we familiarize ourselves with the data collected on sleep, stress, digestion and hydration, we are able to pair it with our perception of fatigue, energy or neutrality. Becoming adept at this comparison can help us become experts on our own health signals, making adjustments, testing data and ultimately finding practices that lead to ongoing health and wellness success.
This feature appeared in the summer 2024 edition of Boulevard Okanagan.