Vitality Unleashed: The Functional Medicine Podcast

Is Your Smartwatch Making You Sick? The Truth About Data Anxiety

• Dr. Kumar from LifeWellMD.com • Season 1 • Episode 222

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Do you wake up feeling great, only to have your mood crushed because your "Readiness Score" is low?
You aren’t alone. In this episode, we dive deep into a growing phenomenon known as the Nocebo Effect—where the stress of tracking your health actually makes you less healthy.
We explore the "Clinical Architecture of Data Anxiety," including:

  • Orthosomnia: The unhealthy obsession with achieving "perfect" sleep data.
  • The Cortisol Loop: How worrying about a bad health score releases stress hormones that physically degrade your health.
  • Interoceptive Avoidance: Why we are losing the ability to listen to our own bodies because we trust algorithms too much.

Stop guessing and stop stressing. Your body is a biological miracle, not a spreadsheet. If you are tired of being a prisoner to your notifications and want a medical expert to help you separate the signal from the noise, you need a navigator who understands both the data and the human.

Connect with Dr. Ramesh T. Kumar at LifeWell MD Dr. Kumar is a Board Certified Radiation Oncologist and Functional Medicine expert who helps patients interpret their health data correctly, moving from anxiety to true optimization.

📞 Schedule Your Consultation Today: Call: 561-210-9999

🌐 Visit: LifeWellMD.com

Available for In-Office Consultations (North Palm Beach) and Telemedicine.

Disclaimer:
The information provided in this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your supplement regimen or health routine. Individual needs and reactions vary, so it’s important to make informed decisions with the guidance of your physician.

Connect with Us:
If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with someone who might benefit. For more insights and updates, visit our website at Lifewellmd.com.

Stay Informed, Stay Healthy:
Remember, informed choices lead to better health. Until next time, be well and take care of yourself.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome back to the deep dive.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Today we are opening up a file that creates a pretty uncomfortable paradox.

SPEAKER_01:

Trevor Burrus, it really does.

SPEAKER_00:

Trevor Burrus, we've got this massive stack of research here. We're talking clinical studies, case reports from places like Rush University, articles from VCU Health.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

And it all points to this one strange, undeniable reality.

SPEAKER_01:

Trevor Burrus We have never had more data about our bodies. Ever. And yet.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell And yet, looking at all this evidence, we have arguably never been more anxious about our own biology.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Ross Powell It's the whole dilemma of the quantified self, isn't it? We have the tech to measure almost everything sleep stages, heart rate variability, glucose, blood oxygen, you name it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00:

Everything.

SPEAKER_01:

But as a society, we haven't really stopped to ask if measuring everything every single second of the day is actually good for us.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Or if it's maybe making us sick.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And just to set the scene for you, because I think every single person listening has had this exact morning picture of this. You wake up, it's a Tuesday, the sun is streaming in, you stretch. Yeah. You actually feel fantastic. You know, you feel rested, your brain feels clear, you are ready to just crush the day.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell Sounds like the perfect morning, the kind of morning we all hope for.

SPEAKER_00:

It was the perfect morning. Until you know you reach over the nightstand, you grab your phone and you sink your smart ring or your watch.

SPEAKER_01:

Ah, here it comes.

SPEAKER_00:

And you're expecting like a gold star because you feel so good. But instead, the screen just flashes red. It says, readiness score, 50. Sleep quality, poor.

SPEAKER_01:

Oof.

SPEAKER_00:

And I swear, in that exact second, the energy just it physically drains out of you.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell It's a visceral reaction, isn't it? It completely changes your reality in an instant.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell It does. Suddenly your limbs feel heavy. You start questioning yourself. You're thinking, oh no, I must actually be exhausted, and I just I didn't realize it.

SPEAKER_01:

And you trudge to the kitchen feeling like a zombie.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell All because an algorithm told me I was one.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell That is a perfect, I mean, a textbook description of what the research calls the nocebo effect.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell The Nocebo effect. Okay, so most people know the placebo effect.

SPEAKER_01:

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah. Right. Where you believe a sugar pill is medicine and that belief makes you feel better.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell The power of expectation.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. Well, the nocebo effect is it's kind of its evil twin. It's when these negative expectations, triggered by that red screen, they actually manifest as negative physiological symptoms.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell So the data becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of fatigue.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell Precisely.

SPEAKER_00:

And that's really what we're unpacking today. When does the tracking stop helping and, you know, start actually hurting? Because there is a specific clinical term for what I just described, right? It's not just being bummed out.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Ross Powell No, not at all. It's a recognized phenomenon now. Researchers like Dr. Kelly Glazerbaron and Dr. Sabra Abbott, they've coined the term orthosomia.

SPEAKER_00:

Orthosomnia. Okay, that sounds a lot like orthorexia.

SPEAKER_01:

That is exactly where the name comes from. So orthorexia is that unhealthy obsession with eating only pure or perfect foods. Right. Orthosomia is the perfectionist quest to achieve perfect sleep. And here's the massive irony the stress of trying to optimize your sleep metrics.

SPEAKER_00:

Trying to force that graph to stay in the green.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yes. That stress is the very thing that's keeping you awake.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I have definitely been there. You're lying in bed staring at the ceiling and you're doing the math in your head.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, if I don't fall asleep in the next seven minutes, my recovery score is going to drop, my HRV will tank, and then tomorrow is just ruined.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell, which is a complete disaster for your physiology. That thought process alone releases adrenaline and cortisol stress hormones, which literally signal your body to stay alert.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell So you're stressing yourself out of sleep in the name of tracking sleep.

SPEAKER_01:

You are. And this anxiety isn't just staying in the bedroom. The research shows it's migrated right into the kitchen, especially with the explosion of continuous glucose monitors, CGMs.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell This is a huge trend right now.

SPEAKER_01:

Huge. And look, these devices were developed for diabetes management. They're critical, life-saving tech for people who need to dose insulin.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. But now you scroll social media and you see wellness influencers with these patches on their arms.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell And they're freaking out over a banana.

SPEAKER_00:

I saw a video the other day. Someone said they can't eat grapes anymore because it caused a spike.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell Right. They eat a handful of grapes or a piece of fruit, they see the line on the graph shoot up and they just panic. It's become the glucose panic.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell But looking at the data from VCU Health, we need to be really clear about the biology here. If I eat an apple and my blood sugar goes up, is that a malfunction? Am I broken? No.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely not. That is the definition of being a healthy mammal. If you're a non-diabetic human and you eat a carbohydrate, your blood glucose has to rise.

SPEAKER_00:

It has to.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the signal for your pancreas to release insulin, which then shuttles that energy into your cells for fuel, and then the levels come back down. That curve on the graph isn't pathology, it's physiology. It's your body working perfectly.

SPEAKER_00:

But without that medical context, a sharp line shooting up on a graph looks scary. It looks like a stock market crash.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. We're pathologizing normal human biology because we're looking at raw data without the, you know, medical degree to interpret it. We see a functional system doing its job, and we call it a failure because the line isn't flat.

SPEAKER_00:

So we have orthosonia keeping us awake, glucose panic making us afraid of fruit. Just a general state of confusion. We realized pretty early in prepping this deep dive that we needed a navigator, someone who speaks data, but also speaks human.

SPEAKER_01:

And that is where the work of Dr. Ramesh T. Kumar comes in. He's the founder of LifeWell MD.

SPEAKER_00:

And he has a really interesting resume for this specific problem. He isn't just a tech guy, and he is definitely not just a wellness guru.

SPEAKER_01:

No, he sits at this very rare intersection. So on one side, he is a board-certified radiation oncologist.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell, which is about as high stakes and data driven as medicine gets. I mean, in oncology, you do not mess around with data. You can't just feel your way through radiation therapy. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01:

Not at all. In that world, a biomarker change or a millimeter of difference is quite literally life or death. So he respects the data. But he's also a functional medicine expert and was trained in medical acupuncture at Harvard. So he gets the medical grade clinical data, but he also understands the holistic wellness side of things.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell He knows the difference between a real tumor marker and a readiness score that's maybe just trying to sell you a subscription.

SPEAKER_01:

That distinction is vital right now. Dr. Kumar seems to be the one saying, okay, everyone, let's turn down the volume for a second and see what's actually playing.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Because if we don't, the sources we're looking at here describe a mechanism where this tracking actually causes physical injury.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. And we're not talking about a rash from the plastic strap on your watch. We're talking about what's called the clinical architecture of data anxiety.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, let's break that down. How does looking at a number on my wrist actually make me sick?

SPEAKER_01:

It comes right back to that cortisol loop we touched on earlier. So let's say you check your watch. You see a bad number. Maybe your heart rate variability, your HRV is lower than usual, or your resting heart rate is up by, say, three beats.

SPEAKER_00:

My immediate thought is I'm sick, I'm overtrained, or I'm dying. One of the three.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. You perceive that data point as a threat. And evolutionarily, threats, whether it's a lion in the bushes or a low HRV score, they trigger the HPA access.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell The hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the one. And your body just dumps cortisol into your system to help you fight or flee.

SPEAKER_00:

But you can't fight a number.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And you definitely can't run away from your own wrist.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. And here is the cruel biological joke. What does cortisol do to you physically? It raises your heart rate, it lowers your heart rate variability, it disrupts your sleep and digestion.

SPEAKER_00:

Wait, so the act of worrying about the bad data actually causes the data to get worse.

SPEAKER_01:

Precisely. It is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. You see a bad number, you get stressed. The stress makes the number worse, which in turn makes you even more stressed. The sources call this a nocebo feedback loop.

SPEAKER_00:

You're creating the pathology just by monitoring for it.

SPEAKER_01:

You really are.

SPEAKER_00:

And we have some wild case studies here that prove this isn't just a theory. I mean, the report from the HitLab source about the 70-year-old woman with atrial fibrillation, that one really stuck with me. It just feels so tragic.

SPEAKER_01:

That case is both heartbreaking and so illuminating. So this woman had aphib in a regular heartbeat. It's a serious condition, but she'd been diagnosed, she's on a treatment plan, she was stable.

SPEAKER_00:

Her doctor was happy with her progress. She was just living her life.

SPEAKER_01:

She was. Then she gets a smartwatch.

SPEAKER_00:

And it has the irregular rhythm notifications.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Now remember, she knows she has an irregular rhythm. That's not new information. But suddenly she has a device on her wrist buzzing constantly, just reminding her irregularity detected. Irregularity detected.

SPEAKER_00:

It's like having a little siren going off on your arm for something you're already managing.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. And the result, she went to the emergency room 12 times in one year.

SPEAKER_00:

12 times. That's once a month.

SPEAKER_01:

12 times, plus countless frantic calls to her clinic. But here is the kicker, and this is what Dr. Kumar warns about. In the end, none of those visits actually changed her treatment.

SPEAKER_00:

Her heart wasn't getting worse.

SPEAKER_01:

Her heart was fine. The only thing that changed was her mental state. She eventually needed cognitive behavioral therapy just to treat the anxiety that the watch created.

SPEAKER_00:

That is the definition of digital hypochondria.

SPEAKER_01:

It is. And it's so tragic because the tool that was supposed to empower her actually stripped away her agency. It made her a prisoner of the notification.

SPEAKER_00:

And then you have the case of Mr. R from the Rush University source. This one is less about medical fear and more about the pressure of the quantified self.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, this was the guy who got a tracker as a gift, right?

SPEAKER_00:

From his girlfriend. A well-intentioned gift.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And before the tracker, Mr. R slept fine. He didn't even think about it. But once he had the device, he fixated on the number eight. He decided he needed exactly eight hours of sleep to be a functioning human, just because the app suggested it.

SPEAKER_00:

So he gamified his own rest. He made sleep a job.

SPEAKER_01:

And he started losing the game. He started going to bed earlier, staying in bed longer, trying to force his body to hit that metric so the algorithm would be happy.

SPEAKER_00:

And I'm gonna guess that did not work.

SPEAKER_01:

It backfired completely. He developed severe performance anxiety. He actually started sleeping less because he was so worried about the score he would see in the morning.

SPEAKER_00:

He outsourced his own feelings of restfulness to a gadget.

SPEAKER_01:

That phrase outsourcing feelings that really connects to this concept in the research called interoception. Can we dig into that? Because it feels like we're losing the ability to just know how we feel.

SPEAKER_00:

This is a critical point. Interoception is basically your body's internal dashboard. It's the biological skill that tells you if you're hungry or cold or tired or stressed.

SPEAKER_01:

We evolved to feel these things.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And what researchers are seeing now is something they call interoceptive avoidance.

SPEAKER_01:

We're starting to stop trusting the dashboard, and instead we're just waiting for the mechanics report.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. We ignore the internal signal and we wait for the external one to tell us what to do. There was a great example of this from a doctor, Dr. Sophie Schotter, in the Refinery 29 article. She wears an aura ring.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And she's a doctor, so she knows her physiology.

SPEAKER_00:

She does. And one morning, she wakes up and the ring tells her that her readiness score is terrible, her HRV has plummeted.

SPEAKER_01:

And even as a doctor, her first thought was panic.

SPEAKER_00:

Of course. Her immediate thought was, I must be sick, I'm coming down with a virus. She starts mentally scanning for symptoms. Does my throat hurt? Do I feel feverish?

SPEAKER_01:

But then she pauses.

SPEAKER_00:

And this is the key moment. She looks for the context.

SPEAKER_01:

She realized her bedroom was just hot.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. It was a warmer night than usual. Her body was just working harder to thermoregulate, to pump blood to the skin to keep her cool. And that effort naturally raises your heart rate and lowers your HRV.

SPEAKER_01:

So the data wasn't wrong, but the conclusion was.

SPEAKER_00:

The data was accurate, the interpretation was flawed, it wasn't pathology, it was homeostasis. It was her body doing its job correctly to keep her cool.

SPEAKER_01:

But the algorithm didn't know the room temperature, it just saw the numbers deviate and flagged a failure.

SPEAKER_00:

And that's the danger of raw data without context. The algorithm sees a deviation and calls it a problem. The body sees a deviation and calls it adaptation.

SPEAKER_01:

That's a beautiful way to put it. The body is a dynamic system. It is not meant to be a flat line. Your heart rate should go up when you're stressed or hot. Your glucose should go up when you eat. If we treat every little fluctuation as a failure, we're just fighting our own biology.

SPEAKER_00:

We're asking our bodies to be robots. So we're stuck in this loop of data anxiety, relying on these algorithms that don't know if we just ate a cookie or if we're fighting the flu. We need a way out. How do we fix this relationship with our tech?

SPEAKER_01:

And that brings us back to Dr. Kumar and his methodology at Life Well MD.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. His approach is so refreshing because he's not a Luddite. He doesn't say throw all the technology away. He's a scientist. He loves data.

SPEAKER_01:

But he draws a very hard line between accumulation and interpretation.

SPEAKER_00:

And most of us are just accumulating. We're just hoarders of data. I probably have gigabytes of heart rate data I have never once looked at.

SPEAKER_01:

We all have mountains of it. Dr. Kumar focuses on interpretation. Think of it this way: if you have a library full of books written in a language you don't speak, you don't have knowledge. You just have a fire hazard. You need a translator.

SPEAKER_00:

And his philosophy is tech as servant, not master.

SPEAKER_01:

Correct. The data should support how you feel, not dictate it. If you wake up feeling great, like you did in our opening scenario, and the data says you're tired, you prioritize your feeling. You trust the interoception. The feeling is the truth. The data is just a proxy.

SPEAKER_00:

He also has some really practical strategies for this. One that stood out to me was the idea of tracker holidays.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it is exactly what it sounds like. Take the watch off, leave the ring on the charger, take a break for a weekend or a week.

SPEAKER_00:

That sounds terrifying to me, which probably means I need to do it.

SPEAKER_01:

That fear right there is the diagnostic. If you feel anxious at the very thought of taking your tracker off, that is a huge red flag that you're dealing with data dependency. You're addicted to the feedback.

SPEAKER_00:

And the goal of the holiday is to reset that interoceptive awareness.

SPEAKER_01:

To relearn how to listen to your body without a digital interpreter chiming in.

SPEAKER_00:

Another strategy he mentions is contextualization, basically looking at the forest, not the individual trees.

SPEAKER_01:

This is so crucial. Daily volatility, the ups and downs of a single Tuesday, is mostly just noise. It's influenced by what you watched on TV, the temperature of the room, a salty meal you had. Right. Dr. Kumar advises looking at long-term trends. Is your resting heart rate trending up over a whole month? Okay, that might mean something. Did your HRV drop for three weeks straight? That's a trend worth investigating.

SPEAKER_00:

But obsessing over last night's number is usually a complete waste of emotional energy.

SPEAKER_01:

And the symptom first, data second rule. I think this is the most actionable takeaway for me.

SPEAKER_00:

It reverses how most of us use these devices. Most people look at the data to find problems. Oh, my oxygen saturation dropped 1%. What could that mean?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. You go hunting for trouble.

SPEAKER_00:

Dr. Kumar says, live your life. If and only if you physically feel that something is off, you're dizzy, you're chronically fatigued, you have palpitations, then look at the data to see if it captured something.

SPEAKER_01:

Use the data to validate a symptom, not to hunt for one when you feel perfectly fine. Exactly because, and this is really the so what moment, if the data is stressing you out, the damage from that stress is probably worse for you than whatever minor optimization you're trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_00:

That is such a powerful paradox. We're wearing these things to extend our health span, and the stress of wearing them might actually be shortening it.

SPEAKER_01:

We know chronic cortisol elevation is damaging. It leads to insulin resistance, it hurts the immune system, it causes visceral fat accumulation. If your quest for perfect health through data is causing you chronic stress, you are actively harming your own longevity. You're defeating the entire purpose.

SPEAKER_00:

It's the definition of counterproductive. Yeah. And that's why having a guide like Dr. Kumar is so essential. He can look at that same data and say, this is normal physiology, ignore it. Or, okay, this is a trend we need to address with nutrition or lifestyle. He takes the emotional weight off of you.

SPEAKER_01:

Which is what a good doctor should do. They shouldn't just hand you a spreadsheet. They should give you peace of mind or a clear plan of action.

SPEAKER_00:

So if you're listening to this and you find yourself staring at your watch, wondering why your score is low and you feel fine, or if you're terrified to eat a piece of fruit because of a graph, or if you're Mr. R forcing yourself to stay in bed just to hit a number, you really need a new perspective.

SPEAKER_01:

You do. You need to step back. And if you want professional help to separate that signal from all the noise, Dr. Ramesh T. Kumar at LifeWell MD is the resource we found who really, really gets it.

SPEAKER_00:

He's based in North Palm Beach for in-office consults. But for our listeners who are elsewhere, he does offer telehealth options. You can actually have him look at your data and give you that much-needed medical reality check.

SPEAKER_01:

You can reach his practice at 561-210-9999. That's 561-210-9999. Or you can check out their website, lifewellmd.com.

SPEAKER_00:

I think the mantra we need to adopt here is pretty simple. Stop guessing and stop stressing.

SPEAKER_01:

I like that. And I would just add, trust your hardware. And by hardware, I don't mean the watch. I mean the millions of years of evolutionary biology that built your body. You are a complex biological miracle, not a spreadsheet. You are more than a data point. Trust your body.

SPEAKER_00:

Couldn't have said it better. Take a tracker holiday, folks. We'll see you on the next deep dive.