Smart watches are often hailed for their ability to synchronize fitness goals and lifestyle habits with a small device on your wrist and an app on your phone, but there are many other ways they can improve users’ physical health as well as their mental wellbeing.
During stressful times of the year, such as the holiday season, smart watches can help track more than just your daily step count or how long you worked out. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of your smart watch during the holidays.
For Stress Relief
With kids home from school, varying work schedules, travel, winter weather, and gift giving, the holidays can be the most stressful time of the year for many. But managing stress can be made easier with the help of a smart watch.
Apple watches offer a variety of different meditation apps, which can be used to set breathing exercises, practice mindfulness, or set goals to create new routines for the holiday season. If you have a Fitbit, there are stress relief options available for you, too! On your Fitbit app and watch, you can find similar tools in the Relax app, which offers guided breathing sessions and allows you to track how your heart rate and breathing will change each time you have used the Relax app.
Finding ways to incorporate stress relief into your day will set you up to form many other good habits this winter as well.
For Good Habits
Time off from work or school during the holidays can throw off your daily or weekly routine, which means most of your good habits will only return when things settle down in the new year.
To use this downtime to feel your best, you can keep yourself accountable to your healthy goals and habits during your vacation by using your smart watch.
The Garmin Vívoactive 3, like many other smart watches, allows users to track their sleep each night and set their ideal sleep schedules in the watch’s app. This feature will help you know when it’s time for shut-eye, even if you are not setting an alarm for the next morning.
Other watches, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active, set users up for success by allowing them to track their food and water intake, and even monitor how much caffeine they have consumed during the day. Galaxy Watch users can then see if they need to limit their caffeine intake to potentially calm any jitters that may arrive after that third cup of coffee.
Like monitoring caffeine, users of many smart watches have also adopted the habit of logging their water intake throughout the day. This practice can encourage users to drink more water, which results in improved brain function and increased physical and athletic performance ability.
For Communication and Organization
Coordinating plans throughout the holidays can also be stressful. Balancing holiday parties, playdates, family gatherings, and religious obligations can leave even the most organized person feeling frazzled and spread thin.
When coordinating schedules while kids are home from school, smart watches are a very helpful tool. A text message forwarding feature is available on almost all wearable technology nowadays, and shows incoming text messages at the same time they would appear on your phone screen. This way, seeing the text from your babysitter saying that they are running a few minutes late can alleviate worries when you’re still getting the kids ready before their arrival.
Likewise, if you don’t have your phone on hand during holiday activities, such as baking or family gatherings, text message forwarding can keep you in the loop. This way, if your dinner plans change or your friend needs help setting up for a holiday party earlier than you had originally planned, you will still know what’s going on.
With so many weeknight gatherings this time of year, silent alarms (also available on most smart watches) can become your best friend. If you need a quiet reminder to leave the company party by 8:00 p.m., you can set on your watch to notify you at 7:55 p.m. that it’s time to wrap up.
Wearable technology has the capability to improve more than just your fitness. Take this time of year to utilize all of your smart watch’s functions and prepare yourself for a much less hectic holiday season than last year.