It all started when I read a piece from The Verge about a new Casio watch back in July. It described a simple digital watch that only shows time, counts steps and has Bluetooth to export steps data to the phone.
Now that really caught my attention because I myself was struggling with my Apple Watch for many months (years?) now. The way it negatively affected my mental health and anxiety was clear to me for quite some time, but yet I was not ready to part with the benefits of using it, mainly related to fitness.
A bit of history
I bought Apple Watch in late 2019, when they introduced Series 5 with always-on display, and it finally started to actually resemble an useable watch.
At first, I was sceptical, but then embraced it fully, drank the cool aid like no tomorrow, and tried to use all the features it had, from fitness tracking to mindfulness reminders. Gradually, over the years, I stripped down the usage of my Apple Watch to bare minimum - fitness and notifications. Still, it was not good enough.
Negative effect of Apple Watch on the mental health
I know everyone’s brain works slightly differently, but the “nag on the wrist” (how my colleague described such smartwatches) was most definitely detrimental to my mental health.
It’s not that easy to explain, but to me, Apple Watch and similar smartwatches proved to be a constant distraction.
They are interactive and attention grabbing, prompting to always check notifications on them, or emails, or weather, or calendar, or my activity rings. Just the fact that it is yet another beautiful, bright touch screen was bad enough for my stupid mind.
As a compromise, I stopped using Apple Watch on weekends and on holidays to keep me away from its distractions and the phone. I have a nice mechanic watch (Hamilton Khaki Officer Mechanical, with ETA6497 movement) which is a pleasure to wear, so just started wearing it more often.
When I started to wear mechanical watches over the weekend, I immediately noticed that initially I yearned to interact with them like I did with Apple Watch, glance at them constantly and even attempt to pull down the imaginary notification bar. And since they were non-interactive, after a few hours my brain accepted this fact and stopped pulling my attention to them, resulting in a more peaceful and relaxed weekend.
Dumber smartwatches
Reading that article at Verge prompted me to research the topic of ‘dumber smartwatches’, and I discovered the whole world of simpler watches that had all the fitness features I needed, but still remained primarily a watch, not some sort of mini-iPhone on my wrist.
Examples include newer Casio watches like GBD-200, Suunto fitness watches and a bunch of Garmin models.
Funny enough, when I saw the look of them, I realized that that’s exactly what I was trying to turn my Apple Watch into. Black and white screen to minimize the visual noise, clearly readable time, only the most basic widgets like physical activity indicator, and a weather indicator.
I’ve got so engrossed by my discovery of this new (to me) world of fitness watches that I spent several days researching the subject thoroughly, and ended up buying a Garmin Instinct 2.
Experience with Garmin Instinct 2
It has been a good three months since I wear them daily, and so far, they proved to be exactly what I needed. Smart enough that I can still enjoy all the fitness tracking stuff, and check out the weather and critical notifications from the watch, but dumb enough and toned down visually so that they feel like normal watch for my overworked brain.
The Garmin I bought is pretty much a sports watch with very basic ‘smart’ features. It doesn’t have a touch screen, and doesn’t allow me to interact with it in an attention-grabbing way of Apple Watch. Sure there are ‘widgets’, but they are purely informational, read only.
On a side note - the physical buttons are such a delight to use for things like timers or workouts - no way to ‘fat finger’ anything.
Plus, the always-on monochrome screen feels like a normal quartz watch from my childhood.
As a result, my brain treats them as a normal watch and doesn’t see them as a distraction.
At the same time, I still can precisely track my runs and hikes, keep tabs on my activity through the day, check the weather at a glance, and receive important (non-interactive) notifications like pages during the oncall.
The ruggedness of Garmin Instinct is also a big plus, since I enjoy DIY and woodworking, and got my Apple Watch screen scratched badly within the first month of usage just by doing basic DIY around the house.
The month-long battery life is a just a cherry on top, although it is quite liberating going for a week-long holiday and not needing to pack a watch charger.
Conclusion
To sum up, I couldn’t be happier with this change. Not only did I remove the ever present brain-frying smartwatch overload from my life, I gained in fitness features and quality of life with long battery life.
And I also discovered the world of retro quartz watches. The aesthetic of Casio AE-1200 or F-91W is very appealing to me.
It reminds me dearly of the ‘Montana’ watches that were popular in the ex-USSR in the 1990s, and ironically had nothing to do with Montana or the USA.
I have a feeling that my “collection” of weekend-only watches (now consisting of just one lonely Hamilton watch) will grow in the near future ;-)