Why I Still Cannot Take My Galaxy Watch Off

It started as just an alarm clock

I bought the Galaxy Watch two years ago because I was tired of pulling my phone out every ten minutes. Check a notification, glance at the time, tap to pay for coffee. That was the whole plan. I didn't expect to care about it beyond that.

Things changed when I got back into the gym. Last summer I noticed how much fitness I'd lost, so I started running three times a week. For the first month I just ran. I didn't even know what the watch was tracking.

Once the numbers piled up, patterns showed up too

By the second month I'd started actually looking at the heart rate graphs. Same five kilometer route, but some days my heart rate climbed into the 160s and other days it sat comfortably around 145. At first I assumed it was random. A few days later the pattern was obvious. Any night I slept under six hours, my heart rate the next day was almost always high.

Knowing that sleep affects performance and seeing it happen are two different things. Everyone knows bad sleep means a bad workout. But the watch turned it into a number, and that number lined up directly with how my run went the next day. That's the first time I actually started managing my sleep on purpose. I cut out the habit of watching YouTube past 11:30 purely because of that graph.

Body composition, which I thought was a gimmick

I tried the body composition feature on the Galaxy Watch half as a joke at first. You pinch the bezel with two fingers, wait fifteen seconds, and it spits out skeletal muscle mass and body fat percentage. Mostly I was curious how far off it would be from an actual clinic scan.

In March I had a company health checkup that included a real InBody scan, and the body fat number was within one percent of what the watch had told me. After that I started taking it seriously, weighing in every Monday morning. It stopped being a curiosity and became the way I check what I did right or wrong the week before.

A half marathon and the running coach feature

I signed up for a half marathon in October and needed a training plan, which is when I actually used the running coach feature inside Samsung Health for the first time. You enter a target finish time and it builds out weekly pace and distance targets, and what surprised me was how it adjusted the following week in real time based on how badly I'd missed the plan.

Around week six my knee started acting up and I took two days off. The watch quietly scaled down that week's volume and pushed back the harder sessions until my recovery metrics were back to normal. Decisions I used to make on gut feeling were suddenly based on actual numbers.

I ended up finishing the half marathon four minutes slower than my goal. Disappointing in the moment, but looking at the heart rate zone graph afterward, it was obvious I'd gone out too fast and paid for it in the last five kilometers. My strategy for the next race came entirely from reading that one chart.

My dad is walking more too

The thing I never expected. I handed my old Galaxy Watch down to my dad, and now my parents check each other's daily step counts. If my mom's steps are lower than my dad's, she'll suggest a walk after dinner. It's basically a routine now.

I didn't plan for that to happen. It just did. But it might be my favorite thing the watch has ever done, not because of a number on a screen, but because it quietly rearranged how my parents spend their evenings.

So why the analog watch didn't work out

Back to that three day experiment. Wearing something on my wrist that measured nothing made me strangely uneasy. Not knowing my step count for the day, or whether I'd slept better than yesterday, turned out to be more stressful than I expected.

I've heard the argument that a digital watch hands you a verdict, while an analog dial just shows you where you stand. For me it's the opposite. It's not a verdict, it's progress. What percentage of today's step goal I've hit, whether this week's training load beats last week's, none of that feels like pass or fail. It just tells me where I am right now.

No real conclusion, I just keep wearing it

I didn't write this to argue against analog watches. What you strap to your wrist comes down to what you actually want from it. All I know is that I'm someone who wants to check, every day, whether today's run was better than the last one, whether I'm sleeping well tonight. This whole experiment just reminded me of that.

Three days later, pulling the Galaxy Watch back out of the drawer, I had exactly one thought. How did I survive without this.