For his birthday a few months ago, Chris’s brother got him a new Garmin device, so Chris has been using it daily, wearing it during his swims, and keeping it on pretty much day and night. He was looking at the Garmin app and noticing that for the most part, his stress level, as recorded by Garmin, seems to go up throughout the workday, and as soon as work starts winding down, it goes down gradually. Yet, on Thursday, it was a bit of an anomaly. The stress level pretty much stayed steady from about 9am through the time he went to bed. Why would that be the case?

Oh, that was easy, I said to him. We had our family chat that night! And thus, that added to Chris’s debate with me that Zoom/Google hangout/video chats do NOT relax him, and thus he doesn’t really look forward to them as he would socializing in person with people he cares about.

I’ve stopped wearing my Garmin regularly, but I wonder what my stress level is like when I do virtual hangouts with friends given what he said.