Your Smartwatch Says You’re Fine, But Menopause Research Suggests Otherwise

Maybe you’ve been more irritable lately, your mood is all over the place, or you’re finding it harder to keep up with your usual routine. Your smartwatch says your stress levels are low, but you feel anything but calm.

If you’re going through menopause, you might wonder whether these changes are connected. And more importantly, is your smartwatch actually picking up on them?

A recent study looked at how women’s menopause symptoms compared with both their perceived stress and the stress scores recorded by their wearables. Here’s what it found.

About the study

Researchers looked at whether more severe menopause symptoms were linked to how stressed women felt, and to how their smartwatches recorded stress.

The study included 253 women who reported on their menopause symptoms and completed questionnaires about how stressed they felt in everyday life. They also spent a full week wearing smartwatches that tracked physical signals used to estimate stress.

One of the signals the watches tracked was heart rate variability (HRV), which measures the variation in time between heartbeats. These changes can offer clues about how the nervous system responds to stress.

Menopause symptoms were linked to higher stress, but smartwatch scores told a different story

Women with more severe menopause symptoms tended to report feeling more stressed. However, their smartwatch stress scores didn’t necessarily reflect that.

The link between menopause symptoms and self-reported stress was strongest for psychological symptoms, such as anxiety. Physical symptoms were less strongly tied to perceived stress, and urogenital symptoms (which affect the urinary and genital areas) showed no clear link. None of the symptom types clearly tracked with smartwatch stress scores.

Women’s own stress ratings and their smartwatch scores didn’t line up with each other, either. Stress levels also didn’t clearly differ before, during, or after the menopause transition, though older women tended to report feeling less stressed.

In short, feeling stressed and having physical signs of stress aren’t always the same thing.

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Why your smartwatch might miss menopause stress

Think about the difference between feeling overwhelmed after a difficult day and your body showing physical signs of stress. The two can overlap, but they aren’t interchangeable.

The study’s authors suggest that how stressed you feel and what your watch measures may capture different aspects of stress. For example, smartwatches use measurements like HRV to estimate how the body responds to stress. But HRV scores don’t incorporate anxiety, mood changes, or emotional exhaustion.

During menopause, when mood-related symptoms are common, that gap may be especially worth keeping in mind. However, it doesn’t mean your smartwatch data is useless. It simply measures one part of a much bigger picture.

These results also reflect a single snapshot in time, so they can’t show whether symptoms fuel stress, stress makes symptoms feel worse, or both. Most participants were healthy and from similar backgrounds, and only 193 had enough usable smartwatch data, so the findings need testing in more diverse groups.

How to make sense of your stress levels during menopause

If you use a smartwatch to monitor your health, treat its stress score as one piece of information rather than a verdict on how you’re doing. You know your body better than any technology.

If you’re trying to make sense of how menopause is affecting your stress, a few things can help:

• Notice patterns: Pay attention to whether physical menopause symptoms, disrupted sleep, or everyday stressors tend to affect your mood.

• Talk to your health care provider: If anxiety, irritability, or other symptoms are affecting your quality of life, discuss your options. Menopause hormone therapy or antidepressants can help manage certain symptoms, depending on your health history and needs.

• Use your data wisely: HRV can offer insight into your body’s stress response, but it shouldn’t replace how you feel or professional guidance.

The takeaway

Smartwatches are useful health tools, not emotional barometers. But that doesn’t mean your emotional state isn’t worth tracking.

During menopause, those mood changes and stressful days deserve attention, even when your wearable gives you a clean bill of health. If symptoms are weighing on you, it’s important to take that experience seriously. Talk to a health care provider about how to best manage your symptoms and build coping strategies to ease the emotional burden of this transition.