It's okay to ignore your smartwatch this January.

Every January, fitness tech and wearable device companies remind us about New Year’s Resolutions. For a small group of people, these challenges and marketing campaigns may provide the necessary push to achieve their goals. However, for others, it’s just another reason to feel bad about themselves.

The start of the new year is also when Peloton Bikes has their sales, Apple launches its annual Ring in the New Year Challenge, and new content for Fitness Plus is rolled out. Looking around, I’ve noticed many friends starting to log activities on Strava. This year, a new marketing strategy also emerged: “Quitter’s Day.”

This day, celebrated on the second Friday of January, marks when most people abandon their New Year’s resolutions, whether related to fitness or other goals. Apple released a commercial for the Apple Watch around this date, encouraging people to “not give up” with a bit of extra motivation. The popular strength training app, Ladder, joined this trend with a humorous ad suggesting that if you have Ladder trainers by your side, you can avoid quitting.

I was present at the massive CES trade show this year, right on Quitter’s Day. During this week, I feel lucky if I manage to get in a single workout, eat three meals a day, and sleep more than three hours a night. My Apple Watch workout data, Strava fitness graphs, and Oura Ring scores reflected a drop like plunging stocks. I received several motivational notifications from the fitness apps I use, urging me to “get back at it.” By any wearable measure, I had spectacularly failed by Quitter's Day.

People don’t abandon their New Year’s resolutions because they lack the right smartwatch or the ideal fitness app. Most give up because they set unrealistic goals and expectations. Wearable technology and fitness are, at their core, tools that can aid in forming new habits and achieving objectives, but to use them effectively, one also needs to know when to ignore them.

It wasn’t pleasant to see my data. I didn’t feel good about sidelining my new strength training routine or breaking my seven-month running streak. In my youth, I would have criticized myself for not being able to do it all. Those starting out in the fitness world might have given up entirely.

However, this year I made the decision to be smarter and turned off all notifications from my wearables at CES. I used the “Pause Rings” feature on my Apple Watch. I considered the two improvised workout sessions out of the four I had planned to be enough. I scheduled a date, post-CES, to resume my training. After years of testing devices around the clock, I’ve learned that the best thing is to trust yourself. Sometimes that involves listening to your device's data, and many other times, it means completely ignoring it. You don’t need it, but you have my full permission to tell your smartwatch to be quiet for the rest of January. After all, there are still 11 months left in this year.