Every time you check your smartwatch to see if you're stressed, you're slowly losing the ability to feel your own emotions.
April 15, 2026
Original Paper
When Regulation Is No Longer Self-Regulation: Interoceptive Authority, Interpretive Displacement, and the Structural Conditions of Affective Dependence
PsyArXiv · qpjk9_v1
The Takeaway
We think of wearables and mood trackers as tools for self-improvement, but they might be causing 'interpretive displacement.' This is a framework where we start relying on external data to tell us how our bodies feel, rather than listening to our internal signals. If your watch says you're calm but you feel anxious, you begin to doubt your own biology. Over time, this dependence can actually erode your biological capacity to process and determine your own emotional states. It’s the ultimate irony: in trying to track ourselves perfectly, we might actually be losing touch with our own humanity.
From the abstract
Predictive processing accounts of interoception hold that emotion regulation depends on the brain’s capacity to model, interpret, and update internal bodily signals. These frameworks assume that the locus of interpretation remains with the subject. This paper identifies a structural condition under which that assumption fails: interpretive displacement—the progressive reconfiguration of inter- nal arbitration such that externally generated interpretations, including those produced by wearable de