Can A Fitness Tracker Tell When You Fall In Love?

We've all wondered about how we fall in love. There have even been studies that show it’s possible to train yourself to fall in love. As it turns out, we can actually track our love lives, thanks to personal fitness trackers. Koby Soto's FitBit recorded the exact moment his heart broke when he was unexpectedly dumped. As the day went on, his FitBit also recorded his emotional distress post-breakup shown by progressively increasing heart rate. So how does this work?

Your fitness tracker essentially records when your heart rate increases or decreases. When you go for a run, your heart rate increases and your fitness tracker will record and share that information with you. When you fall in love or are attracted to someone, your palms get sweaty, your pupils can dilate, and your heart rate speeds up. “A fitness monitor or fitness tracker can absolutely track things not related to exercise,” Athletic Training, Health, and Exercise Science Professor Nikki Russo tells Bustle. “So whether it’s a feeling of anxiety, a feeling of love, a feeling of playfulness, or a feeling of exercise. It can still track the same way.”

In the second episode of the season two of Love, Factually — Bustle’s video series about love, dating, and relationships — Bustle talks to Biological Anthropologist Helen Fisher, and Adjunct Professor of Athletic Training, Health, and Exercise Science at Long Island University, Nikki Russo about whether we can really track how our body reacts to changes in our love lives.

Check out the video below and see how the other ways our bodies react to love.

1. Your Body Reacts Like You’re Stressed

“You might have wobbly knees, butterflies in your stomach, but the same thing can happen when you’re walking on a stage to make a major speech,” Dr. Helen Fisher tells Bustle. “This is a basic bodily system that is going to operate under many circumstances of fight or flight and romantic love is only one of them.”

2. Fitness Trackers Can Absolutely Track Feelings

“It can definitely track if somebody is having those feelings. The feelings of euphoria, those feelings of “Oh my god, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything but think about this person” because you’re having this spike in your heart rate,” Russo tells Bustle.

3. There Is More To Love Than A Racing Heart

“We have to go into the brain to find out what’s happening in the brain, to know about that moment when you fall in love. The energy, the euphoria, the focus, the motivation, that’s in the brain,” says Fisher. “The body will reflect what the brain is doing.”

4. It Is Limited

“The basic heart rate pumping up is probably going to be very similar to whether you just ran around Central Park for several miles or whether somebody just told you that they loved you,” Fisher says.

5. Love Is Still Unpredictable and Awesome

“You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake but when you sit down and eat that cake, you feel that joy," Fisher says. "In the same, you can monitor every part of the body and every part of the brain and everything that is going on, but when it happens to you, you go into ecstasy just the way we did a million years ago."

Images: Bustle/YouTube