Have you ever heard a story about a friend or acquaintance who can’t wear wrist watches because every watch they wear will simply stop working? Are you that friend and have you had a watch stop working on you for seemingly no good reason at all?
Watches stop working all the time due to drained batteries and internal defects, but perhaps this is something a little bit different. You may have even looked up how to fix a watch and been vexed because there seems to be no legitimate fix for what you’re dealing with.
Is it your body? Is that the reason why you run into this problem every time with every watch? Has every watch you’ve purchased stopped working some three to four weeks after the first time you put it on? Are you destined to have watches stop working on you for no explainable reason?
There isn’t a lot of concrete evidence which can shine a light on this irritating and disheartening phenomenon. People who have dealt with this over and over posit theories in online forums and on social media, but there hasn’t been one answer that’s come out which has really addressed this problem fully. So rather than offering you a catch-all primer on why your watch stopped working out of the blue, we want to address your watch problems by shining a light on a few popular theories.
Can body chemistry stop a watch?
The main theory floating around for sudden and consistent watch failure places the blame on a person’s personal magnetic field. Every atom in our body has an electrical field which lies between it and other atoms, and even our sensation of touch has so much to do with the interaction of various electrical fields.
The curious case of the always breaking watches has led many to believe that it’s something to do with the calibration of their personal magnetic fields. It all has the distinct air of science fiction and honestly makes some people feel better when they keep running into broken watch after broken watch.
The problem with this theory is that while we do have personal magnetic fields with interact and repel, they are not strong enough to do damage to a mechanical device. As this recent article puts it, there’s no way a human being could survive if their personal electrical fields were strong enough to erase a VHS tape or damage even the smallest of gadgets. So while it sounds eerie and kinda Marvel Comics romantic that your personal magnetic field is just too strong for a watch to function on your wrist, it just doesn’t line up with what we know about the construct of the human body.
Then why do watches always stop working when I wear them?
If the electrical field theory just can’t be true based on science, then what gives? People have floated multiple theories about why their wrist watches simply don’t work for very long, and these theories range from the spiritual to simple memory problems.
If you’ve watched your watch tick and then just stop time and time again, some people believe that you could have a disruption with your aura. While there is no way to substantiate this with science, people with more spiritual leanings contend that your aura can actually cause problems in the physical realm if your energy is a bit off. It’s one explanation and one that can’t be proven, so definitely take it for what it’s worth.
There’s also the more concrete theory of confirmation bias or simply misremembering what has happened years ago and even recently. Our minds are tricky things and can sometimes construct narratives to both confirm our feelings about problems we’re having and obscure the actual truth of what’s actually happened. Many people see their watches break every day for a variety of reasons, so there’s a possibility you’re conflating normal watch issues with the aforementioned phenomenon because it just feels that way.
How do you fix a watch that keeps stopping?
It depends on the problem with the watch. If it’s a quartz watch with a battery, double check to make sure you don’t have a defective one. Some people will attribute their watch issues to an unexplained phenomenon when they’ve actually just gotten unlucky by receiving a watch with a bum battery.
If it’s a watch you really love and you can’t figure out the issue on your own, there are plenty of watch repair shops around the globe which will gladly take a look at your time piece and assess what’s going wrong with it.
And if you keep running into the same problem with every wrist watch you purchase, it’s possible that you might have to put the questions away and just focus on buying a nice pocket watch. It just might save you both a headache and a trip down the electric field conspiracy theory rabbit hole.