Two Garmin “excellent” sleep ratings in a row!

Jthanmyfitnesspal

This is unprecedented. My most common Garmin sleep rating is “poor.” It feels like a huge accomplishment. I think it is associated with my dry January. Also, I’ve been exercising regularly and cutting sweets.

Anyone else monitoring their sleep with their Garmin watch?

AnnPT77

In a manner of speaking.

Before I say what that means, does your subjective feeling match that Garmin result? I hope so, for your sake. That would be great!

I admit to some poor sleep hygiene habits (after trying various interventions unsuccessfully for about 20 years, I've mostly given up). My Garmin is completely useless to me for sleep tracking. Graph and details in the spoiler.

I hope you continue with the excellent results - congratulations on finding improvements!

Just as an example - a pretty typical one - it thinks I went to sleep last night at 1:44 AM, woke up briefly at about 1:58 AM, then again from about 4:59 to 5:19 (with a short blip of sleep in that interval), then woke up for real at about 9:43 AM. It looks like this:

In reality, I was in bed around that 1:44, awake (intentionally) until approximately 2:30, woke up a couple times and did get up briefly but went back to bed and remained awake around that 5AM slot; then I woke up for real around . . . I forget, something between 7:45 and 8:30, but checked messages and stuff before getting up around that 9:43. I also woke very briefly at least a couple of other times during the night that don't show up in the graph as wake-ups, just long enough to look at my watch and go back to sleep quickly without moving much. (I have a weird form of sleep interruption insomnia.)

I had my watch on for my last in-hospital sleep study. They were monitoring my brain waves, heart rate, breathing, muscle twitches, had a camera aimed at me and microphones, and I don't know what all. I have trouble sleeping under those conditions (I keep thinking things like "I wonder what my brain waves look like now?!?" 😆 which makes me perk up).

I stay very still, though, and breathe slowly, meditate if I can, to try to get back to sleep so they can watch that. My Garmin thought I slept pretty much all night. I showed the sleep technician who'd watched me all night the graph in Garmin Connect . . . we both laughed and laughed.

I'm not saying it's this misleading for everyone, because I have what they tell me are unusual sleep issues. But it does give me a level of skepticism, in my own case at least.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

@AnnPT77 : I would give Garmin the weak endorsement that it "works better than I would expect." It only has access to HR and motion at the wrist. (And, SpO2, if you want, but I leave it off to save battery. It doesn't work all that well, anyway.) That's pretty basic.

I usually get a low rating because they claim my REM sleep time is low. But, how can the watch tell if you're in REM or if you are just sleeping lightly? I don't know!

I feel like deep sleep is the most important for feeling rested the next day. Garmin probably detects that phase of sleep the best, since your HR decreases and you are nearly completely immobile. It seems that I have a pretty good day when I get an hour or more of deep sleep the night before.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

Another interesting data point. (At least, it's interesting to me!)

Yesterday evening I did a 45 minute jog on the treadmill. I didn't feel I slept that well last night, maybe because I exerted pretty hard-- for me, I really didn't pull any impressive numbers, or anything. It's a common problem for me that I don't sleep all that well on nights after a hard workout. It's better to do them earlier in the day, but I'm really bad at that. So, there you have it.

BUT: Garmin detected a lot of deep sleep (>2h) early in the evening, which totally made up for a restless stage around 3AM. And then it detected light and REM for the next few hours. So, despite my remembering the awake portion of the night, it really wasn't all that bad, and, in fact, Garmin rated it as "Good."

I think that is useful information!

AnnPT77

You clearly believe your Garmin more than I believe mine. Maybe that's because yours is correct for you, that your patterns are more average than mine.

Mine likes to give me helpful tips in Connect about how I should improve my sleep patterns, tips it has formulated based on the wildly distorted version of my sleep it sees. I'm starting a short period of editing the reported sleep start/stop in the mornings to reflect something closer to reality. I'll see if I still get their tsk-tsk tips.

I'm glad your mileage varies.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

@AnnPT77 : I could imagine there being a much improved device. Wearing something on your wrist to determine if you have rapid eye movements is bound to have limited success!