Stress levels and deep sleep

I'm amazed at how you arrived at your conclusion from what I had shared, but it makes sense to me. I'll see how this changes as I work on my breathwork. Thank you.

This sounds similar to what 3281977 is saying about being in Fight or Flight mode, and also makes me think that I need to address chronic stress. I'll have to do more research on the supplements you suggest. Thank you for your thoughts.

1774595 said:

Driving is stressful!? As is watching TV.

Mental stress seems ok!

To top up my body battery I have a busy day at work! LOL

Yes! So crazy

The changes come very slow. You have to work on it every day. But it will change your life

I have found that if I eat later in the day (after 5:30pm) my stress levels during sleep are high.

Ashwangadha, Magnesium, Vitamin C after stressor is very good to calm down.

All the replies seem to assume that the Garmin watch is an infallible Medical grade device. It is most definitely not. I have had my body battery stuck at 5 for days on end. I have had onboard HRM flatline for one whole night.m, and drop from 100 to 70 for ten minutes in the middle of an intense activity. I have found that rebooting the watch has raised my body battery from 5 to 75 immediately. From all this I conclude that the watch, its algorithms and their assumptions are the problem. If I were you I wouldn’t go off looking for medical solutions to what is probably a technology problem. 

Absolutely not. The watch is not a medical device, but it can give you hints about stress level and if the workout was maybe too late during the day, to recover fully till morning. The watch helped me already during 2 years a lot. Not only with training, but also with stress and also medical issues I have had. Example: Because my pace didn't improved I went to a doctor and he did find something...

I've noticed this too!! I've had my Garmin for a year and after tracking a lot of different variables I've noticed a few patterns. I'm curious to see if any of you have made similar discoveries.

1. For me this is strongly related to my menstrual cycle. During the second half of my cycle I usually have at least a short period of low-medium stress at the beginning of the night and then my stress level is around 20-24 for most of the night, whereas at the beginning of my cycle I sometimes get an amazing night of sleep where it's under 10 the entire night. The first half of my cycle is much more forgiving—I can eat fairly late or work out at night and still sleep well. During the second half if I do these things I'll pretty much always have high stress during sleep. I've only ever had perfect stress levels (all blue) the entire night during the first half of my cycle and on those days I wake up feeling incredible.

2. Weed destroys my stress scores. Any time I smoke weed in the evening my stress scores will be medium to high all night even though I have no trouble falling asleep and I stay asleep for 8 hours.

3. Social events heavily affect my stress scores. This is a weird one because I don't have social anxiety, at least not that I'm aware of, but any time I go to a party or event where I'm talking to people and/or dancing for several hours I get super high stress scores during sleep that night. For the record I don't drink alcohol anymore and most of the time I don't smoke weed at parties. I'm thinking it might be some kind of overstimulation that my body doesn't bounce back from if I go out and then come home and jump straight into bed. I'm going to try to mitigate this next time I go to a party by staying up a bit later when I get home and letting my body decompress more before I try to sleep.

4. Yoga and other quick relaxation techniques don't actually help much when I do them right before bed. I'll get my stress score down super low for a few minutes but once I go to sleep it shoots back up again.

5. My sleep stress tends to be lower when I walk a lot during the day but NOT when I exercise hard. Any time I've had a high step count (15-20k or higher) I've usually had pretty good recovery during sleep. Some days when I work out super hard I sleep well but other days I sleep poorly after.