How does my watch know that I am stress ?

The graph gives you a tracing of your measureable stress. If you check the help for that tile, it explains what you’re results represent. I’d say you are need of some relaxation, unless you’re getting sick. I noticed my escalated recently along with an increased RHR. I’m currently recooperating from the flu. So, in my case it’s been functioning “as advertised”, as they say. Hope this helps a little.

I too have a very high stress score every day. Always. Usually I have about 3-16 minutes of rest. The watch says I'm stressed when asleep, watching a movie, well all the time. The recent update of the firmware and a reset of the watch didn't help. My question is: I'm currently not in a very good shape. I've put on some weight and I run less than I normally do. Is the high stress score one way of saying my body needs harder work to go on living?

I'm not sold on the wrist based stress monitoring. Right now I'm in pretty good shape, I'm not sick, or fatigued and I didn't run or workout at all over this past weekend and my numbers for those 2 days were 62 and 53. Saturday night I had a very good restful sleep and the stress graph during those hours are shown as medium stress, and high stress while I was taking a nap Sunday afternoon.

This is on a VA3, but still the same sensor and logarithm. Overall the wrist HR works well for me so I know it's not a matter of not wearing the watch correctly.

For those that get unseasonably high stress scores, this happened to me and other users after the last firmware update, when all of a sudden the stress scores doubled and barely any rest periods (blue) showed even during sleep.

It seems to be a bug and the only way it resolved was performing a hard reset. But after the reset everything immediately went back to normal and the stress readings went back to normal and working correctly.

Mind you that even if you back up your data and restore it after the hard reset (restoring to factory settings) you will still lose some settings like watch faces, VO2 value, training load, etc.

The stress score is very screwed up for me since the recent firmware update and there doesn't seem to be any way to fix it. As C966 says, even if you do a hard reset, it will only return to "normal" for a short period and then will go back to being crazy high/no rest, etc. The only way to get it fixed is for Garmin to look into it and fix it in another firmware update, but so far, I do not know if they are working on this as the last time I called it to Customer Support, not that many people had reported it as a problem. If everyone who has this problem would call into Customer Support at 800.8001020 (the US number -- not sure what to do if you are outside the US), maybe they will see it is many owners of the Fenix 5 series.

even if you do a hard reset, it will only return to "normal" for a short period and then will go back to being crazy high/no rest, etc.

Interesting what you mention that the problem came back for you after a short period, I did the reset 2 weeks ago and still seems Ok but will keep an eye on it then. Did the stress scores go crazy again all of a sudden from one day to another or did they progressively go bad? Hope they solve this soon cause it's hard to place any value on the hrv stress scores now if does come back even after a hard reset.

Hello, I notice strange stress readings as well. My overnight stress levels are extremely high (75 to 100?). Does this make sense or do you think it is the software? I find it hard to believe my body is stressed while sleeping overnight and less stressed when I am working during the day? Should I wait for an update from Garmin? Can anyone from Garmin weight in on this for the latest firmware?

Hello, I notice strange stress readings as well. My overnight stress levels are extremely high (75 to 100?). Does this make sense or do you think it is the software? I find it hard to believe my body is stressed while sleeping overnight and less stressed when I am working during the day? Should I wait for an update from Garmin? Can anyone from Garmin weight in on this for the latest firmware?

I would say that is the bug, you should be seeing bellow 50 during sleep (normally bellow 25 mostly) unless you are sick with the flue or special circumstances like that.Hard reset should bring it back to normal, but the bug may come back again until its fixed by Garmin, but nobody knows when that may be.

I have the same issue. Stress values were high all the time after latest update. Factory reset fixed them for 2 days, then the problem was back. Really annoying, as the stress feature is really nice when it is working. Maybe I should open a trouble ticket for this.

The fact that the issue goes away after hard reset and re-appears after a few days indicates that there is an incorrect input parameter that's wiped after reset but keeps being set back to the wrong value (which impacts stress calculations).

Those with an issue:
- Are you wearing the watch to bed so that resting heart rate is calculated correctly?
- Is sleep time set correctly?
- Do you have resting heart rate set to levels determined by the watch or are you using a manual value?
- Have you reviewed all values in your user profile and if yes, are any that are incomplete, inaccurate or set manually?

For me personally, one of the latest updates did change the values I am seeing (subjectively - night time stress went up from 5-10 to 10-20) but the daily stress profile aligns to how I feel and what I'd expect.