All day stress always reports HIGH since update 7.60

Yeah, I think they probably just tweaked it up a bit.

What you describe is the same for me. I get 90% of my "rest" while I am asleep. During the day, I will only get the odd blue line here and there.

To me, that makes sense. The body is doing almost 100% of it's recovery when you are sleeping. That is the most important time for recovery, so it makes sense.

This is what mine looked like on day-2 of a "rest and recovery" period (sometimes I take 2 or even 3 days doing nothing to get full recovery). I think I did 10 minutes of yoga or something, but nothing intense.

I would seem like they tweaked the sensitivity up a bit and just gave higher average values but that is not it, because all the pattern were lost, there was no sense of when it was higher or lower, there was no relation to when you were resting or stress. Its not that it simply gave higher values. The image you posted looks exactly like it used to look for everybody before 7.60 firmware including myself.

Here is a screenshot of two typical Sundays with exactly the same routine, workout and same rest. One if before 7.60 and the other after. BTW, in the post 7.60 screenshot, that sleep that shows stress above 50% I slept 8hrs, of which 3 and a half were of deep sleep, mostly on the area of the graph were its reaching 75% stress. Later did a workout of 1 hour lifting weight and then ran 5 kilometers at lactic threshold and including sprints, and it shows less stress post-exercise than during sleep, when normally as is logical after a workout I have the highest stress level which tapers off gradually until night as you can see in the pre-7.60 screenshot. After 7.60 the stress widget clearly broke, making no sense and giving no useful information, its not that the values were simply amplified.All days lok like the pic bellow regardless if I'm working, exercising, taking the day off, sick, etc.

So, I signed up for this forum explicitly to post about this. My stress widget has me in "high" stress about 25% of the time, medium stress about 25% of the time, low stress about 45% of the time, and rest about 5% of the time (only when I am asleep). It's constantly telling me that I am not resting enough, and that I'll become exhausted.

What's funny is that I have a HeartMath Inner Balance HRV biofeedback device that I use explicitly for HRV training. I can be using the Inner Balance device, and see that I have very high HRV (it actually shows you the HRV graph, and it will show you the power spectrum, and the ratio between the high and low heart rate frequencies, so you can see the data for yourself, and see how it changes over time) -- so I can see that while I am in a state of very high heart rate variability with a HR fluctuating between 60 and 70 laying on my back, my Fenix 5 will say I'm in a state of high stress.

This widget is junk! It's never worked for me, from day one.

For reference, here's yesterday's full-day stress report. Note the near complete lack of rest, even during sleep. And I had three 10-minute long HRV biofeedback sessions in the afternoon and evening, when I was resting and had confirmed and measured high HRV measured with an earlobe heart rate monitor, plus an additional 15 minute meditation session. I don't know what the wrist-based Fenix 5 widget is actually measuring, but it is NOT heart rate variability, or at least it is not calibrated properly.ciq.forums.garmin.com/.../1348481.jpg

8.99 beta seems to have fixed stress issues in my watch also, thanks Garmin. Let's hope that fix is permanent and will find its way to official version also.

It's worth noting that a high stress score is not "bad". It's just a signal that you've done a lot of work and your body is repairing and recovering (and getting stronger). Maybe you guys who are getting lots of high stress scores are just doing a lot of hard training? If you're training hard and often, it would be perfectly normal to expect high stress scores. Low stress scores wouldn't make sense. In fact, in a way, you're aiming for "high stress scores". It's telling you, "okay you've done enough work, time to recover". If they tweaked it so that the stress scores went down and everyone was getting low stress all the time, that could be interpretted as, "you're not working out hard enough or often enough".

However, if you're not training very intensely, or not doing it very often, then you definitely shouldn't be getting high stress scores all the time (unless you're drinking booze every night).

Are you guys actively recovering? As in making a plan to recover after a hard workout day with no workouts, no alcohol or coffee, plenty of water and an early night in bed? That is how I got my stress levels to go down on v8.0.0 (screenshot above). It actually took a couple of days of that, but the stress level did go down.

Also, if you hard reset the watch, everything would back to normal and you would see normal patterns again that corresponded with your stress and activities. But after 2-10 days, the values would gradually start to get corrupted until it reached the same situation again.

But if you reset the watch, isn't that throwing out your "history"? Maybe when you get the watch new (or reset it), it just assumes you're in a "perfectly rested state" and have done "no workouts recently" by default, just as a starting point, and it takes 2-10 days for it to "calibrate" itself to your sleep patterns and activity level?

On the other hand, maybe it is just broken for some people. I have no idea. I'm not claiming there is no problem. Maybe there is a bug that just hasn't effected my watch for whatever reason. All I know is that it seems to work how it should for me personally. Maybe I'm just lucky and have avoided the bug somehow?

It's worth noting that a high stress score is not "bad". It's just a signal that you've done a lot of work and your body is repairing and recovering (and getting stronger). Maybe you guys who are getting lots of high stress scores are just doing a lot of hard training? If you're training hard and often, it would be perfectly normal to expect high stress scores. Low stress scores wouldn't make sense. In fact, in a way, you're aiming for "high stress scores". It's telling you, "okay you've done enough work, time to recover". If they tweaked it so that the stress scores went down and everyone was getting low stress all the time, that could be interpretted as, "you're not working out hard enough or often enough".

However, if you're not training very intensely, or not doing it very often, then you definitely shouldn't be getting high stress scores all the time (unless you're drinking booze every night).

Are you guys actively recovering? As in making a plan to recover after a hard workout day with no workouts, no alcohol or coffee, plenty of water and an early night in bed? That is how I got my stress levels to go down on v8.0.0 (screenshot above). It actually took a couple of days of that, but the stress level did go down.

The point I'm trying to get across is that everything is the same as before 7.60, no drinking, same workout routines and intensity, same rest, all other metrics are normal (RestingHR, training load and effort, performance, sleep, etc) is just the HRV widget that went completely out of whack after 7.60 and does not correspond to all other parameters, and before 7.60 it did correspond. It is not simply that its giving somewhat proportionally higher values than before or if its more sensitive to changes, if that were the case it would be no problem since the specific value is of no interest, its the overall zones they fall in and their trends, and those would still be there and that is not the case.

Seems not everybody have this bug (you don't appear to fortunately), but others do, in my case it was clear with my Fenix5 after 7.60, and a bit later same exact thing happened to my wife and her Vivoactive3. Anyway seems it has been fixed now, hopefully.

The point I'm trying to get across is that everything is the same as before 7.60, no drinking, same workout routines and intensity, same rest, all other metrics are normal (RestingHR, training load and effort, performance, sleep, etc) is just the HRV widget that went completely out of whack after 7.60 and does not correspond to all other parameters, and before 7.60 it did correspond. It is not simply that its giving somewhat proportionally higher values than before or if its more sensitive to changes, if that were the case it would be no problem since the specific value is of no interest, its the overall zones they fall in and their trends, and those would still be there and that is not the case.

Seems not everybody have this bug (you don't appear to fortunately), but others do, in my case it was clear with my Fenix5 after 7.60, and a bit later same exact thing happened to my wife and her Vivoactive3. Anyway seems it has been fixed now, hopefully.

+1

The point I'm trying to get across is that everything is the same as before 7.60, no drinking, same workout routines and intensity, same rest, all other metrics are normal (RestingHR, training load and effort, performance, sleep, etc) is just the HRV widget that went completely out of whack after 7.60 and does not correspond to all other parameters, and before 7.60 it did correspond. It is not simply that its giving somewhat proportionally higher values than before or if its more sensitive to changes, if that were the case it would be no problem since the specific value is of no interest, its the overall zones they fall in and their trends, and those would still be there and that is not the case.

Seems not everybody have this bug (you don't appear to fortunately), but others do, in my case it was clear with my Fenix5 after 7.60, and a bit later same exact thing happened to my wife and her Vivoactive3. Anyway seems it has been fixed now, hopefully.

Yeah mate, I understand. It seems that for whatever reason, I've been lucky and just not got that bug you guys are talking about.

Perhaps it's due to my locale, or the fact that I got the watch quite recently (I think I updated it to v8.0.0 before I even strapped it on my wrist).

Yeah mate, I understand. It seems that for whatever reason, I've been lucky and just not got that bug you guys are talking about.

Perhaps it's due to my locale, or the fact that I got the watch quite recently (I think I updated it to v8.0.0 before I even strapped it on my wrist).

For me, firmware had absolutely nothing to do with this. I got wonky readings when I bought the device in December, and I got wonky readings with each subsequent update. I even updated to the most recent beta after reading this forum (8.54) and I'm still getting the same wonky readings. I did try the hard reset trick, and I got normal readings for one day, like others suggested, but after that one day, it went back to high stress all the time, with basically no rest.

Is it maybe a skin type issue? Does the photo monitor have trouble measuring the R-R interval with certain skin types?