Sleep Mode Issues

I have an up to date Epix 2.  Great watch.  I am coming from an Apple watch 4, I believe, and with that, sleep mode was simple - you activate it when you go to bed, and de-activate it when you wake.  Seems like a no brainer.  But with the Epix, you have manual activation modes, sleep schedules, and I don't know what else.  I had time input for all the days of the week, but if I stayed up past the activation time, the watch goes into sleep screen, which is a pain in the ass if you are trying to do something with it.  So I input all days at 0000 to 0001 to try to bypass this.  Last night I went to bed, activated sleep mode at roughly around 2200 or so, and when I awoke at 6 to stop it, I see that it didn't actually start until 0200 something.  I am trying to figure if it is me, or does the sleep mode on this thing just plain suck.  It also shows me getting poor sleep when it does work.  I wore the Apple watch one night on the other arm, and it showed better sleep, but not so much so that it concerned me.  I am hoping I am doing something wrong, because I would like to get some consistent sleep and sleep pulse Ox readings.  Thank you.

  • Hope I can help you. Garmin has sleep tracking and a sleep mode which conserves battery. So in your sleep mode you define during which timeslots you normally sleep and therefore would like the watch to use the night watchface next to some other battey saving settings and do not disturb setting. As far as I know, the epix will start and stop your sleep tracking based upon your movement. I have sleep mode setup daily from 2300 until 0700. When I go to sleep at 22 or at midnight, it will track my sleep from that moment based on my movement, not from 23. It will stop when I awake and start to move around.

  • Thank you, Rene.  So if I understand, sleep tracking and sleep mode are totally disassociated??  Sleep mode is a battery saving operation, and sleep tracking is strictly a movement based operation?  I wonder why it doesn't register naps, then.  I must have moved too much for the watch to enter sleep tracking.  As I said, I like the watch, but that seems like a pretty piss poor way to monitor one's sleep.  But I will at least go back and enter the sleep mode times to save some battery life.  Thank you again. 

  • It doesn't track naps because Garmin allows only one sleep cycle per day. Naps(when HR/stress levels are low enough) are recharging the body battery so they are considered for the recovery or similar stuff but they are not included within the sleep score.

  • @ CaptMike748 -- and you can see them in your bodybattery chart. Makes sense when you think about it, as naps are not about recovery sleep, more about body recharge, hence having it under bodybattey recharging it makes far more sense.

    Part of sleep score and sleep stage tracking is to confirm you get sufficient deep (13-23% - Garmin/Sleep Foundation use slightly different values to most other foundations/clinics) and Rem (20-25%) of overall sleep duration; to ensure that your body is getting the necessary amount. Based on how sleep stages tend to work, and the fact that naps really have no definable benefit over 40mins (can be detrimental if you consider waking up groggy as detrimental); you would be adding a lot of additional light sleep duration, possibly with a bit of deep mixed in --> this would skew your deep / rem averages and impact your overall quality of sleep (and partially why naps are recommended to be power naps and be short).

  • Man, you guys know your sleep.  I appreciate the replies.