Sleep tracking on Fenix 7, what are your first impressions?

Chadman said:

That is OK. If sleep tracking is that important, then you shouldn't use a watch to track it. 

That's not a viable position for Garmin given that its entire premise is based on total fitness performance monitoring and improvement. If you can't accurately monitor sleep (including multiples thereof), you don't really have a credible proposition to gauge exercise recovery and overall health.

My Huawei GT2 Pro (and previous models) mostly nails my (multiple + naps) sleep times to within a couple of minutes. The consistency of its accuracy is astounding.

The attraction of Garmin is to have all of my sensor driven metrics in one app. It remains to be seen if my Fenix will convert me entirely to the Garmin universe but the Garmin sleep tracking options are a big red flag at the moment. If Garmin don't deal with it, they're leaving the door open to a dispersed architecture and diverse application environment and, with that, the loss of any claim to the total performance monitoring throne to the advantage of Wahoo, Huawei, Google Fit & Co.

I understand. All I am trying to say is that if you want the best sleep tracking available, it isn't through a wrist based sensor but rather a dedicated one. I personally find the information useful but sometime chuckle at the results. Like when it tells me i got 0% deep sleep, haha. 

I never see my watch not to catch deep sleep, not that I'm sure that it caught it correctly. But technically, how can you be sure that you had that deep sleep unless you've used polysomnography at the same night? ;)

I'm kinda relieved to hear you say this only because it means I'm not the only one.  Same experience here.  I also, upgraded from a a 5 Plus and always thought I was getting robbed on Deep sleep.  With the 7, the Deep sleep seems reasonably accurate, at least I think it is. It's at least in the low-normal range despite my excellent sleep habits (no alcohol, moderate to intense exercise, same sleep time every day, no screen time before bed, dark quiet room, etc), but its telling me I get about 45 minutes of REM sleep a night.  The 5 Plus seemed over generous with REM.  You can see it in my charts, the only thing that changed was the watch and the stats are barely comparable.  Very frustrated.  It also tells me I wake when I definitely don't, and there isn't even a movement spike when these awake times are recorded.  The start and end times are very accurate for me, on both watches, its just that the sleep cycles seem garbage.

It's horrible. Says I wake up 5 times a night. Then says I shouldn't run coz of poor sleep. None of this is true because I run anyway and hit good numbers.

For the life of me I don’t understand Garmin’s resistance to supporting naps. It’s infuriating. Fitbit does it. Samsung does it. The Apple Watch can do it (AutoSleep app is phenomenal). Xiaomi can do it. Like what’s the problem here? A $25 tracker can pick up naps, but not a $900 one? 

It may seem inconsequential, but the reason I’d pay $900 for a watch is for it to be the best, most all-encompassing data collector. Omitting naps is an unfortunate misstep for an otherwise great device. I own a Fenix 6s and want to upgrade to another Garmin watch, but finding it hard to justify without a feature I’m getting from my Galaxy Watch, Apple Watch, and old Fitbit I no longer use. I swap between Android and iOS often, hence the Apple and Galaxy Watch. Garmin could be the best platform agnostic watch, but until the rudimentary feature of nap tracking is added - it’s not. 

Basically, sleep tracking is important to me

Pretty bad for me.  My last watch was a Fenix 3, so can't compare to anything more recent.  The only thing that seems improved is tracking start and stop time for sleep.  The actual stages seem awful.  The F3 showed what seemed like a reasonable progression of sleep stages and a reasonable amount of deep/light sleep (it didn't do REM).  It seemed to fit with my own sense of how I was doing. I often had to correct the begin/end time but once I did it would have pretty good data.

The F7 seems to get begin/end window really well, but says I get almost no deep sleep at all, and wake up far more than I experience.  In the month I've been wearing it, it's given me almost all Poor sleep scores, with a few Fair. Even when I get a really good night's sleep.  I'm 64 - I don't know if Garmin takes age into account in terms of what it considers "healthy" sleep. But similar to another reviewer, I should be falling apart based on Garmin's analysis of my sleep.

Interestingly though, body battery seems really good.

My sleep data is way off. In just one week of using my Fenix 7, I’m disappointed. It says each night I’m awake for 45 minutes a night and get 15 minutes of REM. My instinct seemed much more accurate

My Fenix 5 Plus reported stats that were what I would expect, extremely consistent. When I first got the Fenix 7 it was telling me I was getting such little REM that I would probably go mentally insane relatively soon. Now, all of sudden, even though my lifestyle has not changed one iota, its telling me I am getting fairly good REM and close to zero Deep.  WTF?  Are they just fiddling with the output so that the majority of the users are getting somewhat believable results?  Maybe just tweaking it until the number of complaints goes down?  Is that success?  Well, I won't stop complaining until I get results that are accurate.

HINT: For those of you who can't get any REM, try this trick, works for me like a charm, wake up and fiddle with your phone for about 45 minutes.  Read the news, solve the Wordle, read garmin forum posts about how poor sleep tracking is, and you are guaranteed to get REM sleep for this. I swear!  This is how I get my watch to tell me I got REM and that I'll have a creative and productive day, by procrastinating in bed.  Pffft.