Inaccurate sleep tracking? Any settings to tweak?

Garmin always scores poorly for sleeping tracking, you just need to watch some of the Quantified Scientist reviews on YouTube.

Having poor sleep tracking makes some of the other garmin metrics useless, like body battery, training readiness and recovery time, as all of these are linked to sleep performance. 

By far the best sleep tracking is whoop, which lives on my right arm and the Garmin on the left, if garmin could resolve the poor sleep tracking, I would definitely ditch the whoop. 

Well that's a bit disappointing to hear, a few of the bigger features I bought this new thousand dollar gadget for, don't really work.... I guess it tells the time pretty well 

Wait. You paid 1000 dollar for a forerunner 965? US dollars?

And yeh, there are quite a number of garmin features you can put “which doesn’t work” after.

To get more accurate data which is impacted by the poor sleep tracking...I try and remember each morning what time I went to sleep the night before and I also note my specific wake up time and I edit the sleep/awake times in my Garmin connect phone app.

I just trust my body. I know when I’m recovered. I know when I’m tired. I know when to train hard or do a recovery run. Don’t need a watch to confirm (and my watch doesn’t even do that ).

(overal I’m happy with my fr 965 as replacement for my ancient fr 935. But I think it’s a replacement and not an upgrade. Usefulness is about the same. Except for the screen. Due to the very poor gesture handling the screen on my 965 is worse than on my 935)

This is a great idea. I will use this method to clean up my sleep data. But how does Garmin track sleep if we sleep later in the morning (later than the end of our pre-defined sleep schedule)? If we're sleeping, we can't manually turn on the sleep mode to track the extra sleep... Any thoughts?

In my experience, it stops once you have read your Morning Report (if you have it turned on) and it doesn't detect multiple sleep sessions well. I have seen my Body Battery increase a little (~5 points) after a nap but that is about it. The only parameter that is adjustable is the Start and End time for each day.

According to the latest research on sleep, what is the most important is ~8 hours of continuous undisturbed sleep (because of how our sleep cycle progresses from hour #1 to hour #8), so the way Garmin designed it is actually helpful. Multiple sessions totalling up to 8 hours of sleep is unlikely to help you recover anywhere as well as a single 8 hour session. Naps are good for your brain (learning, creativity etc) but they are unlikely to do anything for your physical performance.

My experience isn't the length of time that is captured, it's the sleep cycles, Garmin watches never capture sleep cycles correctly for me, with only 10 to 20 min max of deep sleep, compared to the whoop 4.0 which always captures 75 to 90 min of deep sleep. The as a result the Garmin usually scores sleep as fair, which then impacts recovery, training readiness and body battery. Without accurate sleep cycles, all the other Garmin metrics are worthless.