Inaccurate sleep tracking? Any settings to tweak?

I'm finding my 'bed time' to be way off, it will show me asleep as soon as I hit the lounge of a night, last night that led to 4hrs of extra sleep being logged. I've had a bit of a search around and I see suggestions to just edit the time, but that's not a great solution, are there any settings related to the sleep sensors and their sensitivity, whatever those sensors are?

  • With the advances in technology, why is this still an issue?  I was awake half the night with insomnia and the fing thing says my sleep was excellent 

  • With the advances in technology, why is this still happening? I was awake half the night last night with insomnia and the effing watch says my sleep score was excellent!

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member 11 months ago

    Just swapped from a Fitbit and the Garmin’s sleep tracking is hopeless in comparison. Awake hours are so inaccurate!

  • Here is my sleep tracking last night. I was waken and no sleep was activated, and ater one hour suddenly I have this;

    51 hours and 52 minutes sleeping time even I was waken when I suddenly got this lol Slight smile

    And my closk show this;

    Sooo .. The watch does not agree with the Garmin Connet app/web or vice versa as they show completely different (and wrong) sleep times :)

    This scenario happened when I was awake :O Joy

  • There are so many variables that go into accurate sleep data tracking that there's exactly zero chance you're getting any helpful feedback from your smart watch. In fact your life could become profoundly disrupted if you rely on the Garmin sleep tracking stats. Inconsistency in training, medications, a bad day, evening activities, beginning new exercise routine, ramping up your training, getting a cold, getting older, being too productive at work, etc, etc., all will probably lead to bad sleep scores and low body battery. Psychologically you're now primed to have unproductive bad days hoping your battery doesn't crash. I just think the sleep tracking shouldn't be so aggressive trying to convince you how bad you should be feeling. I don't think it's accurate at all with how it measures wakefullness by subtracting this very natural part of our sleep out of the total time slept making us believe we've gotten far less sleep when we haven't. If you don't remember being awake then you are in your natural wakeful part of the sleep cycle. This should not be subtracted from the total sleep time. I'm totally done with tracking sleep on my Garmin from here on. I know I sleep way better and way longer than this terrible tracker tells me and it's tiring and stressful to wake up having been asleep for 9 hours and feeling great then look at my watch and see it says 6 hours and btw your bady battery only went up to 35 overnight. Every night. Perhaps I got a bad device but my experience with this 6 month old Vivoactive 5 has been a disaster.

  • I used Polar for all years until i Recently changed to Garmin. Polar mainly scored sleep og HRV, heart rate and movement. It was a much better predictor of how I felt the day after. On the Garmin I don't pay much attention to the sleep score, but I do look at it and it does annoy me.

    This morning I was sleeping well and dreaming a lot. Garmin scored 0 REM sleep and that I slept poorly. My heart rate was low through the night, and HRV high. I had a good night sleep.

    The HRV tracking is a better number to follow then the sleep score. If my HRV was low during the night, chances are high I had a bad night.

  • I 100% agree. This is the bad thing with Garmin. Sleep tracking should be scored as per a baseline HRV, heart rate and time. And generally give you positive feedback. Garmin keeps telling me I need 8-9 hours sleep when I naturally wake up rested after 7.5 hours, without an alarm. And it tells me i should feel like *** when I feel strong and rested. If i go earlier to bed i wake up earlier, meaning it's a good indicator that 7.5 h is the target for me. My Garmin forerunner 955 is basically trying to convince me to not train (low training readiness) and sleep more. The body battery I don't even look at. It has no value to me.

  • @Pete1336 - Thank you for great tip!

    Thought it didn't capture the sleep depth details, the hours are correct, which makes the body battery useful again.

  • so let us summarize:

    Sleep Tracking with Garmin is inaccurate. So all that relies on it is useless.
    Heart Rate with Garmin is inaccurate. So all that relies on it is useless.
    Distance tracking with Garmin is inaccurate. So all that relies on it is more or less useless.

    Is there anything left that is useful? Maybe to use it as a watch?

    So sad. In the meanwhile i am using my Garmin mainly as a receiver for the Polar HRM to get the data into other tools for further analysis.