Forerunner 965 worst sleep tracker

Ive had my Fitbit Versa 2 before, and never had any problem with sleeping accuracy or sleep hour count, maybe 1 out of 10 errors occurred, but not noticeably. I transferred to a Garmin Fenix 65 due to limited capabilities and a weak battery; it's also old. I expected it to surpass everything my Versa 2 produced, especially in sleep tracking, because it is more than twice as expensive. To my shock, it has worse sleeping accuracy-worse than those cheap knock-off watches with sleep counting. I have often slept for only 3 hours, but my Garmin keeps saying 5-6 hours. You know you sleep terribly when you feel sleepy, have a headache, and are in bad condition, but this watch keeps saying I slept well. I never had this kind of problem with my Versa 2. Now I am struggling because I keep getting the same problem; it feels like 7 out of 10 times there is a problem with my sleep count. Does anyone have this problem or know how to fix it?

  • I was going to chime in and say I did not buy my 965 for tracking sleep. Any data it produces, at least for me, is anecdotal. 

    However, it is very interesting that your Versa 2 does a better job. I had lousy experiences with all my Fitbits dying prematurely, so switched to Garmin. Very I did. Very happy I did. 

  • I have never noticed any issues with my 965's Sleep Tracking, I don't look at it super close, I monitor more the higher level things that take into account more overall health/recovery status.... like Body Battery, Training Readiness and HRV Status.  All of which typically make lots of sense, with amount sleep, stress, training that I have done. 

  • Garmin users (including me) have some expectations. One of them is that if I have the watch 24/7 on with all sensors enabled it should be able to figure out when I sleep. I also think that this should work way better as it does... From reading (not too closely) forums regarding the sleep tracking it seems to me that Garmin has problems with it (maybe technical, maybe legal) and that there is one input that we users seem to ignore (or we think it has a different meaning) is the settings of "Sleep mode > Schedule" (and then there's even more confusion because there's a "similar" setting for "Do not disturb" which BTW has part of the settings under Sleep Mode, and part next to it under it's own menu: Do not disturb)
    I thought these are settings that affect the battery usage and how my watchface looks/behaves during the night, but apparently it is also a very important input for the sleep/nap detection. (In my words I would say: Garmin doesn't know how to detect when I sleep, so instead they fake it and basically use the sleep schedule setting...)

  • What software version are you on? 21.22?

  • The sleep tracking accuracy seems to vary quite a lot from person to person. To give another data point, for some reason it works quite well for me. I've only had a couple of cases where the watch has incorrectly though I was sleeping, and for normal sleep it seems to record my sleeping times (and nightly awakenings) surprisingly well. I rarely nap, so cannot comment on that (and when I do take a nap, I turn on the nap timer manually to wake me up).

    But this is of course not to say that sleep tracking doesn't work well for some and probably needs additional work from Garmin.