I will gladly invest in a more accessible developer ecosystem.
It would be better to only look at the stats after playing if you want to verify it, this could easily be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I've slept with my watch for a while (stopped because the battery is crap and I need to charge it every day or it won't last past noon the next day) and I've had the same adjustment period.
I also think some people are just more sensitive to these things. Some sleep with full-on CPAP machines hooked up to their faces like it's nothing, but others can barely stand wearing clothes when they're sleeping. Plus, some watches are more comfortable than others.
I'm guessing this is an Apple Watch? Garmins typically last a week or more.
The rings (notably Oura) are much better. I used to wear both and they gave completely different results, with the Oura being far more accurate to how I feel and the timings of going to sleep and waking up. Garmin almost always reckoned I woke up an hour earlier than I did and ended the tracking there.
It's honestly best not to get too involved in tracking sleep. The analysis does more to ruin your mood and give you nocebo effect than it really gives useful information.
I will confess, I do still wear my Garmin to bed because I like the vibration alarm over anything audible.
Smart "bands" tend to be less perceptible.
Much better than a smart ring.
Maybe it is not super accurate, but it was eye-opening for me to see how the score changes for the worse even with a little bit of alcohol. I am way more careful with when and how much I drink since I've started wearing a Fenix 6 few years back
Taking that drug, however, it sees far fewer gaps and I show up in the blue "rest" zone most of the time.
I've been watching my heart rate a lot in the last month part because of health concerns and part because of a new stance I am practicing that has a physical component (e.g. adjusted gaits that are energy efficient) and a mental component, being an oceanic reservoir of calm with close mind-body-environment coupling 95% of the time but disconnecting that connection under peak stress -- like I am standing between two people who are screaming at each other and holding a barrier at my chest that I don't let my breathing cross and glance at my watch and my HR is 52 and it is not just the nebivolol talking because when I lose my shit it would be more like 70.
People taught me conventional Pranayama (diaphragmatic breathing) as a kid and it never helped me in "lose my shit" situations involving unstable environments and moral injury, with the intense practice I was doing recently it was clear to me that I was never going to do it better and I started researching emergency techniques for managing sympathetic overload and that one worked for me and now I feel like one of the people in [1] particularly when I show people my HRV web app [2] and demonstrate that I can turn my Mayer oscillation off
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain in the sense of ironclad autonomic control but with full sensory perception
[2] ... soon to be on Github
(2) Walking forward as if pushing through something with a forward lean. I was in a small building and this was awkward and my body searched through the crouching and hip swinging gaits as I tried this, I thought it might have been better in a bigger space and might give it a try sometime.
(3) What did work was the 'chest barrier' which is holding the chest absolutely rigid and NOT paying attention to whatever my body is doing to breathe. Since I have been practicing diaphragmatic breathing heavily I find that my body does that automatically and it just doesn't expand through or past my chest.
This works amazingly well. When I tried it I got flash of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion where the robot is raging out of control and they pull the power cable on it and it tries smashing it's way into the control room while an observer stands his or her [1] ground at the window before the battery runs out.
I added a "pull the cable" visualization and definitely sense that brave observer appear in my head, although I also realized that in this mind-body interaction it is the mind that is to blame because it brought in some trouble that it thought about from elsewhere. Trying to control the body consciously is a disaster in this situation because disturbances from the mind are coupled efficiently into the body and disturbances from the body are coupled into the mind. So I focus on holding the chest and only on holding the chest.
[1] it happens twice
I know it's tracking real data, but the conclusions feel completely made up.
What are other people's experience -- especially from those who are more bullish about sleep tracking?
Originally I got this app for its alarm, it tries to go off in the half hour before the alarm time when you're already partially awake. The sleep tracking was just a bonus.
But there have been three aspects of sleep tracking that have been mildly useful:
1. A few times my heart rate variability went haywire and the sleep scores didn't match how I felt, and it turned out I was sick and had not yet noticed any symptoms. Since then it has been mildly useful to have a heads up when I'm probably coming down with something before symptoms show up.
2. You can use their Lifestyle Logging to track how things like caffeine, alcohol, and various nighttime routines affect your sleep. I mean, I haven't discovered anything that's not already common knowledge, but somehow having hard data makes it more compelling. I suppose if I was going to trial any sleep aids then Garmin's correlation would be convenient and save me from having to maintain my own spreadsheet.
3. It alters the suggested workouts if you haven't been sleeping well. Trivial to do manually, but it's a convenient reminder not to overextend.
It's not perfect - there are definitely days when it's wrong. But overall I have a target of keeping my sleep and energy scores in the 90s and it's helpful. I think the most important thing is to keep in mind that it's an imperfect measurements but it's still the best one most of us have for now.
Time in deep sleep is not a direct marker of slow-wave delta power, which is just one of the measures of repair and glymphatic flush which occurs during deep sleep.
If slow-wave activity is slightly impaired, your brain can try to make up for that reduction by increasing time in deep sleep.
However, larger impairments mean your brain will struggle to stay in deep sleep.
This is why our work at https://affectablesleep.com focuses directly on enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep (and specifically deep sleep) rather than focusing on time.
I do have an iOS shortcut that tracks my mood with janky emojis. I use it at least once daily.
I don’t trust the raw numbers at all, really, but since i’m wearing the same sensor i can use it to spot trends at least.
Or that’s what i tell myself anyway…
Oura for measuring sleep. Garmin for tracking physical exercise. Oura always reflected the timings and my feeling much closer than Garmin (Enduro), which basically always told me I had bad sleep (started late after my last woken moments and ended an hour early).
My own thought, it's honestly best not to track sleep unless you feel you have an underlying issue. It causes more anxiety than it solves. If you're tired, go to bed earlier, adjust tech use and food consumption before bed.
Apparently your study is strictly about cardio.
Heavier compound lifts can surely knock me out for 30 minutes to 2 hours. I don't know how in the heck people train in the mornings. But a lot of this is because they are complex cognitive tasks.
A small curiosity: I recently learned that sleep trackers in commercial wearables are terrible for people with sleep disorders like apneas, UARS, etc. It makes sense, as this isn't a typical dataset, but it's worth knowing.
see https://fitnessvolt.com/rhonda-patrick-and-darren-candow-cre... and https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine
Not much research in this area and I don't see anyway that a smartwatch can/could track this.
Measuring sleep by time is an antiquated idea, and the industry is just barely starting to move away from this metric. You wouldn't measure your diet based on how much time you spend chewing.
Decreased slow-wave activity, the hallmark of deep sleep, can increase time spent in deep sleep as your brain tries to compensate for the lack. This only works to a certain point, and with significant decrease, such as after drinking alcohol, your brain is unable to make up for the deficit and is actually unable to stay in deep sleep. The deep sleep length doesn't map directly to function.
Chess is an interesting metric because there is an opponent being played against, so what does that really say about the players mental clarity? There are too many factors.
I wonder if sleep regularity (consistent wake in particular) was a metric which was fed into the algorithm, and if it did not correlate?
Though many people say "garmin (smartwatch X) isn't good at tracking" that misses the point that tracking time isn't a valuable metric, and why so many people say "my sleep score doesn't match what my watch tells me".
Beyond just tracking, we have the ability to directly enhance the Neural Function of Sleep, and this is what we're working on at https://affectablesleep.com
However breaking people away from the "sleep time metric" is a challenging one.
