[99094]

My Garmin (255s) is pretty inaccurate when it comes to sleep. It often mistakes REM for awake and vice versa. Honestly, nowadays I only wear it for my runs. Even if it was accurate, I can just tell by feel. All the metrics such as sleep, resting HR and HRV are pretty bad compared to your nervous system.

The metrics aren't really actionable either. I got a bad night of sleep, so what? I know it. I have low HRV because I drank alcohol/over-trained/am ill. I don’t need a watch to tell me that. I know it.

It’s just collecting data for the sake of collecting data.

[petre]

I've changed my 250 to an Insight 2. It's an improvement and it helped me be more attentive with my sleep, exercise. I don't do runs but walks, hiking, cycling and several water sports during summer. It's also used as a HR sensor for my cycling Garmin device.

[csdvrx]

> It’s just collecting data for the sake of collecting data.

No, sleep is one of the most important parameters for health!

If in 2024 you are not collecting data on your sleep to take action (and for ex, stop overtraining, reduce drinking etc) to reduce the risks of future brain problems, you are doing it wrong.

> Even if it was accurate, I can just tell by feel

I can't, and I fear it may be the same "overconfidence" issue that cause car accidents when drunk.

I collect logs with my sqlite based bash history collection that I've been running for 5 years: https://github.com/csdvrx/bash-timestamping-sqlite

Thanks to my garmin, I have identified a pattern where I feel ok, but my garmin reported less REM sleep than usual: in the day, I run more commands than usual but I have way more mistakes (as can be seen by the non-zero return values)

So now, when my watch reports low REM sleep, I try to be very careful to avoid negative-productivity days

[ocharles]

Sleep isn't the metric to track here, there are much better things to analyze such as HRV. For reducing drinking you shouldn't be doing that because of your sleep, you should be doing it because of your overall health. If you care about future health, take blood tests, weigh yourself, evaluate your physical fitness.

[csdvrx]

Personally, I don't drink, and I've noticed sleep to be the best indicator of my coding performance but YMMV