My Garmin Vivoactive gives me sleeping advice?

I am perplexed by a lot of what my new smartwatch can do and other things I am a bit apprehensive to believe that it actually can do these things and if it can, should I be afraid of this technology? I am amazed that it can get somewhat of an accurate bead on how fast my heart is beating but now I am digging into the statistics this thing can gather about you and some of it is pretty amazing... well, if it is at all based on truth that is.


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There is an interesting article on "how to" track your sleep on most Garmin watches that you can read here but I didn't really apply much of what was put in there and just left the watch to do its thing. If there is one thing I learned from working in computers for a bit in my life it is that if something is doing what you want it to do, leave it alone.

I only found out about the sleep analysis by accident because I was digging through all the amazing information that this watch is able to collect about me and "sleep" was one of the options.

Of course you do need to be wearing the watch to bed in order for it to work at all and since these watches aren't exactly super tiny this could be an eliminating factor for a lot of people. I chose to give it a try and now I am kind of intrigued by the results it is giving me the day after.


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Hopefully you wont judge me too much by how much sleep I got, it was an unusual night. I normally don't sleep that long.

I wonder how the hell this thing can have any idea how much "deep sleep" and "REM sleep" I am getting but I suppose they do have their methods of doing that sort of thing. The fact that I got so much "light sleep" and zero "deep sleep" probably isn't very good but I don't have any idea how to improve that. I do like that my normal amount of sleep, averaged across a larger time-period is nearly right on the button as far as how much we have always been told we are supposed to get.


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I guess it makes sense that I slept so much during last night when the night before I only slept for a mere 4 hours. I don't know what is going on with me in that realm. I don't normally set alarms so I am one of those lucky people that gets to sleep, for the most part, until he feels like waking up. I have a job yes, but it is on contract terms on mostly short-term projects and well, you don't need to know the details of that. I'm just lucky that I never have an alarm chasing me.


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Now check this one out. This was a considerably shorter rest, but a lot of it was "deep sleep." I woke up feeling just as refreshed, perhaps a bit more so than today, despite the fact that I slept nearly half the amount of time but achieved "deep sleep." So I don't really know what is going on there nor would I have any clue how to change it if that was even possible.

I think that it is really cool that my watch is able to give me this information but I have my reservations about how accurate it could possibly be seeing as how it is attached to my left arm, not my brain. There is a little laser that emits from the back of it so maybe I should be a little concerned about what the hell that actually is. Like most things, it is probably something that is causing cancer and we will find out about it 20 years from now.



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9 comments
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I recon I could do with about 9 hours sleep, right about now !LOL
I have heard the little green lights some how measure oxygen in your blood stream to workout your heart rate.
mine even seemed to work then I had around my ankle, held in place by my sock, then I was playing a football match.
!PIZZA

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never heard of anyone using the house arrest approach with a Garmin but I guess it makes sense!

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I've not used sleep tracking as I don't really want a watch on then. I think we can normally tell if we got enough sleep. What you need is advice if it's not going well. Would the watch stats help with that?

!BEER

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no the stats would not help with that unless there was some particular program that encouraged the right kind of sleep to happen or some sort of supplement.

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Do you talk about your watch a lot (lol). Just joking, but it is good to se what it does and maybe some others will buy one as well. From the knowing how many laps in a pool to what exercise you are doin in the gym is quite incredible. Now the sleep one maybe easier to read because a light sleep would possibly mean you move around a bit and a deep sleep is you are stationary. I may be wrong, but that kind of makes sense.

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the days where I have tons of light sleep I normally have slept too long and don't really even feel refreshed so I think there is some truth to it all

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