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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

FWIW I have been using a flex 2 for two weeks now and I couldn 't believe how I messed up my sleep. I was a trainwreck and going for no more than 5 hours per night while misevaluating my sleep time to 7-8h. I decided to break the cycle and I have been sleeping much more for one week and already can see the difference. I think I should have bought an alta or a charge to get the benefits of the HR monitor. Still, I am glad I bought one. It was a reality check. And I bought it because I really wanted an vibrating wrist alarm.

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If you get one with the HR tracking, you get more detailed info on your sleep stages - https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2163

I'm with you though. I thought I was doing a good job on sleep and then picked up a Charge 2 and was super surprised at just how little I was getting. It's helped me get better at going to bed at a reasonable hour.

How accurate are these things, really?

I don't sleep much, I never have. However, I can pretty much shut my body down and meditate, which probably has similar outward physiological expressions as sleep.

I call it my time in my rejuvenation center. It isn't sleep. I'll do that for hours and then get three to five hours of sleep - estimating, of course.

When I did my sleep study, they asked me to not do that. So, I sat there awake and it was not a very fruitful study. I am sure I am not unique but I am only finding generic information when I search.

Are you aware of the condition known as Pseudoinsomnia?

I am. But, in thus case, I can tell you when the dog got on the bed, when the missus moved, etc... I'm very much awake and alert to my surroundings.

You can be aware of those things in lighter levels of sleep. Some of the protocols used in lucid dreaming research rely on it.

I could but I think I will trust the doctor. We had this conversation. I can just lay there and do something, but I prefer to meditate as it seems to offer some level of rejuvenation.

I'm not sure I follow.

By slowing myself down to a restful position, it affords some of the same benefits of sleep. I am very much awake for those few hours, and then I fall asleep. There's no pseudoinsomnia involved.

I stay nearly perfectly still, inasmuch as a human can, and meditate. Once I am asleep, I guess I toss and turn, as well as snore. I highly doubt that I am unique, in these regards.

The proscribed medical solution is a rotation of pharmacutical sleep aids. I don't usually bother with them, as I dislike the groggy feeling that I have the following day.

But yeah, I am very much awake. My pulse rate slows, as does my respiration. At some point, I'll change position and that's when I have actually fallen asleep. The duration varies, and I sometimes just give up and go do something else.

Prescribed? Proscribed means forbidden.

It was either autocorrect or a brainfart.

So it's basically a nap?

How is the vibrating alarm? Is it a nicer experience in the morning?

I have the Fitbit Blaze and I really like the vibrating alarm. I have it set a few minutes before my phone alarm. It always wakes me up so I have time to pick up my phone and kill the alarm before it wakes my wife. I also find I'm less "startled" by the vibration than the alarm sound (though using alarm sounds which increase in volume over time help that too).

This has been my experience as well... Coming out of deep sleep to a blaring alarm clock is about the worst case scenario. If I can get natural light or a vibrating alarm to "warn" me, I'm much more receptive to the strong alarm and able to become alert much more quickly.

Right now, I don't have much control over ambient light, but I'd like to find a solution. I think that probably means automatically opening window shades in the summer (anyone tried this?) and, since I live in Seattle, a 10 KW spotlight rigged to a timer in the winter...

I bought it to wake up without waking my wife. Unfortunately the motor makes enough noise in a silent bedroom that it woke my wife anyway.

Similar story here. I always thought I slept like the dead and nothing short of a force of nature could wake me.

Fitbit rolled out their new sleep types tracking and I find out I'm actually a super light sleeper. Most nights I don't get anywhere near the low-end benchmark for Deep Sleep and I overshoot the high-end benchmark for Light Sleep by many points.

It's weird because my subjective experience and the data that Fitbit shows are so out of whack. I could swear that I sleep well, but nope.

Crazy thought, but perhaps the device is actually pretty terrible at measuring when the user is asleep? Wrist-band heart-rate monitors are known to be fairly less accurate than chest-band HRMs.

I hate to be so pessimistic but since Fitbit doesn't measure brain waves (among many other things) any "sleep" data generated by the Fitbit is somewhere between those novelty love tester machines and random bits in accuracy. Don't trust it over your subjective experience.

>I could swear that I sleep well, but nope.

Who's really right here then? I'm curious, if you have some nights where the Fitbit says you sleep better or worse than average, does that correlate with your subjective experience?

Or possibly not all 7 billion people need the same amount of each sleep stage? Maybe you and your Fitbit are both right, but the benchmark is wrong for you.

All the stages have some benefit. https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2163#Dif...

Just curious, could you elaborate on how you were so far off on your sleep estimation? Microsoft's Band has had this feature since its inception, and while the graphs are pretty, I found it utterly useless. My personal experience was that it told me exactly what I already knew.

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