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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I tried wearing my Garmin to bed for a while, but the information just wasn't that interesting. I can see where science gets value out of a population study but for the N=1 population consisting of yourself, I just wasn't seeing the point.

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On the contrary, I’ve been wearing my Apple Watch nearly 24 hours a day for a few years and find the sleep info extremely useful.

Really, the primary benefit I get is twofold:

1. I know approximately how long I slept for and remind myself of that all day via a widget. A short sleep is common for me, but I end up feeling foggy. Being reminded that it’s OK, I had a poor sleep, helps ease my mind.

2. I see approximately when I fell asleep and when I woke up. I end up having to add extra time if I sleep past my alarm, but seeing that I didn’t really fall asleep until late into the night helps me manage the pattern of late nights.

Both of those are easily covered by even semi-diligently tracking your sleep on paper, but having my watch do it for me is what I like!

> I end up having to add extra time if I sleep past my alarm

I find this one a painful design decision on the Apple team's part. The end time of the normal desired sleep schedule does not mean the literal end of sleep every day. I wish they wouldn't clip the data at the end of the sleep schedule. Maybe it's because they're using heuristics and so all the data is guesstimates?

I find the Autosleep app to be much more accurate than the Watch's native sleep tracking.

I have been using Autosleep now with an apple watch 6 - for 3 years daily.

The learnings and the gamification are huge for me. I got my deep sleep up from 1.5h to consistently over 2h.

Learnings:

- early to bed makes more deep sleep. Huge difference from 10pm or 12am

- magnesium doesn’t help at all

- sauna before does help, but hard to do daily

- deep sleep less than 1.5h makes for an awful day with angry mood

- cold room: biggest lever. Haven’t pulled the trigger on an 8sleep yet. But that wouldn’t be my next thing if sleep wouldn’t be so great.

- also, as weird as it sounds: having something exciting to work on improves sleep by a lot.

YMMV

From Apple Watch, I learned I get 11 minutes of deep sleep last night, and generally average well under half an hour (for a full 8 hour typical). I can fall asleep easily, but apparently not very well. Yours sounds great.

Mine was absolute crap at sleep detection. Typically it would report that I fell asleep before I went to bed, or I was asleep longer than I was in bed.

Heart rate detection and so on was generally fine through the night, as was Hrv. I sort of wonder if the actual sleep detection is done on the phone, and if the phone is not nearby, it just fails. (My phone doesn’t go to the bedroom. Makes it far easier to actually sleep)

(Also, Watch is dead now, and didn’t replace it, so I might be misremembering the exact bits, but the results were generally paradoxical)

I've been considering buying an apple watch just for the stats. I really don't like how my co-workers watches light up when the move, or when they receive a message, so I wonder if I can turn off everything except health stat collection, at which point the whole thing seems a bit absurd.

If that's your only showstopper you can change that in settings. Look up Raise to Wake[1] and Notifications[2] in Settings.

I'm usually using Theatre Mode which keeps the screen off until an alarm or I wake it up and have pretty much all notifications off. I still get heavy use of the watch itself for timers, reminders, calendar, tracking workouts and health stats and whatnot so I'm very happy with it. [1] - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/watch/apd748b87e2a/wat...

[2] - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/watch/apd9b833c9f3/wat...

I find my Apple Watch information useful. I don't remember when I fell asleep but my apple watch does. This keeps me honest about going to be too late.

Additionally, when I first got it, I found that I was only getting 40 minutes of deep sleep which is why I was always somewhat tired. After adding magnesium to my diet I am getting around 70 minutes of deep sleep. I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint this without the data. The apple watch is the best sleep tracker [1] so your data might be too noisy to find results.

[1] https://youtu.be/LPqtfC70QTU?si=6tTayfNCkcJwDayW&t=12m30s

Does Watch accurately capture when you fell asleep, as opposed to when you lay down and stopped moving?

Not that well. You have to extrapolate from when the first first deep sleep occurs in comparison to other nights.

I used to be someone who might have a single beer with dinner a few nights per week. When I got a Garmin and saw what it did to my stress levels and sleep, I essentially stopped drinking at all except for rare social situations.

In addition to improving the numbers, I noticed a qualitative improvement in my sleep, energy levels, and exercise recovery.

What are measurements for stress levels? Are they accurate enough?

I may be wrong, but I think it's just heart rate and heart rate variability.

I find that I can pretty consistently see an increase in resting heart rate by several beats per minute the day after drinking, an elevated skin temperature and a reduction in Deep- and REM-sleep. Particularly heavy drinking will manifest itself as a large drop in heart rate variability.

Garmin wearable devices display a proprietary stress metric from their Firstbeat Analytics subsidiary. This is basically just heart rate variability (HRV) normalized to the user's baseline.

https://www.firstbeatanalytics.com/en/features/all-day-stres...

As for accuracy, compared to what? Any definition of "stress" is inherently somewhat arbitrary and subjective. There seems to be a decent correlation to how I'm feeling. But the metric isn't really actionable for most people.

Whether the measurements are accurate enough is not clear, but they are certainly precise enough. I (and all my friends) can easily see huge differences in HRV on nights of drinking, it's pretty amazing.

I had the same experience. It puts things into circumspect when you can physically see how erratic things like heart rate and sleep stage times differ with just a single drink. The difference for my was so stark you'd think it were a bug if it weren't for the fact I could spot the pattern and test to see the truth of things.

OK but once you've learned this fact (that I think you could have learned from numerous sources without any technology), what is the ongoing value of the sleep tracker? I feel it is in the category of things that you learn from but then stop needing, including a cadence meter on a bicycle, bathroom scales, and similar devices.

You never really know when it might matter. One huge thing is when I have a serious illness I can see my heart rate remains about 80bpm all night long. I know my immune system has quieted down when my nighttime heart rate gets back down in the 50s. This doesn't even require accurate sleep tracking. (In fact the watch has a hard time even noticing I'm asleep when I'm that sick, but it doesn't really matter, it's very useful.)

I also notice similar things related to heavy exercise etc.

Do you not get fever dreams? Even if I have a slight fever (say 100) my dreams are uniquely different, so I always know when I have a fever at night. Hard to explain "fever dreams" if you don't get them...

I've seen my heart rate elevated when I don't have a fever, and it can take several days to fully recover. Also no, I don't get fever dreams.

It's like the speedometer on your car. Even once you reach the speed limit, you may need to check your speedometer again and again, both for safety and comfort. Consider that different people place a different value on their health. In a high stakes environment like a school zone, you would prefer to check your speedometer more often. Also consider that the accompanying apps are gamified, as in addiction forming.

You can dial in several things if you know how well you slept:

I can judge how performant I'll be in the gym and fitness competitions - ie, how well I can push myself and recover. I can work out whether what I ate before I slept had an impact (high cards vs low, or if certain foods are a trigger for poor sleep). I can understand if things like meditation, light sources, and noises outside, among others, actually impact me or not. I'm constantly learning something new from it month by month.

It is interesting but I find Garmin data completely unreliable. For example, it claims I’m awake for 2-3 times each night for 30 minutes or more, it claims I’m asleep when I know I was on Tik Tok because I couldn’t sleep.

I enjoyed getting the metrics (not sure how accurate they were) but my garmin is so clunky it's impossible to sleep in. Great for everything else.

I wear the women's model of the smallest one they make for this exact reason. Most of the watches Garmin is making are just ridiculously big.

I had the same experience when I first started sleep tracking before beginning our start-up https://affectablesleep.com.

My oura would tell me I didn't get enough deep sleep, or REM sleep, and I was like - so what? What do I do with that information?

We're using auditory stimulation to increase the efficiency of deep sleep during the night. The data after a night of sleep is less valuable than the real-time intervention.

what do you think of binaural beats (cool edit pro did them the best, you could even use arbitrary audio) for helping with sleep?

I know it's probably a big ask to wear headphones prior to sleep but when i was younger i used binaural beats for a few years to try hacking my brain a bit. When it "clicks" the sensation is pretty noticeable and intense. I described the default "noise" binaural beats "activating" like the sound of a helicopter circling around you, but quietly and quickly.

The only research I've seen says that binaural are no more effective then monarual across the population.

But also, our stimulation isn't music, it's sound. It is 50ms timed near the peak of a slow-wave, so completely different mechanisms.

When people ask what it sounds like, my response is "if I gave you a pill, you wouldn't ask what it tastes like".

So I'm not the person to ask about binaural beats.

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