Sleep is a very important part of our life. Because “during sleep, your body is working to support healthy brain function and maintain your physical health“.
To make it easier to understand how you slept, and maybe even determine the cause of bad sleep, the latest generation Garmin watches have Garmin Sleep Score insight.
Garmin Sleep Score is a metric that will show you sleep duration, stress, deep sleep time, light sleep time, REM sleep time and awake/Restlessness sleep time. The Garmin algorhythm adds up all of these metrics and outputs an overall Sleep Score.
At first glance, this metric may not seem very useful, because “I know how I feel when I wake up”, but this metric can help discover the causes of bad sleep. For example, he helped me understand that if I eat before going to bed, I always have a lower sleep score.
Because of this, doctors and scientists unanimously agree that “It’s best to stop eating about three hours before going to bed”.
How Garmin Sleep Score looks on Garmin Connect
Let’s start with the fact that not all Garmin watches have this widget. Garmin sleep score compatible devices are:
- D2 Air X10
- D2 Mach 1
- Descent G1 Series
- Descent Mk2 Series (requires software version 12.20 or later)
- Enduro Series
- Enduro 2
- epix (Gen 2) Series
- fenix 6 Series
- fenix 7 Series
- Forerunner 255 Series
- Forerunner 745
- Forerunner 945 and 945 LTE
- Forerunner 955/955 Solar
- Instinct 2 Series
- Instinct Crossover Series
- MARQ Collection
- MARQ Collection (Gen 2)
- quatix 6 Series
- quatix 7 Series
- tactix 7 Series
- tactix Delta Series
- Venu 2 Series
- Venu Sq 2 Series
- vivosmart 5
Newer Garmin watches that were released after 2019 have this feature. So, if you have a Garmin watch that is on the list mentioned above, you can track and check your sleep score. Older Garmin watches monitor the quality of sleep, but they do not have a sleep score, but the quality of sleep can be monitored by looking at how much the Body battery has increased overnight.
In the main menu, if you scroll down a bit, you can find the Garmin Sleep score, which in my case was pretty good last night. Clicking on Garmin sleep score will take you to slightly more detailed sleep metrics.
At the top, you can select the period you want to monitor. This is a great tool to see your sleep pattern. Swipe down to see the factors that affected your sleep quality.
As you can see, my last sleep was excellent in two factors: Sleep duration and awake/restlessness. Elsewhere, the performances fell into the Fair category.
If I want to know why my sleep score stress was only fair, I can get more information by pressing on it.
Garmin Sleep Score Stress
I like, how Garmin presented the data. You can check each category and even find out what needs to be done to achieve better results.
In my case, my toddler child was waking up at that time, so Garmin did a really good job of recognizing that. Because a child crying at night, I think, causes everyone at least a certain amount of stress. 😀
Garmin Sleep Score Deep
In my case, the Deep sleep phase could have been influenced by the stress caused by a crying child at night. Also, sports exercises before the night, extended the duration of deep sleep, it is known if they are performed at least 3 hours before sleep.
Garmin Sleep Score Light
As you can see, my light sleep was too long, and it could have affected my daytime nap. As far as is known, too long light sleep can be influenced by:
- Irregular sleep
- Blue light (this is the light emitted by telephones, and TV) Blue light should be avoided for at least 60 minutes before bedtime.
- Diets.
- Caffeine, nicotine.
Garmin Sleep Score REM
REM sleep means rapid eye movement sleep. This is the phase of sleep during which people dream.
This sleep phase is very important for learning and memory function. I do not drink alcohol, but it is the main reason for the bad REM sleep phase.
Is the sleep score on Garmin accurate?
In 2019 Garmin announced Sleep Study Results. 55 participants were selected, 14 of whom reported having sleep disorders.
The study showed that “The overall accuracy of the algorithm against this real-world data was 69.7%, with the sensitivity in detecting sleep 95.8% and the specificity in detecting awake 73.4%. The Cohen’s kappa (k) value is 0.54 +/- 0.12. These results should be assessed in light of the fact that the inter-scorer agreement between two trained human scorers using PSG is approximately 83% with a Cohen’s kappa of approximately 0.78.“
As you can see, the deep sleep phase was recorded with 95.8% accuracy, awake 73.4%, and the total was 69.7%. Yes, the results are not 90-100% accurate, but they are pretty good.
Related articles:
- Garmin Activity Class. What is it?
- Garmin Acute Load: What you need to know.
- Garmin HRV: Everything you need to know.
- Garmin Connect badges: Collect them all
Conclusion
In my opinion, Garmin sleep score is a very useful thing to improve the quality of your sleep. This tool can not only help you identify sleep problems, but also provide solutions to these problems.
If you have any observations about the article or want to share insights, you can write to me directly here, or leave a comment in the comments section.
