My Garmin Forerunner 255 gives me a morning report every day. It sums up a few stats, like my sleep score and body battery, then sends me off for my daily adventures. It’s a nice little feature.
Lately, though, it’s been giving me less welcome news. You had a lousy sleep. Too much stress. Try to relax. Get better sleep. Exercise. Then rest. Why are you so stressed?
Through all of this, I haven’t felt notably different.
Take last night. If you asked me this morning to rate my sleep score, I would have guessed around 70 or so (on a scale of 1 to 100). Average, nothing special. But my actual sleep score was 47 and the description was this:
Non-restorative You slept long enough, but not well enough to bring your stress levels down overnight. You might feel higher stress or fatigue today.
Reading this does cause me stress, so it is at least partly accurate. It also meant that my body battery (which can also go to 100) began below 50 and is currently down to 9 at 4 p.m. I’m being told I had an active day and to rest. I’m not sure how low my body battery can go, but I’ll take this as a good excuse to laze around for the rest of the day.
In the meantime, I need to figure out what is causing the phantom stress and poor sleep. While I think the watch is exaggerating things, there may be some subtle change that is actually stressing me out without me being overtly aware of it.
So maybe my watch is just, uh, watching out for me1Really, it’s the natural thing to say. It’s technically not a pun.. I’ll report back if things improve, get worse, or get weird. Basically, I’ll follow-up.
