When I started wearing a watch, it constantly distracted me and cause minor annoyance all day while I got used to it. At some point it just started blending into the background. Now, when I wear my watch on my other hand, I still have the same problem, but I don't notice my watch normally anymore.

I've slept with my watch for a while (stopped because the battery is crap and I need to charge it every day or it won't last past noon the next day) and I've had the same adjustment period.

I also think some people are just more sensitive to these things. Some sleep with full-on CPAP machines hooked up to their faces like it's nothing, but others can barely stand wearing clothes when they're sleeping. Plus, some watches are more comfortable than others.

People used to sleep with watches 50 years ago too. You just get used to it.

Not sure why Garmin or any of the exercise tracking watches are being used for sleep tracking. They're infamously bad at it from my experience.

The rings (notably Oura) are much better. I used to wear both and they gave completely different results, with the Oura being far more accurate to how I feel and the timings of going to sleep and waking up. Garmin almost always reckoned I woke up an hour earlier than I did and ended the tracking there.

It's honestly best not to get too involved in tracking sleep. The analysis does more to ruin your mood and give you nocebo effect than it really gives useful information.

I will confess, I do still wear my Garmin to bed because I like the vibration alarm over anything audible.

Nylon straps are pretty comfortable. The default strap with the metal buckle would dig in to my wrist, and also it was difficult to have a perfect fit since you had to pick a hole. The nylon strap allows for analogue refinement.

I'm the opposite; I do not like wearing rings. I have no issue with my watch, however.

The Garmin sleep tracker is reportedly pretty comfortable.

I don't wear one anymore, but I used to put in on an ankle overnight. I would wear a sock on that foot so that I didn't tear it off with my other foot during sleep.

I thought the same, I just got used to it after a few days (even if I wear a slimmer watch from Suunto)

I use an Android app called "Sleep", it just works by accelerometer with your phone on the corner of your bed. I've found it's not really good with its automatic rating and suggestions, but the activity graph has an extremely reliable wave pattern on the mornings I am well rested. Like an hour and a half of no movement at all, then an hour of restlessness, which repeats through the night. Usually the hour of restlessness even has the same pattern each time it happens. But any other pattern and I generally feel tired the whole morning.

Originally I got this app for its alarm, it tries to go off in the half hour before the alarm time when you're already partially awake. The sleep tracking was just a bonus.

I find Garmin's sleep tracking "accurate" in that it typically matches how I feel the next day, but that also makes it not terribly useful because I don't really need a gadget to tell me when I feel tired. Mostly I wear the watch to sleep out of inertia and in case I need a flashlight in the middle of the night.

But there have been three aspects of sleep tracking that have been mildly useful:

1. A few times my heart rate variability went haywire and the sleep scores didn't match how I felt, and it turned out I was sick and had not yet noticed any symptoms. Since then it has been mildly useful to have a heads up when I'm probably coming down with something before symptoms show up.

2. You can use their Lifestyle Logging to track how things like caffeine, alcohol, and various nighttime routines affect your sleep. I mean, I haven't discovered anything that's not already common knowledge, but somehow having hard data makes it more compelling. I suppose if I was going to trial any sleep aids then Garmin's correlation would be convenient and save me from having to maintain my own spreadsheet.

3. It alters the suggested workouts if you haven't been sleeping well. Trivial to do manually, but it's a convenient reminder not to overextend.

I track sleep and energy levels with a galaxy watch and there's a strong correlation with how I feel on a given day. Sometimes it surprises me, and day where I wake up thinking I slept well but after an hour or two I'll realize my energy level isn't great, and sure enough I'll check the app and see it's low, with a warning about my sleeping HRV or resting heart rate being away from my norm.

It's not perfect - there are definitely days when it's wrong. But overall I have a target of keeping my sleep and energy scores in the 90s and it's helpful. I think the most important thing is to keep in mind that it's an imperfect measurements but it's still the best one most of us have for now.

There are a number of studies comparing these devices with clinical sleep tracking. Just search for sleep tracking on google scholar. My take is that consumer devices have gotten pretty good at detecting when you are sleeping, but are not really good at detecting your sleep phases

Garmin’s body battery is very close to how I physically feel

Wrist based sleep tracking is worse than finger.

Oura for measuring sleep. Garmin for tracking physical exercise. Oura always reflected the timings and my feeling much closer than Garmin (Enduro), which basically always told me I had bad sleep (started late after my last woken moments and ended an hour early).

My own thought, it's honestly best not to track sleep unless you feel you have an underlying issue. It causes more anxiety than it solves. If you're tired, go to bed earlier, adjust tech use and food consumption before bed.

by tracking sleep, what exactly do you mean by that? sleep phases, sleep score, sleep duration?

it's a lot of work, but something you could do is track how you feel (manually or some other way) and do a similar statistical analysis. chess elo was just convenient and aligned for me.

thank you! i think it's ridiculous how little they invest in their developer ecosystem. i have been thinking about jumping ship to oura or whoop simply because of this.