My Vivoactive 4S is a little less than four months old today. Whoop-tee-do you might say. Me too -sort of.
Do you have a smart watch, Oura Ring, Wellvue Oximeter? What the heck do you do with all the data they are giving you?
Since getting the Wellvue Oximeter which I wrote about here, monitoring and understanding what a good night’s sleep is and how to get it has been somewhat of a obsessive-compulsive thing for me. I’m just going to jump into the middle here and not go into the Garmin Connect software, using a Vivoactive 4 and focus on one variable — STRESS.
Garmin has an algorithm that takes heart rate (HR) and HR variability to compute a Stress value. I’m trying to figure out what makes my Garmin watch record a higher stress level while sleeping.
This pic is the Body Battery measurement graph (another interesting measurement) that Stress is a major component of for computing. The orange bar graphs are the Stress measurement.
Initially my guess was the high Stress numbers while sleeping were related to a harder bike ride. But, last week I did a really hard ride (Strava Epic Workout) and Stress didn’t go up. I had been drinking a glass of wine three days with a lamb stew and then didn’t have any alcohol for 2–3 days and the stress level went back down. So, was it alcohol related?
Last night I had one G&T and my stress level was back up as recorded by Vivoactive 4.
Bottom line — IDK yet but am doing my own experiments of a little alcohol, no alcohol and looking at how hard I rode the bike. If the cause of high stress is because alcohol and a hard ride are dependent variables and together cause it, this will be harder to figure out.
Right now, a work in progress. If anyone has experience with this or know other resources please hit me up in the comments. Let me know if you want a deeper dive into other aspects of Garmin Connect. The official Garmin resources I’ve found are so wishy-washy and generic probably due to liability concerns as to be next-to-useless. Maybe something interactive here on Medium could be mutually beneficial.
I wrote a follow-up to this published here.
Thanks!
