Garmin watches come equipped with the advanced sleep monitoring (ASM) feature, which enables them to track your sleep patterns using the watch’s optical heart rate sensor and your movement. Once you wake up, Garmin will analyze your sleep and provide valuable insights through the Garmin Connect app. Garmin watches do track sleep, so if you’re wondering whether they do, the answer is yes!
Enabling the Sleep Mode Feature on a Garmin Watch
The recent Garmin models can automatically monitor your sleep with the help of your heart rate and movements.
Older versions will manually go to sleep mode. Whichever way, the watch must be on the wrist while sleeping so that the heart rate and movements are monitored.
Unfortunately, Garmin watches are only designed to monitor typical sleep and not anything outside primary sleep time like naps and rest times.
How to Enable Sleep Mode on Garmin Watches
The following Garmin watches can have their sleep modes manually activated. See the instructions to manually enable the sleep mode of several watches.
How to Enable Sleep Mode on Garmin Vivoactive
- Go to the activity tracking widget.
- Press the three small vertical lines.
- And then select Start Sleep.
How to Enable Sleep Mode on Garmin Vivosmart
- Wake the device by double-tapping the display.
- Long hold the display to access the menu.
- Touch the moon symbol (crescent).
- When sleep mode appears tap OK.
- You can exit the sleep mode by long holding the moon symbol (crescent) for 2 to 3 seconds.
How to Enable Sleep Mode on Garmin Forerunner 92XT
- Go to the activity monitoring widget.
- Press and hold the menu.
- From the three dots on the bottom left select Sleep Mode.
How to Enable Sleep Mode on Vivofit 1 and Vivofit 2
- Press then hold the device key. Doing so will cycle the watch through several options.
- Release the device key when the watch cycles to the SLEEP option.
- To exit the SLEEP mode, press and hold the device key for the watch to go to the normal display.
Set Sleep and Wake Window Times in Garmin
Garmin watches use the Firstbeat sleep detection feature to track when you are sleeping, based on the wake and sleep times set through Garmin Connect.
How to Set the Sleep and Wake Window Times Via Garmin Connect
- Launch the Garmin Connect App
- Open the Menu by tapping on the three small vertical lines at the upper left corner of your Android device or the “More” option at the bottom right corner of your iOS device.
- Choose Settings
- Then, choose User Settings
- Choose Bed Time or Wake Time
- Provide the time and select OK
- Now exit the settings menu
How to Set the Sleep and Wake Window Times Via Computer
- Using a personal computer or laptop log into your Garmin Connect account.
- Click on the watch symbol on the upper right of your computer.
- Select your device and then Device Settings
- Choose User Settings
- Edit the Normal Sleep Time data
- Scroll to the bottom and select Save Settings
Garmin Sleep Score and Sleep Insights
A healthy lifestyle equals good sleep. Metal success all depends on how well you slept last night. A night of good sleep will also keep you away from diseases and when you are sick you get to recover quickly.
The list of benefits you can get from having a good night’s sleep is endless. Unfortunately, more than a third of adults are estimated to lack good sleep every night.
Given the importance of sleep, it is important that you also understand your relationship with sleep. With sleep data from an app like Garmin Connect, you become responsible for your sleep and find ways to improve your sleeping habits.
Advanced Sleep Tracking with Sleep Score
Sleep scores and insights are add-ons to the Garmin watches that can do advanced sleep monitoring.
Examples of Garmin watches that can carry out advanced sleep tracking include the Forerunner® 945 series, the MARQ® series, Forerunner® 745, the Fenix® 6, and Fēnix® 6 solar series, the Venu® 2 series, Garmin Instinct, Enduro ™, Descent™ MK2 series, and the Tactix® Delta series.
The purpose of advanced sleep tracking is to tell when you are asleep and when you wake up. It is also the one to tell your sleep stages during the night.
The sleep stages include light, deep, and REM sleep. Garmin watches combine the heart rate, heart rate variation, body movements, respiratory rate, and other inputs to identify sleep and sleep stages.
Other Garmin watches will have you deeply understand your sleep by letting you overlay respiratory and oxygen saturation to the sleep chart in the Garmin Connect App for a complete picture of how the night was. Sleep scores range from 0 to 100.
How Is Garmin Sleep Score Calculated?
Garmin watches calculate nightly sleep scores based on a combination of how well you sleep and how long you sleep together with your heart variability data.
Sleep quality and quantity on Garmin are assessed by comparing recorded sleep to age-based sleep standards as agreed by sleep experts. The only way you can compensate for poor sleep quality is by setting more sleep and vice versa is true.
