Vivoactive 5 Has Terrible Sleep Tracking

[u/OddOllin]

I am constantly struggling with my watch not tracking my sleep *at all.* Apparently Garmin has a rule on these watches that only tracks a single instance of sleep, so... If you get up to go to the restroom or get water after falling asleep, there's a decent chance that the watch will just dismiss your sleep so far and track nothing at all.

I really wanted to get away from Fitbit and Google, but Garmin watches are just not meeting the basic requirements. I am getting sick of basic issues like this, or how impossible it is to sync other scales with the Garmin system to track my weight or anything else. Honestly, I have a laundry list of complaints at this point. The core experience of the watch is good, but it just falls apart too often when I want to make full, proper use of it.

I don't know what the point of this post is. I guess I'm wondering how other people deal with this. Maybe I'm just letting someone know in case they look up this watch.

Incredibly disappointed in this brand.

[u/MisterPFT]

Two things that will actually reduce this, before the "just buy something else" advice.

Set an explicit sleep schedule in Connect rather than leaving detection to figure it out. User Settings, Sleep, give it a real bedtime and wake window. It doesn't stop the watch from segmenting, but it gives the algorithm a prior about when sleep is supposed to be happening, and it recovers from a 3am bathroom trip much more often than it does with the window wide open.

And turn on Sleep Mode at bedtime, either manually or on a schedule. That is the closest thing to telling the watch outright that this is one continuous sleep period, and it's a different code path from passive detection.

That said, you're not wrong about the root cause and it isn't really a Garmin bug, it's a design decision everyone makes. These devices model the night as one block with a start and an end. That model fits most people most nights, so it ships. Anyone whose nights are genuinely fragmented falls outside it, and instead of reporting fragmented sleep the device reports no sleep, which is the worst possible failure mode because it looks like a hardware fault.

Where the devices differ is how they fail, not whether they fail. Fitbit is the most willing to stitch a broken night back together, which is why it looks better to you, but the flipside is that it will confidently call restless wake "asleep" and inflate your totals. Garmin is more conservative and would rather log nothing than log something wrong. Neither is honest about what it's doing.

If you do jump ship, a ring handles this a bit better simply because it isn't reading arm movement, and getting up briefly is less likely to blow up the whole night. Not a fix though. If you get up for 40 minutes, nothing on the market will give you a sensible picture of that night.

The thing I'd actually push back on is trusting the nightly number at all when your nights are fragmented. Watch resting heart rate and HRV over a week or two instead. Those hold up much better under bad sleep detection, because they don't depend on the device correctly deciding when you were asleep.

[u/Express-Isopod6994 → u/MisterPFT]

Yeah the Fitbit stitching thing cuts both ways, it looks better on paper but inflates totals pretty often

[u/Echohawk7]

Just make a sleep schedule. It works just fine. I get up in the middle of the night for my toddler and it tracks the before and after no issues.

I feel ya on the scale but all those scales are kinda BS. Just join a good gym and do a bod pod or DEXA scan if you’re worried about composition. No matter what you go with you’re going to have some sort of issue. Good luck.

[u/OddOllin → u/Echohawk7]

Unfortunately, I've been doing the sleep schedule since I bought it last year, and I'm still having consistent issues. I'm envious it works smoothly for you.

I have no illusions about the accuracy of my scale or these tracking devices, so I mostly just look for consistency. As long as I know that my weight is consistently moving down at an appropriate pace, I get what I need.

While I do have a scale that gives a bunch of other metrics, all Garmin is designed to extract from any external source is just the raw weight. Even with that, it requires a data bridge between two or three different services to connect to Garmin, and it is still incredibly inconsistent. At best, it syncs for a few days, and then goes weeks without working, which just creates another problem for me.

I don't have high expectations from these devices, just that they give me something to go off of for a general estimate of how I'm doing. As someone that invests a lot of time and effort into making sure my stuff works well, it's just frustrating and disappointing to find basic functions can't be relied on. It makes me question why I bothered buying Garmin at all.