Is Your Smartwatch Gaslighting You? My 30-Day Garmin Experiment

It’s a typical morning: my 5AM alarm goes off, and the first thing I do is check my smartwatch, it's a Garmin brand running watch, and it's been attached to my wrist for the last couple of years. Here's what I want to know ASAP:

• How did I sleep? 

• What’s my sleep score? 

• What about the body battery? 

• What will my energy levels be like today?

  
  

Many questions to be answered. But recently, something started feeling… a little off putting about it.

It was as if I was being told how to feel and what my day was going to look like by a piece of tech before I even stepped out of bed. It became incredibly apparent when my watch would say one thing, but my internal biofeedback felt completely different. This caused a misalignment of sorts.

As an example, I’d wake up feeling energized and ready to tackle the day, only to see a measly body battery score of 70/100. Suddenly, a seed of doubt was planted: Surely I can't go to the gym and give an all-out effort with a score like that...right?! 🤨

This realization wasn’t just a red flag—it was a freaking giant red tarp. I was losing touch with my own body cues. Had I forgotten how to feel into my own energy?

So with that, I decided to do what my watch ironically tells me to do every morning: LiStEn tO My bOdY 🙄 - I designed an experiment.

30(ish) days of internal check-ins

The rules were simple: For one month, I would NOT look at my Garmin morning report until at least 30 minutes after waking up.

Instead, I’d get my morning beverage, sit down to meditate and journal, and perform an intuitive body scan (basically some light stretching feeling into the body). I’d record my own perceived sleep score and body battery in an analog journal first. Only THEN would I check the watch to compare and write that down as well. 

Ultimately, I gathered 29 days of clean data (a few days were thrown out because I accidentally looked at the watch or forgot to wear it to sleep). I threw these numbers into a spreadsheet to get some detailed info.

Since we are living in a major cultural wearables moment (everybody and their grandma has one, it seems), before we look at the numbers, let’s talk about my history with tracking devices...

History with wearables

I haven’t always been a nerd about my health stats. My journey with fitness tech has been a clunky evolution, that I feel like most of us have been thought... Here's my timeline:

• 2011(ish) Free Pedometer: A plastic piece of junk from my early 20s that I got as part of a corporate step challenge. People just jiggled them at their desks to win step challenges. WHYYY??

• 2012-2014 Polar Heart Rate Strap + Watch: The chest strap was a total pain to air-dry. Not going to lie, it tracked HR so good, but the focus was on the calorie burn back then.

• 2015 Old ass Fitbit: The one with the flashing lights that looked like Starlink satellites. Everyone wore them alongside those jingly Alex and Ani bracelets (remember that trend?). Useless.

• 2023- now Garmin Venu 3 & Forerunner: I originally bought the Venu to track stats when I started to get ‘running curious’, a year or so later, I got the Forerunner running watch.

  
  

I’ve honestly enjoyed wearing the Garmin. But I wanted to get curious: Is this thing controlling my mood? And how do I actually feel about that?

Andddd drumroll, pleaseee!! 🥁

Here are my results:

Once the 29 days were up, I crunched the numbers. Here is what happened when I stacked my intuition against the Garmin almighty algorithm:

Sleep/wake time - ehhh, actually accurate

Garmin is surprisingly spot-on here. It detected my sleep onset within about 10 minutes and caught my wake-up time pretty much to the exact minute. 

Sleep score - slight deviation 🤏

On average, my perceived sleep score deviated from Garmin’s by 8 points. I generally rated my sleep higher than the watch did.

Body battery - higher deviation

I feel that this is Garmin's most defeating (and maybe not so useful) metric. Waking up feeling great only to see a low body battery score is a psychological buzzkill 😭. My intuitive score differed by nearly ~11 points on average.

What my research has shown me on the science behind this watch..

To understand the gap, I dove into how Garmin calculates these numbers. The watch uses a wrist-based optical sensor to track heart rate, Heart Rate Variability (HRV), movement, and respiration.

While Garmin's internal studies claim an 83% accuracy compared to a clinical polysomnography (PSG) sleep study, independent peer-reviewed research shows weaker results.

The main reason for the discrepancy? A watch cannot read your brainwaves. Duh! Clinical sleep studies track brain activity to define sleep stages. Your watch relies heavily on a surrogate marker: movement.

If you are lying perfectly still in bed, awake but unable to sleep, your heart rate lowers and your movement drops. The watch often interprets this "motionless wakefulness" as light sleep. As a result, it can overstate sleep duration and hands you an arbitrary score and sleep stages that do not match the reality.

This is where I believe it can be a little “gaslight-y”!

My new relationship with the data..

It’s been a couple of months since the experiment ended, and my relationship with my wearable has shifted signficantly:

• I no longer wake up with an urgent need to check my morning report. Half the time, I forget it exists. That feels nice.

• If I do look at a low score, I treat it as "fun data" I can get curious about but not let it dictate my mood or give me an excuse to skip a workout or “go harder” when I’m actually not feeling it.

  
  

I even tried a secondary experiment where I stopped wearing the watch entirely except during runs. That lasted less than a week. Why you may ask? Because on a deeper level, I actually like the validation. Seeing my movement patterns recorded reinforces my core identity—I am the type of person who deeply values movement. And there is nothing wrong with using tech to validate your habits, provided you don’t beat yourself up when you don't hit an "optimal" score. 

Final thoughts..

A wearable is a fantastic tool to build awareness, especially if you are starting a fitness journey and trying to map out your patterns.

But… big BUT: You do NOT need a smartwatch to be healthy.

This experiment taught me that we already possess the best biofeedback tracker on the market, it's our own bodies. You can apply this mindful check-in to any facet of life: sleep, movement, nutrition, or even finances.

Final, FINAL thought: Even though this watch is attached to me, I am not attached to it.

What about YOU?

What is your relationship like with your fitness tracker?

Do you find it empowering, or does a low score ruin your morning?

If you don't wear one, do you feel a sense of freedom or like you’re missing out?

Let me know in the comments below!

Watch YouTube video HERE!