8 ms·

Training my smartwatch to track intelligence

156 points by dmvaldman 9mo ago

runjake 9mo ago
I've tracked sleep using a number of devices and algorithms and I haven't found a single one that regularly aligns with what and how I feel. I know it's tracking real data, but the conclusions feel completely made up. What are other people's experience -- especially from those who are more bullish about sleep tracking?
- guzik 9mo ago
  by tracking sleep, what exactly do you mean by that? sleep phases, sleep score, sleep duration?
  - runjake 9mo ago
    Yes to all.
- dmvaldman 9mo ago
  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.
  - runjake 9mo ago
    Yeah, I didn't mean to discount your article. Pretty clearly, it's working out for you. I do have an iOS shortcut that tracks my mood with janky emojis. I use it at least once daily.
- esperent 9mo ago
  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.
- wongarsu 9mo ago
  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
- 121789 9mo ago
  Garmin’s body battery is very close to how I physically feel
  - danielbln 9mo ago
    Yep, can confirm. It's surprisingly accurate to the subjective feeling.
- angiolillo 9mo ago
  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.
- sjw987 9mo ago
  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.
- Izkata 9mo ago
  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.
- asdff 9mo ago
  I’m surprised people need this data. Are they not aware if they had a good night sleep? Always had been obvious to me.
  - cyberpunk 9mo ago
    I think it’s more a way to explore the effects certain other behaviours can have on your sleep quality; for instance does a magnesium supplement help you get more deep sleep, what about workout timing does it effect how long it takes to fall asleep or interruptions and so on. I don’t trust the raw numbers at all, really, but since i’m wearing the same sensor i can use it to spot trends at least. Or that’s what i tell myself anyway…
    - asdff 9mo ago
      How did you know it was magnesium supplement? There is no control and n=1.
- pedalpete 9mo ago
  Your devices are tracking sleep time, which makes about as much sense as measuring your diet based on how much time you spend chewing. Time in deep sleep is not a direct marker of slow-wave delta power, which is just one of the measures of repair and glymphatic flush which occurs during deep sleep. If slow-wave activity is slightly impaired, your brain can try to make up for that reduction by increasing time in deep sleep. However, larger impairments mean your brain will struggle to stay in deep sleep. This is why our work at https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com focuses directly on enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep (and specifically deep sleep) rather than focusing on time.
sinoue 9mo ago
I hope Garmin sees your passion project and greenlights it for inclusion. You have the right approach to ensuring folks are at their optimal health to grow intellectually as a person.
- dmvaldman 9mo ago
  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.
  - gavmor 9mo ago
    Yes, likewise! I've bounced off their developer portal several times, and I've colleagues who note they're extraordinarily difficult to integrate with. I will gladly invest in a more accessible developer ecosystem.
echoangle 9mo ago
> Often, it would also contradict how I was internally feeling. I’d wake up feeling rested, see my stats are low, and play a game of chess out of algorithmic rebellion, only to feel my mind up against a barrier and handedly lose. It would be better to only look at the stats after playing if you want to verify it, this could easily be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- ctxc 9mo ago
  My thoughts exactly! The barrier could be mental, induced _by_ the app
Ethee 9mo ago
The biggest thing for me is I don't understand how people can sleep with these watches on, it's so uncomfortable to me personally which is why the different ring technologies appeal to me more. I just wish either Garmin made one or that there was one I didn't have to buy a subscription to use.
- fifilura 9mo ago
  People used to sleep with watches 50 years ago too. You just get used to it.
  - mhitza 9mo ago
    True. Though the difference with smart watches is that they tend to be significantly bigger in size than what common watches used to be like. Smart "bands" tend to be less perceptible.
    - formerly_proven 9mo ago
      They’re not that much bigger than an automatic, though they are heavier than most.
      - fifilura 9mo ago
        Yeah, they get bigger if you spend more money on them. I have a Garmin Forerunner 165, it is not very big, and not heavy compared to an old style watch made from metal.
    - sva_ 9mo ago
      I think it depends what kind of smartwatch you choose. It should fit your wrist. The amount of people I've seen with e.g. a Galaxy Ultra watch that stands over their wrist on both sides is staggering to me. For me, the Galaxy Watch 7 in 44mm fits perfectly
    - sobjornstad 9mo ago
      Surprisingly, I find the Apple Watch significantly more comfortable and less perceptible than any other watch I've worn in the past. My theory is it's the contoured back for the heart rate monitor, etc. But maybe I'm just weird.
PaulHoule 9mo ago
I didn't believe the stress numbers on my Garmin watch were very meaningful until I started taking Nebivolol (an atypical beta blocker) because there were so many gaps (even when I was sitting) that I didn't feel I could eyeball them or trust averages over time. Taking that drug, however, it sees far fewer gaps and I show up in the blue "rest" zone most of the time. I've been watching my heart rate a lot in the last month part because of health concerns and part because of a new stance I am practicing that has a physical component (e.g. adjusted gaits that are energy efficient) and a mental component, being an oceanic reservoir of calm with close mind-body-environment coupling 95% of the time but disconnecting that connection under peak stress -- like I am standing between two people who are screaming at each other and holding a barrier at my chest that I don't let my breathing cross and glance at my watch and my HR is 52 and it is not just the nebivolol talking because when I lose my shit it would be more like 70. People taught me conventional Pranayama (diaphragmatic breathing) as a kid and it never helped me in "lose my shit" situations involving unstable environments and moral injury, with the intense practice I was doing recently it was clear to me that I was never going to do it better and I started researching emergency techniques for managing sympathetic overload and that one worked for me and now I feel like one of the people in [1] particularly when I show people my HRV web app [2] and demonstrate that I can turn my Mayer oscillation off [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain in the sense of ironclad autonomic control but with full sensory perception [2] ... soon to be on Github
- benbarbersmith 9mo ago
  Which techniques did you try, and which worked for you?
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    (1) Putting cold water on my wrists. Maybe it would have worked if I tried it longer, but it didn't. (2) Walking forward as if pushing through something with a forward lean. I was in a small building and this was awkward and my body searched through the crouching and hip swinging gaits as I tried this, I thought it might have been better in a bigger space and might give it a try sometime. (3) What did work was the 'chest barrier' which is holding the chest absolutely rigid and NOT paying attention to whatever my body is doing to breathe. Since I have been practicing diaphragmatic breathing heavily I find that my body does that automatically and it just doesn't expand through or past my chest. This works amazingly well. When I tried it I got flash of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion where the robot is raging out of control and they pull the power cable on it and it tries smashing it's way into the control room while an observer stands his or her [1] ground at the window before the battery runs out. I added a "pull the cable" visualization and definitely sense that brave observer appear in my head, although I also realized that in this mind-body interaction it is the mind that is to blame because it brought in some trouble that it thought about from elsewhere. Trying to control the body consciously is a disaster in this situation because disturbances from the mind are coupled efficiently into the body and disturbances from the body are coupled into the mind. So I focus on holding the chest and only on holding the chest. [1] it happens twice
FL33TW00D 9mo ago
I love this, the interday variability in my intelligence is extremely annoying.
- dmvaldman 9mo ago
  may the REM sleep gods light your path
jollyllama 9mo ago
In Soviet Russia, intelligence tracks your smartwatch.
- immibis 9mo ago
  In the USA, too. That's one of many methods they use to decide where to send ICE.
FredrikMeyer 9mo ago
I really wish Garmin had an official API that can be used by their users instead of the reverse-engineered solutions (although they're very good), but they're at the mercy of Garmin.
- dmvaldman 9mo ago
  1000%
maxverse 9mo ago
Absolutely love this kind of project, combining different data sources to predict/model how you're doing. I also use chess as a proxy for my brain is working!
what_was_it 9mo ago
> exercise-induced fatigue impairs complex cognitive tasks Apparently your study is strictly about cardio. Heavier compound lifts can surely knock me out for 30 minutes to 2 hours. I don't know how in the heck people train in the mornings. But a lot of this is because they are complex cognitive tasks.
- byproxy 9mo ago
  Mornings (~6am), I often walk ~40min to my gym, do heavy compound lifts (~1hr total with ~2-3min rest between sets), walk ~40min back, and I tend to feel fine by the time I get back home. It's usually at the end of the day where the fatigue seems to catch up to me.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    You’ve built up endurance already. The hard part of working out is getting to the point you got of not being completely sore for days after a single workout. I think that puts a lot of people off from consistent routines. I remember the first two weeks of track season no one could walk up stairs we were getting worked so hard, puking after ladder workouts 5 days a week. Eventually that petered out over the season but that initial hump from insufficient activity to being active is massive, and I don’t think a lot of us on the team would have surmounted it without essentially peer pressure and mutual support in suffering.
    - byproxy 9mo ago
      Oh, yea, for sure. One thing that keeps me consistent is that I know what happens when I take > 1 week off (which is sometimes unavoidable) and attempt to get back into it. DOMS⁰ for days. --- 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_onset_muscle_soreness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_onset_muscle_soreness
icefish 9mo ago
A petty correction to this excellent post: you say "Even a single serving of alcohol disproportionately impares REM sleep", but your source says "Reductions in REM sleep were observed starting at approximately 2 standard drinks".
- dmvaldman 9mo ago
  thanks for catching this!
andai 9mo ago
I hear that the performance on Dual n-back is exceptionally sensitive to sleep quality. You might feel totally fine but notice that your cognition has actually tanked in measurable ways.
adit_ya1 9mo ago
[dead]
lackoftactics 9mo ago
Isn't it a well-known fact that Garmin has terrible sleep tracking? The wearables can't handle deep sleep at all; even Muse with EEG can't reliably predict it, so I wouldn't be drawing conclusions here. A small curiosity: I recently learned that sleep trackers in commercial wearables are terrible for people with sleep disorders like apneas, UARS, etc. It makes sense, as this isn't a typical dataset, but it's worth knowing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FAz7QGmlBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FAz7QGmlBM
dmaa 9mo ago
Lot of hate on Garmin sleep tracking in this thread, but I love it. Maybe it is not super accurate, but it was eye-opening for me to see how the score changes for the worse even with a little bit of alcohol. I am way more careful with when and how much I drink since I've started wearing a Fenix 6 few years back
DefundPortland 9mo ago
[flagged]
johschmitz 9mo ago
Since this talks about sleep quality I want to add something that was almost unknown to me for over 30 years. Smartwatches AFAIK don't have CO2 sensors. It seems to me though, that that would be extremely useful for sleep quality tracking. I have just a couple of years ago found out that CO2 levels are having the highest impact on my sleep quality besides temperature. I can highly recommend getting a CO2 sensor to get a good feeling for that effect. Also understand how much air is available in your room and how much CO2 your body produces per hour. I totally underestimated this until I was able to measure it. In a small sleeping room with closed doors the amount of CO2 will reach unhealthy levels at the end of the night.
- jborichevskiy 9mo ago
  I'll also add in getting a standalone sensor (I went with Aranet) gave me insights into this was well, as a non smart watch wearer
pedalpete 9mo ago
I work in neurotech/sleeptech and though I commend @dmvaldman on the project, it falls for some of the common flaws of current sleep medicine/research and some strange decisions in the program itself. Measuring sleep by time is an antiquated idea, and the industry is just barely starting to move away from this metric. You wouldn't measure your diet based on how much time you spend chewing. Decreased slow-wave activity, the hallmark of deep sleep, can increase time spent in deep sleep as your brain tries to compensate for the lack. This only works to a certain point, and with significant decrease, such as after drinking alcohol, your brain is unable to make up for the deficit and is actually unable to stay in deep sleep. The deep sleep length doesn't map directly to function. Chess is an interesting metric because there is an opponent being played against, so what does that really say about the players mental clarity? There are too many factors. I wonder if sleep regularity (consistent wake in particular) was a metric which was fed into the algorithm, and if it did not correlate? Though many people say "garmin (smartwatch X) isn't good at tracking" that misses the point that tracking time isn't a valuable metric, and why so many people say "my sleep score doesn't match what my watch tells me". Beyond just tracking, we have the ability to directly enhance the Neural Function of Sleep, and this is what we're working on at https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com However breaking people away from the "sleep time metric" is a challenging one.
canucker2016 9mo ago
Has anyone looked into creatine? I've seen more mentions of creatine supplementation for cognition performance. see https://fitnessvolt.com/rhonda-patrick-and-darren-candow-creatine-cognitive-benefits/ https://fitnessvolt.com/rhonda-patrick-and-darren-candow-cre... and https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine Not much research in this area and I don't see anyway that a smartwatch can/could track this.
cindyllm 9mo ago
[dead]

156 points by dmvaldman 9mo ago

I've tracked sleep using a number of devices and algorithms and I haven't found a single one that regularly aligns with what and how I feel. I know it's tracking real data, but the conclusions feel completely made up. What are other people's experience -- especially from those who are more bullish about sleep tracking?

guzik 9mo ago
by tracking sleep, what exactly do you mean by that? sleep phases, sleep score, sleep duration?
- runjake 9mo ago
  Yes to all.
dmvaldman 9mo ago
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.
- runjake 9mo ago
  Yeah, I didn't mean to discount your article. Pretty clearly, it's working out for you. I do have an iOS shortcut that tracks my mood with janky emojis. I use it at least once daily.
esperent 9mo ago
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.
wongarsu 9mo ago
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
121789 9mo ago
Garmin’s body battery is very close to how I physically feel
- danielbln 9mo ago
  Yep, can confirm. It's surprisingly accurate to the subjective feeling.
angiolillo 9mo ago
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.
sjw987 9mo ago
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.
Izkata 9mo ago
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.
asdff 9mo ago
I’m surprised people need this data. Are they not aware if they had a good night sleep? Always had been obvious to me.
- cyberpunk 9mo ago
  I think it’s more a way to explore the effects certain other behaviours can have on your sleep quality; for instance does a magnesium supplement help you get more deep sleep, what about workout timing does it effect how long it takes to fall asleep or interruptions and so on. I don’t trust the raw numbers at all, really, but since i’m wearing the same sensor i can use it to spot trends at least. Or that’s what i tell myself anyway…
  - asdff 9mo ago
    How did you know it was magnesium supplement? There is no control and n=1.
pedalpete 9mo ago
Your devices are tracking sleep time, which makes about as much sense as measuring your diet based on how much time you spend chewing. Time in deep sleep is not a direct marker of slow-wave delta power, which is just one of the measures of repair and glymphatic flush which occurs during deep sleep. If slow-wave activity is slightly impaired, your brain can try to make up for that reduction by increasing time in deep sleep. However, larger impairments mean your brain will struggle to stay in deep sleep. This is why our work at https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com focuses directly on enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep (and specifically deep sleep) rather than focusing on time.

sinoue 9mo ago

I hope Garmin sees your passion project and greenlights it for inclusion. You have the right approach to ensuring folks are at their optimal health to grow intellectually as a person.

dmvaldman 9mo ago
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.
- gavmor 9mo ago
  Yes, likewise! I've bounced off their developer portal several times, and I've colleagues who note they're extraordinarily difficult to integrate with. I will gladly invest in a more accessible developer ecosystem.

echoangle 9mo ago

> Often, it would also contradict how I was internally feeling. I’d wake up feeling rested, see my stats are low, and play a game of chess out of algorithmic rebellion, only to feel my mind up against a barrier and handedly lose. It would be better to only look at the stats after playing if you want to verify it, this could easily be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

ctxc 9mo ago
My thoughts exactly! The barrier could be mental, induced _by_ the app

Ethee 9mo ago

The biggest thing for me is I don't understand how people can sleep with these watches on, it's so uncomfortable to me personally which is why the different ring technologies appeal to me more. I just wish either Garmin made one or that there was one I didn't have to buy a subscription to use.

fifilura 9mo ago
People used to sleep with watches 50 years ago too. You just get used to it.
- mhitza 9mo ago
  True. Though the difference with smart watches is that they tend to be significantly bigger in size than what common watches used to be like. Smart "bands" tend to be less perceptible.
  - formerly_proven 9mo ago
    They’re not that much bigger than an automatic, though they are heavier than most.
    - fifilura 9mo ago
      Yeah, they get bigger if you spend more money on them. I have a Garmin Forerunner 165, it is not very big, and not heavy compared to an old style watch made from metal.
  - sva_ 9mo ago
    I think it depends what kind of smartwatch you choose. It should fit your wrist. The amount of people I've seen with e.g. a Galaxy Ultra watch that stands over their wrist on both sides is staggering to me. For me, the Galaxy Watch 7 in 44mm fits perfectly
  - sobjornstad 9mo ago
    Surprisingly, I find the Apple Watch significantly more comfortable and less perceptible than any other watch I've worn in the past. My theory is it's the contoured back for the heart rate monitor, etc. But maybe I'm just weird.

PaulHoule 9mo ago

I didn't believe the stress numbers on my Garmin watch were very meaningful until I started taking Nebivolol (an atypical beta blocker) because there were so many gaps (even when I was sitting) that I didn't feel I could eyeball them or trust averages over time. Taking that drug, however, it sees far fewer gaps and I show up in the blue "rest" zone most of the time. I've been watching my heart rate a lot in the last month part because of health concerns and part because of a new stance I am practicing that has a physical component (e.g. adjusted gaits that are energy efficient) and a mental component, being an oceanic reservoir of calm with close mind-body-environment coupling 95% of the time but disconnecting that connection under peak stress -- like I am standing between two people who are screaming at each other and holding a barrier at my chest that I don't let my breathing cross and glance at my watch and my HR is 52 and it is not just the nebivolol talking because when I lose my shit it would be more like 70. People taught me conventional Pranayama (diaphragmatic breathing) as a kid and it never helped me in "lose my shit" situations involving unstable environments and moral injury, with the intense practice I was doing recently it was clear to me that I was never going to do it better and I started researching emergency techniques for managing sympathetic overload and that one worked for me and now I feel like one of the people in [1] particularly when I show people my HRV web app [2] and demonstrate that I can turn my Mayer oscillation off [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain in the sense of ironclad autonomic control but with full sensory perception [2] ... soon to be on Github

benbarbersmith 9mo ago
Which techniques did you try, and which worked for you?
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  (1) Putting cold water on my wrists. Maybe it would have worked if I tried it longer, but it didn't. (2) Walking forward as if pushing through something with a forward lean. I was in a small building and this was awkward and my body searched through the crouching and hip swinging gaits as I tried this, I thought it might have been better in a bigger space and might give it a try sometime. (3) What did work was the 'chest barrier' which is holding the chest absolutely rigid and NOT paying attention to whatever my body is doing to breathe. Since I have been practicing diaphragmatic breathing heavily I find that my body does that automatically and it just doesn't expand through or past my chest. This works amazingly well. When I tried it I got flash of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion where the robot is raging out of control and they pull the power cable on it and it tries smashing it's way into the control room while an observer stands his or her [1] ground at the window before the battery runs out. I added a "pull the cable" visualization and definitely sense that brave observer appear in my head, although I also realized that in this mind-body interaction it is the mind that is to blame because it brought in some trouble that it thought about from elsewhere. Trying to control the body consciously is a disaster in this situation because disturbances from the mind are coupled efficiently into the body and disturbances from the body are coupled into the mind. So I focus on holding the chest and only on holding the chest. [1] it happens twice

FL33TW00D 9mo ago

I love this, the interday variability in my intelligence is extremely annoying.

dmvaldman 9mo ago
may the REM sleep gods light your path

jollyllama 9mo ago

In Soviet Russia, intelligence tracks your smartwatch.

immibis 9mo ago
In the USA, too. That's one of many methods they use to decide where to send ICE.

FredrikMeyer 9mo ago

I really wish Garmin had an official API that can be used by their users instead of the reverse-engineered solutions (although they're very good), but they're at the mercy of Garmin.

dmvaldman 9mo ago
1000%

maxverse 9mo ago

Absolutely love this kind of project, combining different data sources to predict/model how you're doing. I also use chess as a proxy for my brain is working!

what_was_it 9mo ago

> exercise-induced fatigue impairs complex cognitive tasks Apparently your study is strictly about cardio. Heavier compound lifts can surely knock me out for 30 minutes to 2 hours. I don't know how in the heck people train in the mornings. But a lot of this is because they are complex cognitive tasks.

byproxy 9mo ago
Mornings (~6am), I often walk ~40min to my gym, do heavy compound lifts (~1hr total with ~2-3min rest between sets), walk ~40min back, and I tend to feel fine by the time I get back home. It's usually at the end of the day where the fatigue seems to catch up to me.
- asdff 9mo ago
  You’ve built up endurance already. The hard part of working out is getting to the point you got of not being completely sore for days after a single workout. I think that puts a lot of people off from consistent routines. I remember the first two weeks of track season no one could walk up stairs we were getting worked so hard, puking after ladder workouts 5 days a week. Eventually that petered out over the season but that initial hump from insufficient activity to being active is massive, and I don’t think a lot of us on the team would have surmounted it without essentially peer pressure and mutual support in suffering.
  - byproxy 9mo ago
    Oh, yea, for sure. One thing that keeps me consistent is that I know what happens when I take > 1 week off (which is sometimes unavoidable) and attempt to get back into it. DOMS⁰ for days. --- 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_onset_muscle_soreness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_onset_muscle_soreness

icefish 9mo ago

A petty correction to this excellent post: you say "Even a single serving of alcohol disproportionately impares REM sleep", but your source says "Reductions in REM sleep were observed starting at approximately 2 standard drinks".

dmvaldman 9mo ago
thanks for catching this!

andai 9mo ago

I hear that the performance on Dual n-back is exceptionally sensitive to sleep quality. You might feel totally fine but notice that your cognition has actually tanked in measurable ways.

adit_ya1 9mo ago

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lackoftactics 9mo ago

Isn't it a well-known fact that Garmin has terrible sleep tracking? The wearables can't handle deep sleep at all; even Muse with EEG can't reliably predict it, so I wouldn't be drawing conclusions here. A small curiosity: I recently learned that sleep trackers in commercial wearables are terrible for people with sleep disorders like apneas, UARS, etc. It makes sense, as this isn't a typical dataset, but it's worth knowing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FAz7QGmlBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FAz7QGmlBM

dmaa 9mo ago

Lot of hate on Garmin sleep tracking in this thread, but I love it. Maybe it is not super accurate, but it was eye-opening for me to see how the score changes for the worse even with a little bit of alcohol. I am way more careful with when and how much I drink since I've started wearing a Fenix 6 few years back

DefundPortland 9mo ago

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johschmitz 9mo ago

Since this talks about sleep quality I want to add something that was almost unknown to me for over 30 years. Smartwatches AFAIK don't have CO2 sensors. It seems to me though, that that would be extremely useful for sleep quality tracking. I have just a couple of years ago found out that CO2 levels are having the highest impact on my sleep quality besides temperature. I can highly recommend getting a CO2 sensor to get a good feeling for that effect. Also understand how much air is available in your room and how much CO2 your body produces per hour. I totally underestimated this until I was able to measure it. In a small sleeping room with closed doors the amount of CO2 will reach unhealthy levels at the end of the night.

jborichevskiy 9mo ago
I'll also add in getting a standalone sensor (I went with Aranet) gave me insights into this was well, as a non smart watch wearer

pedalpete 9mo ago

I work in neurotech/sleeptech and though I commend @dmvaldman on the project, it falls for some of the common flaws of current sleep medicine/research and some strange decisions in the program itself. Measuring sleep by time is an antiquated idea, and the industry is just barely starting to move away from this metric. You wouldn't measure your diet based on how much time you spend chewing. Decreased slow-wave activity, the hallmark of deep sleep, can increase time spent in deep sleep as your brain tries to compensate for the lack. This only works to a certain point, and with significant decrease, such as after drinking alcohol, your brain is unable to make up for the deficit and is actually unable to stay in deep sleep. The deep sleep length doesn't map directly to function. Chess is an interesting metric because there is an opponent being played against, so what does that really say about the players mental clarity? There are too many factors. I wonder if sleep regularity (consistent wake in particular) was a metric which was fed into the algorithm, and if it did not correlate? Though many people say "garmin (smartwatch X) isn't good at tracking" that misses the point that tracking time isn't a valuable metric, and why so many people say "my sleep score doesn't match what my watch tells me". Beyond just tracking, we have the ability to directly enhance the Neural Function of Sleep, and this is what we're working on at https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com However breaking people away from the "sleep time metric" is a challenging one.

canucker2016 9mo ago

Has anyone looked into creatine? I've seen more mentions of creatine supplementation for cognition performance. see https://fitnessvolt.com/rhonda-patrick-and-darren-candow-creatine-cognitive-benefits/ https://fitnessvolt.com/rhonda-patrick-and-darren-candow-cre... and https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/creatine Not much research in this area and I don't see anyway that a smartwatch can/could track this.

cindyllm 9mo ago

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