Latest Blog Post

I have a Garmin Forerunner 935 watch.

It is my watch.

I also have a very old Tag that I got for my 21^stBirthday from my parents, which I treasure but don’t wear very often.

I’ve had several Garmin watches, passing each one down to someone else as I’ve moved onto the next one, but I would never have bought this watch; it was given to me as a gift by someone who was given it but didn’t want it.

The interesting thing about this watch is that it measures stress and I was quite interested to find out how it thought it did that.

It uses heart rate variability to measure stress levels and at the end of the day gives you a number, putting it down in an objective measurement. It logs it day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year until it builds up a pattern of your stress over time.

Of course, there is a real significant danger of these things being quite a gimmick, so I looked into it to see whether I thought it was a reasonable way of measuring stress. It seems it is quite well accepted and a reasonable, although slightly non-specific way, of measuring over time the levels at which you’re feeling the stress of life.

I got the watch in January, which was extremely interesting because that was the time I was off work for six weeks, and we’re now in June.

It’s easy to see the track on the little picture above associated with this blog and how the stress increased from January to February and levelled over March and April before reducing down towards May and June.

The interesting thing is that that is how my life is at this time and so the rather non-specific measurement of heart rate variability coincides with my analysis of the stress in my life.

We use a similar situation when we train for endurance sport called RPE. RPE stands for ‘Rate of Perceived Exertion’ and you can do an objectively measured test on your watt bike but then also score it in RPE. You can start to get a measure on how to ride your bike when you’re not measuring things and how to subjectively measure your exertion and then later look back at it against an objective measure.

The same thing applies with Garmin’s heart rate variability on a watch.

Sometimes it acts as a warning. If i’m lying there in the evening and click the stress button on the watch and it’s spiking high then I have to start to take a look at myself and wonder why that is the case and what’s going on. Sometimes it’s not controllable but many times it is totally controllable and might just help me to live a little bit longer.

Just interesting thoughts about gadgets that really are supposed to be designed to make our lives better.

Blog Post Number: 1684