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Wellness Wednesday for July 31, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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A Garmin epix watch. I would say the scores generally match my felt experience pretty closely. It's neat to see how quick you drop down to deep sleep when you're healthy but physically exhausted from the day.

It also gives HRV data and a stress score that's largely HRV derived. The data over the weekend was wild in general. On the flip side, it was actually nice to see some objective measurement of just how bad off I was dropping to help reassure me that I don't really need to do anything other than lie there, drink fluids, and get better when I get better.

Amazon tells me this is in the arena of $500-$1,000 depending on vintage and features. Is that accurate?

I definitely want to track my sleep quality, but am absolutely paranoid that a lot of the devices out there are woo-woo bullshit. Don't mind spendin', just want to spend right.

Whoop is excellent for this without all the doodads of a running watch like a Garmin.

Yep, it was a new Gen 2 when it first came out. Had a corporate discount, so it was $800. So cheap I couldn't afford not to buy it! That and a buddy got one, so I had to keep up.

I like the data, but I mostly got it for the actual running features. The GPS accuracy is superb, the battery life is long, and the running dynamics provide some cool data (e.g. stride length, cadence, estimated power including wind, elevation of stride). The AMOLED screen was the nicest they were likely to have for quite some time, so on something that I wear all the time I valued that a fair bit.

Overall, not something I would recommend dollar for dollar unless running or another sport where GPS data is important. A huge amount of what you're paying for is Garmin's high-quality GPS. Their software used to suck, but it's now excellent as well and allows really nice integration with other platforms.