I feel more stressed and my sleep has got worse

I had high hopes for my Fitbit Sense. I was going to track my exercise and sleep and use the data to make improvements to my fitness and health. Well, that was the theory.

It all started so well. I tracked my steps, made sure I moved every hour, and climbed at least 20 flights of stairs a day. My sleep was average but better than I was expecting. I don’t sleep very well these days.

After around a month, the novelty started to wear off and the Fitbit started to have some glitches.

The first thing that started to annoy me was the instruction to move every hour. It sounds great in theory, but it’s not great in practice. Suppose I arrived at a restaurant to meet friends at 12.55 and stayed for 1.5 hours, that meant I’d miss the 250 steps I was supposed to move between 13.00 and 14.00.

This meant I’d see a gap in the chart. I felt like my Fitbit was telling me that I was a failure, which I wasn’t. I decide to just ignore the instruction to move if I was somewhere like a restaurant.

Other times my watch would beep at the most inconvenient moment, so I’d ignore it and forget. It doesn’t remind you until you’ve all got 10 minutes left. It would be better if the reminder came near the beginning rather than the end.

And sometimes I didn’t hear or feel the reminder at all. It became very stressful.

Then there were lots of times that I’d walk up 10 flights of stairs. My heart rate would show as around 140 but get stuck there for a few minutes. My actual heart rate could be back at 80, but the Fitbit didn’t seem to know that.

Worst of all for me was the watch light switching itself on during the night and waking me up. That meant my sleep patterns getting even worse. If it wasn’t the main screen switching on, it was the light at the back of my Fitbit shining in my face when I was asleep with my arm near my head.

As a test, I didn’t wear my Fitbit to bed for a few days. I slept much better and awoke more refreshed.

Talking of sleep, the final aspect that was terrible about the Fitbit was that it often claimed I’d had a great night’s sleep, yet I woke up feeling unrested and very tired. At other times it would tell me to take it easy because I hadn’t slept well, even though I felt like I had a good night’s sleep. None of this made any sense to me.

It’s better for me to listen to what my own body is telling me instead of listening to what the Fitbit is saying.

That last part doesn’t give me much faith that the Fitbit is at all accurate enough. There is no point in me using it if it’s giving incorrect information. I want to exercise when I feel good. I don’t want to exercise when I feel like my sleep was terrible but the watch tells me to put in a hard workout.

My final complaint is that the watch should only need to be charged every 5-7 days. I needed to charge mine every 2-3 days. I followed all the instructions to find out what could be wrong, but none helped.

After checking online, I found that many others had similar problems to mine.

Some people love their Fitbit though, so you’ll need to decide for yourself if it’s worth it. For me, it isn’t.

I’ve listed it for sale on Facebook Marketplace.

Goodbye and good riddance to it. I won’t miss it. There’ll never be a reconciliation. It’s over. For good.