23h ago

Apple Watch sleep timing is off. Why does this keep happening?

Most nights my stats show that I’m asleep longer than I’m actually in bed. It’s pretty annoying.

4 comments

Scroll to the bottom of the sleep page in Health and click show all data. That will give you some confirmation of what app/device is reporting what. For example, time in bed was always using my iPhone as the data source while sleep was reported by the watch. Also, AutoSleep can write different sleep data into Apple Health, and then the priority/order of data sources comes into play if there is conflicting data.
I turned off the time in bed reporting from my phone because it’s not accurate. I also stopped using AutoSleep because it was overwriting data in Health sometimes depending on how I interacted with data in the AutoSleep app.
I also just use sleep schedule instead of manually setting the focus.

Do you manually set it to sleep when you go to bed or do you use the sleep schedule? A while back if using the sleep schedule it would show asleep at exactly the start of the schedule regardless if I was in bed or not. To prevent this I started manually setting the watch to sleep only once I was in bed. Lately though after one of the watch updates I noticed the times were off just like you are seeing here. Even though going to bed and setting the sleep function at 12:00 it was saying I was sleeping at 10:00. Makes it very frustrating to use. Sorry I don’t have much to add other than this. Hopefully it gets fixed soon.
- So I usually hit the Sleep focus mode on my phone when I actually am going to sleep, so in that case it should be pretty accurate. Looking at the Auto Sleep app, it shows I only got 6.5 hours of sleep and showed some awake periods that don't match the Apple Watch reading either. I feel like I got less sleep, so I am almost inclined to just use Auto Sleep and forget that Apple is even there, except I do like having all my data in the Apple Health app.