Garmin Lifestyle Logging: Everything You Need to Know and Usage Tips

Quick Take: Garmin’s free Lifestyle Logging (now widely available) reveals how lifestyle habits, like coffee, crash your HRV—log 3-5 habits for insights in weeks. Does it beat Whoop’s journal with Garmin’s deeper metrics integration? Let’s see.

Lifestyle Logging is a daily journaling feature that allows you to log behavioural events that might impact your health.

The free feature works closely with another new feature, Health Status, which is limited to newer devices.

Why Log? And 3 Things That Stop You

It sounds boring, but logging is a powerful technique for delivering truly personal insights. I’ve used similar features on non-Garmin platforms like HRV4Training and the Whoop app for years. It works. It’s great. It’s useful. But it takes a little extra time, and there lies the rub.

2025’s wearable tech is amazing and churns out volumes of data—heart rate, blood oxygen, and more. But so what? You are busy and haven’t got time to sift through pages of charts and numbers. Sure, some of the better techy tools will only highlight important changes. Even then, so what? What actually causes the changes?

Garmin Health Status – Everything You Need to Know

Our wearables can only sift through so much data to find the causes. They record and interrogate your exertion and sleep levels, but don’t have your behaviours.

Your Garmin cannot know if you have drunk caffeine, eaten late, what your carb/protein mix was, had sex, taken supplements like melatonin, had medication, slept at altitude, used a dehumidifier, and so on.

The essence of logging is to capture these lifestyle choices. More specifically, details like: what they were (coffee), their timing (last coffee, 6 PM), and their magnitude (large coffee)

Garmin’s clever math tells you which lifestyle choices coincide with key movements in your core health metrics, such as Sleep Score, overnight Heart Rate Variability (HRV), and Stress.

Once you have those insights, you can choose to change your lifestyle—or not. It’s your call, but the knowledge gives you the power to make intelligent decisions.

The downside?

1. Links between Behaviours and metrics might be coincidental. Correlation does not mean cause and effect. But it might.
2. You have to log your behaviours. You don’t have to do it every day, but I’ve found that once the novelty wears off, I only log 3 to 5 metrics regularly. That’s enough, though.
3. Once you understand the causes and effects and make the lifestyle changes, you can stop logging or choose to log new behaviours.

Setting Up: A 5-Step Guide

Garmin Connect app >> More > Health Stats > Lifestyle Logging.

I would keep your choice to a maximum of ten, ideally fewer (5), and consider including custom behaviours to cover areas of specific concern.

‘Mother-in-law visiting’ might be a fun behaviour to list, but Garmin’s system works on maths, so the event must happen many times, at least 20. If your mother-in-law is coming for her annual weekend visit, it’s pointless to log it, but it makes sense if she comes over every Saturday. My apologies to all mothers-in-law out there for this example!

Consider also the practicalities and purposes of what you are trying to log.

If you want to log your coffee at 9 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM, and 6 PM, think about what this entails. If you plan to log each as it happens, the reality is that you won’t do that over the long term. If you plan to log them all in the evening in one go, I bet your routine changes subtly every day, and eventually, you will forget when you had that first coffee.

• Tip: For most people, the time of the last coffee is most likely to impact sleep; record that. Keep it simple; life is complicated enough already.

Garmin tries to make this easier for you by restricting the timing of events to Morning or Late, with Late being within 8 hours of bedtime. That’s generally a good move by Garmin, but it falls over precisely with the Last Coffee example, where some people (me!) want to determine exactly when it’s safe to get my last fix of the day without affecting my sleep.

You could create a custom event for 8 PM coffee, another for 7 PM coffee, etc. But that’s too complicated unless you are highly motivated.

Similarly, if you were logging sleep interruptions, the timing is critical, as an early interruption would be more likely to impact your DEEP sleep stage. Maybe you could create custom events for EARLY INTERRUPTION and LATE INTERRUPTION.

Logging Reminders

One option is to allow the Connect app to send push notifications in the morning, evening, or both to remind you to log your activities. I find this intrusive, but I also forget when not reminded, so having an easily dismissible reminder is a good idea on balance.

FAQs

Q: Where can I log events and behaviours?

Everyone can log in directly within the Connect app, and owners of newer, high-end watches like Venu 4 can use the lifestyle logging widget/widget-glance to log in. The watch option adds convenience.

Q: When can I expect a valid answer on the impact of my lifestyle

With my fading knowledge of correlations, I expect you need about 25 data points for a meaningful correlation with this type of paired data.

Other Observations

It seems odd that Garmin suggests factors like ‘Period Day’, ‘Light Exercise Before Bed ‘, ‘High Altitude ‘, and ‘Oversleeping. ‘ It already has this data. This implies that the new lifestyle logging feature is not integrated with all your data in the Connect ecosystem.

 Looking at the Reports

I haven’t logged enough data yet to get insights, but Garmin kindly shared some screens with dcrainmaker’s site, which is shown below.

At first glance, these reports look nice, and there are some good insights to the sleep score on the right. However, if you look at the actual insight, it can be summarised to “Meditation and wearing an eye mask improve my sleep, and alcohol and late caffeine worsen it”.

Which is clearer, my sentence or those three screens from Connect? My sentence is the insight, Garmin’s screens are a confused mixture of insights, charts, reports and data summaries.

This is another clear example of Garmin being run by techies! The company seems unable to stop itself adding new menu options, reports, charts, and data points to support its latest features. The screens look nice, but they WILL put many people off using it (if they can find it).

Whoop probably has similar screens somewhere in the app, but I never seek them out. Instead, Whoop occasionally presents me with a series of dismissible insights on the main screen. I would be shown something like “Late-night caffeine contributed to a consistent 30-minute sleep debt last month (tick to dismiss).” If there were no correlation, I wouldn’t be shown it. If I’m interested I tap it and get shown more details.

Garmin Context and Competition

Journalling has been used by Oura and Whoop for years, so on paper, at least, Lifestyle Logging brings Garmin closer to them for non-sports Health Insights. Whilst Apple collects and shows Health Vitals, it doesn’t have a native health journaling feature.

It appears that Lifestyle logging is aimed at catching up with Whoop. The closely related Health Status supports the Lifestyle Logging with data the watch gathers, and also catches up with what Apple offers with its Vitals app.

Garmin Lifestyle Logging – Take Out

Garmin’s Lifestyle Logging and Health Status represent reasonably comprehensive and well-thought-through features, but they are poorly implemented in the app.

Garmin broadly understands the nature of the behaviours that you need to log. It has made some slight compromises on how they are captured, either to simplify the login screens or to make the calculations it performs behind the scenes easier to perform. Fair enough, either way.

However, the presentation layer is unforgivable. I agree with other commenters that Garmin is making a play here to set up Connect to compete with Whoop. But it just fails to do that by quite a large margin – at least for now. The visual presentation looks alright, but how the insights are conveyed is rubbish.

This is a big shame as Garmin’s other side of the piece, Health Status, does a good job collecting your key health vitals and is probably accurate, too.

The way everything is pulled together will be loved by some, like the more ‘advanced’ type of Garmin owner or biohacker who reads blogs like this. However, there will definitely be a fair chunk of people who never even find the menu option to set it up, never know how to add the widget glance, others who won’t find the right pre-defined lifestyle behaviour and not set up a custom one, others who will forget to keep logging, and quite a few others who will glance at the insights when they find them and never return. It’s all too complicated for a non-core feature.

That’s one reason why Garmin is not close to being a Whoop competitor.

Here’s another reason.

Garmin’s AI implementation to date is underwhelming. The AI/ML must be let loose on your data to find whatever it can. It feels to me like Garmin has set up Lifestyle Logging to perform something similar to a series of predetermined correlations between your chosen Lifestyle Behaviours and your Health Vitals. That’s fine, but it’s nowhere near Whoop’s longstanding AI Coach and deep integration with your data, journal, and a body of science.

Thoughts welcomed

Garmin Health Status – Everything You Need to Know