Charge 5 won't track sleep stages

[iguanadrop]

My sleep stages worked for the very first day I owned my charge 5 and now they’re just a basic blue line that says asleep, restless, or awake. It’s literally three days old. I don’t understand what’s going on. I’ve gone through forms the past two nights, and tried to fix it with no success. It’s one of the main reasons I bought it.

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[Julia_G]

Hi, @iguanadrop , there are several possible reasons for getting simplified sleep rather than sleep stages:

1. Are you manually starting sleep?  The facility for starting sleep manually is a leftover from older trackers that could not automatically detect sleep.  All recent Fitbits will do this automatically so in order to get advanced sleep info you must just wear it to bed and let it do its thing!

2. Are you wearing your Fitbit too loose or too tight?  The Fitbit will need consistently to detect a heart rate in order to report sleep stages.  If your Fitbit is too loose and flopping around on your wrist that will interfere with heart rate detection.  You should wear it snuggly, but not so tight that it is constricting circulation.

3. Is your battery critically low?  For best performance generally, and for sleep detection in particular, try to keep your battery 20% charged or more.

4. Are you sleeping with your wrist so flexed that it is interfering with heart rate detection?  There isn’t much you can do about this, but it can be a reason that sleep detection occasionally fails.

My advice would be to make sure you are wearing and charging the Fitbit as advised, are letting sleep be detected automatically, and continuing to monitor it for a few more days.  You may find this article with more detailed information on Fitbit sleep detection helpful.

I can also recommend giving your Fitbit a restart as that is always a good first troubleshooting step whenever your Fitbit is not behaving as expected.  You will not lose any data by restarting your Fitbit.