Wristwatch daily summaries, 1 Jan – 31 Aug 2026, plus the Italy window ahead. The score (allDayStress) is HRV-based, not self-reported: the wristwatch reads heart-rate variability from the wrist sensor every few minutes it can get a clean signal, and scores 0–100 by how much that pattern reflects sympathetic (low HRV variability, tense) vs. parasympathetic (higher variability, relaxed) autonomic balance — the device's own bands are Rest 0–25, Low 26–50, Medium 51–75, High 76–100. Travel bands below are shown only where Uwe confirmed the dates directly (via his own Travel Schedule) or where a GPS-tagged activity confirms a specific day — no dates are inferred from the score or step pattern alone. Everywhere not marked as travel is Bansko, confirmed the same way.
1. HRV Average Data from Wristwatch (HRV-based, 0–100)
2. Daily steps
3. Travel
Reading this: gaps in the two data charts mean no wearable data that day (watch not synced or not worn) — 25 such days through August. A raw value of −1 ("not calculated") is excluded, not plotted as zero. No data exists past 31 Aug 2026 in this export, so the Italy window shows as a marked band with no score/step readings yet. Travel evidence standard (carried over from the existing Relaxation Analysis project): a date only appears as a confirmed travel block when Uwe stated it directly (via his Travel Schedule) or a GPS-tagged wristwatch activity names the place. Nothing here is guessed from the score or step shape alone. Everywhere not listed below is Bansko — the baseline (~19–27 average score) everything else is compared against. Also visible without any travel claim attached: monthly averages do not split cleanly into "early year high, later year low" — March (33.7) and June (33.6) are the two highest months of the year. June is mostly a Bansko month, but not entirely: a wisdom-tooth extraction (2 Jun, marked above) and a short trip to Thassos for an in-person team offsite (4–8 Jun) both fall inside it, and 8 Jun — the offsite's last day — recorded a score of 73, among the highest single-day readings of the year outside the Vietnam visa-run. Neither is enough on its own to explain the whole month, but both are legitimate, schedule-confirmed clues rather than noise. The real pattern is a step down from July (20.0), which holds through August (20.5) — see "Patterns across 2026" below for the detail.
4. An open question: does who matters more than where?
The three calmest contexts of 2026 — Turkey (16.2), Bhutan (24.6, once its huge step count is set aside) and Bansko itself (26.9, the baseline) — share something this page can't measure directly: relaxed, trusted company, travelled in a way that felt easy rather than effortful. Turkey is the clearest case: Uwe did not care for the traffic, the cities visited, or the food, and the destination itself left little to recommend it — yet the trip still came out as the calmest stretch of the year. Bhutan was a group trip with people Uwe enjoyed a lot, long days and rough hotels included. Bansko is simply home, surrounded by familiar people. The two stretches that ran at or above baseline despite being framed as travel — Vietnam and Thailand, five months combined — were largely solo or logistics-heavy: a visa scramble, an unplanned hotel search, the open-ended "What to do???" stretch on Koh Phangan.
Bhutan and Turkey are both a clear test of this: long days, real physical strain, rough hotels, traffic, food and cities Uwe did not enjoy — none of it pushed the score up. Who someone is travelling with, and how relaxed and trusted that company feels, may matter more to an HRV-based reading than the destination, the itinerary, or physical exertion. This is a hypothesis prompted by Uwe's own read of the year, not something the wristwatch data can test directly — there is no "company" field to correlate against — but it looks like the missing variable behind several of the patterns on this page.
5. How much does a point actually mean? — e.g. Turkey 16.2 vs. Bhutan 24.6 vs. Bansko 26.9
There's no official figure for how many points make a real change versus ordinary noise — the closest evidence is a 28-day tracking study reporting a day-to-day spread of roughly 15 points for one person†, so a 1–2 point gap between two single days means nothing on its own. Averages behave differently: noise shrinks with the square root of the day count, so Turkey's 9-day average carries roughly ±5 points of noise and the 97-day Bansko baseline roughly ±1.5 — putting Turkey's ~11-point gap at around two combined error bars (worth taking seriously), while Bhutan's ~2-point gap sits well inside plausible noise (not a real effect on its own — see the activity comparison below for why the Bhutan story rests on its step count instead).
Every number here also comes from the same wristwatch and the same on-device algorithm, used consistently for years — a consistently-biased ruler still measures differences correctly, so the comparisons above hold even if the absolute score runs 5–10 points off a lab instrument (independent validation found it correlates only moderately, r≈−0.6, with lab-grade HRV‡). That only breaks down comparing across different sources, or if the algorithm itself quietly changed between 2025 and 2026 — a small, real risk, but nowhere near enough to explain a gap the size of Turkey's. Read every number on this page as directional, not exact.
† Wristwatch stress-score day-to-day variance study (Authorea preprint) — "variance" here may be a loose spread rather than a strict statistical variance; this box uses the larger, more conservative reading either way.
‡ Independent validation study, bioRxiv 2025.
6. Patterns across 2026
Average score by confirmed stretch, lower is calmer, against the Bansko baseline (dashed line). Only stretches with enough days to average meaningfully are shown — Greece has just two confirmed days and Thassos just five, both marked accordingly.
Colour marks a real relationship found in the data; the null result (steps) stays grey.
7. What the score measures
The wristwatch's daily figure is built on Firstbeat Analytics' heart-rate-variability (HRV) methodology: the wrist sensor reads the time between heartbeats every few minutes it gets a clean signal, and the pattern in that variability is scored 0–100 by how far it leans toward sympathetic dominance (tense, low variability) versus parasympathetic dominance (calm, higher variability) — respiration and movement data are used only to filter out exertion noise, not to raise or lower the score directly.1 An independent 2025 validation study found the score correlated significantly with lab-grade HRV measures (RMSSD, SD2/SD1) and with heart rate itself against instrumented references.2
Two things are worth keeping in mind when reading the charts above. First, HRV-based readings and how someone actually feels do not always move together — reviews of the wider literature treat the two as related but distinct signals3, which lines up with the 13 January divergence noted above. Second, travel itself pulls in two directions in the research: unstructured getaways are associated with measurably lower cortisol and better HRV on average across studies4,5, while long-haul travel and disrupted routine push the other way, independently linked to reduced HRV regardless of subjective experience6. Both effects show up in Uwe's own year — Turkey calmer than home, the Thailand visa scramble higher than home — rather than one outweighing the other outright.
8. Travel index
| Place | Dates | HRV index (avg) | Steps (avg) | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vietnam | 1 Jan – 11 Mar | 29 | 5.1k | Da Nang long stay (Eco Green Boutique, with a friend). 13 Jan: visa run to Laos by bus. 15–22 Feb: Ha Long Bay cruise + Sa Pa side trip — 17 Feb (Cat Hai) and 21 Feb (Sa Pa) GPS-confirmed by the wristwatch; the days between are not independently confirmed. | |
| Thailand | 12 Mar – 7 Apr, 18–19 Apr | 29 | 4.4k | Surat Thani 12–20 Mar (forced stay after Vietnam visa expired, walk-in booking). Koh Phangan 21 Mar – 3 Apr (First Light beach bungalow). Bangkok 4–7 Apr and 18–19 Apr (transit either side of Bhutan). | |
| Bhutan | 8 – 17 Apr | 25 | 10.9k | With a group, via Drukair. Fully organised trip, high step count from daily excursions. | |
| Thassos | 4 – 8 Jun | 42 | 4.0k | In-person team offsite (Klausur). Tensest confirmed stretch of the year — overlaps with recovery from a wisdom-tooth extraction on 2 Jun (marked on the chart above), so treat as a small, confounded sample; see the note on "Reading this" above. | |
| Greece | 5 Jul, 10–11 Jul | 31 | 6.8k | 5 Jul day trip with friends; 10–11 Jul weekend with a larger group of friends. | |
| Turkey | 23 – 31 Aug | 16 | 7.0k | With a companion. Score sat at or below the Bansko baseline all week; steps ran roughly 2–3× normal. | |
| Italy | 3 – 10 Sep | — | — | 3 Sep travel day. 4–6 Sep Castelbuono / Madonie Park (Madonie Nomads). 7–10 Sep Palermo & Sicily, then back to Bansko. |
9. Activity comparison
Not every activity shows up as a GPS-tracked session. The wristwatch never logged the Ha Long Bay cruise as an activity in 2026, exactly as it never logged the 2025 sailing trip — the evidence for it lives in the Travel Schedule notes instead ("Diana Halong Cruises", Ninh Bình → Sa Pa overnight bus), the same evidence standard used everywhere else on this page. So the comparison below draws on two sources: the five GPS-tracked sessions (Cat Hai paddleboarding, Sa Pa walking, two Bhutan hikes, one Bansko walk), and CSV-confirmed named periods with no GPS session of their own — the Ha Long Bay cruise itself, and the eleven days on Koh Phangan, which split cleanly in the notes into a settled beach stretch and a six-day stretch the notes literally call "What to do???". Bar shade marks how each row is evidenced: solid = a logged wristwatch activity, medium = a named period from the Travel Schedule, light = the rest of that trip with no specific note attached. One gap worth naming rather than filling in: the Bhutan notes never break the week down beyond a one-line "trip with the group" note each day. Most Bhutan itineraries include the Paro Taktsang ("Tiger's Nest") hike, and 17 April's GPS walk — 2h44, the longest tracked walk of the year — is consistent with it, but the source data does not confirm that is what happened that day, so it is flagged here, not stated as fact.
Answer: the richer picture still doesn't support a simple "activity = calmer" story. The clearest CSV-sourced parallel to 2025's sailing — the Ha Long Bay cruise (31.0) — ran higher than the rest of the Vietnam trip (29.4), not lower, echoing 2025's own finding. Within that cruise window the two GPS-tracked days diverge sharply: Cat Hai paddleboarding (26.0) sat below the window average, Sa Pa walking (43.0) sat well above it — the single highest reading of any tracked activity across both years, fittingly in a region known for demanding rice-terrace trekking, not a lazy add-on. The most counter-intuitive finding is in Koh Phangan: the settled beach stretch (37.0) ran markedly higher than the six days of open-ended "What to do???" limbo that followed it (24.2) — the opposite of what indecision would be expected to produce, a reminder that a day's HRV-based reading reflects far more than whatever got written in the diary that day. Across both years and every context examined so far, deliberate, planned exertion has not shown up as calmer than its surrounding trip — if anything the reverse, slightly — while the single calmest tracked day either year remains a routine, low-key walk at home in Bansko (14.0). Every row here is a small sample (n=1–61) — read as suggestive, not conclusive, in either year.