Three months ago, I was so stressed that I tried my partner’s Garmin watch for a week, to monitor my heart. I realised 2 things: 1- I don’t like smartwatches and 2- I needed to take back control of my health or I was heading toward real troubles.

A week later I was getting my Oura ring.

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What is the Oura ring?

The Oura ring is probably the best known smart ring on the market. Entirely focused on your health, after a few days of getting to know you, it will start providing you with valuable, yet simply presented data which will help you improve your health.

The focus is on sleep and the quality of such sleep, heart health and activity and from there it will give you, through the Oura app, summaries and trends of what they have called your readiness and resilience while giving you activity goals and all sorts of tips to improve your health.

The Oura rings tracks your body temperature, your HRV, your respiratory rate, your sleep patterns… and a lot more.

In short, it’s impressive! And most importantly, super useful.

Some of the things I learned from my Oura ring

It takes a bit of time for your ring to get to know you and for you to understand things. Even when they are obvious!

So here are a few things I have learned so far:

• Wine is bad for my sleep. Like really bad! I obviously knew too much alcohol was bad. I may be French but I’m not that stupid! However, I never knew how much, even a small quantity could have such a big impact. A really negative impact.

• Some meals are very stressing on my body. I suspected it but now I know.

• I didn’t move as much I thought I did. Oura is motivating me to move more and is helping me understand when is a good time to go all in and when it is best to take it slow. The more I look at my trends, the better I understand my body.

• My stress is too high and so my HRV is way too low. It’s killing me, probably literally. I’m working on it and having my ring to help me monitor and act consequently is paramount. Oura does insist that HRV is a highly personal metrics but I can tell the efforts I put into lowering my stress have a positive impact. (you can read a follow up on this here)

• Oura confirmed I’m an early bird! Silly but it made me happy!

Stress is not always what it seems

One specific thing I wanted to highlight is that I realised stress is not always what it seems. At least for me. When reading comments from short time users, it became evident that it wasn’t just for me though. Let me explain.

Just like other people, sometimes I feel super stressed. because I’m in a rush, because I’m driving in traffic, or doing something ‘stressful’. Yet, these are often not the times when my Oura rings registers me as stressed. It’s easy to dismiss the data collected by the ring and think it is wrong.

But instead of considering that my ring is wrong, I decided to check in with myself to consider what has lead to the stress registered by Oura and, to the opposite, what has lead to the restorative state. Like Oura suggests I may add.

And the more I do this, the more I understand what stresses my body, and it is clearly not what I thought.

I often read in the App that stress can be induced even by things we like doing and this has been very true as well!

Some of the things that may still need improvements

• Nap tracking! Oura does in my view an impressive and accurate job tracking night sleep. But I’m a nap girl and it doesn’t always goes well with my ring.

• Having meditations available is great but unfortunately they are not my type and there is only one voice I can sort of tolerate. The others stress me even more than I am.

What other features should it include?

I personally don’t have new features wishes. After a slight learning curve, I’m starting to understand the metrics available better and better and it’s already quite a lot. But I’m sure the Oura team is working on other things to include. The competition is fierce in the ring market!

Everybody should have a smart ring or watch or else

In this day and age, it is silly not to take full advantages of the technology available. Wether you are younger or older, getting a view of your health metrics and understanding your body is probably the best health hack there is.

If you have been around here, you know how much I dislike the “I went vegan for a day or a week and this what I learned“. Replace “vegan” by pretty much any trend you want. Including “I wore a smart watch or ring“. And the result is always the same in my view: Nothing, you learned nothing!

Because the truth is that it takes time to understand your own health, your own body. And your needs change with the seasons, with your cycle and will change further over the years.

This is one of the reasons why having a smart ring or watch is becoming more and more important.

Not mentioning that it creates valuable data for health professionals to look at when you need expert health advice. I’m quite sure lots of doctors don’t even take this into account yet, but it will become a norm in the future.

Additional info

You do need to first buy the sizing kit. This will enable you to try on a mockup ring and wear it to see how it feels. Do not skip this step and do try it for a few days. Take your time deciding on which finger you want to wear your ring, non dominant hand is best. Workout with it, sleep with it…

You will get a credit back for the kit to spend on your ring.

I got my Oura ring in black and I’m happy. Originally I wanted it in silver but it wasn’t available in my size when I bought it, so I switched to black. I’m really glad because it doesn’t look like I’m wearing an expensive piece of jewellery which was important for me. And I can wear my gold or my silver jewellery and it always matches!

You will then need the subscription. Yes! Some people are pissed about this. Yes, overall it is pricey. In my view, having such a tool to help you make better decisions about your health is worth it.

Add tags often & register your activities. Soon the ring will recognise what you are doing on its own. The more relevant tags you add, the better it gets to know you.

There are plenty of things I didn’t mention here. Like the fact that you can sync it with other health apps, that the ring can detect illnesses (in testing mode I think), that it tracks your cycle, that it charges super fast, that the battery last a couple days, that it gives you your vascular age, that I wear it when working in the garage and it is barely scratched!

Oh and that you should dry your finger and the ring after washing your hands or you’ll get wrinkly skin under your ring, sort of like when you take a long bath!

As with every products out there, some people are happy, some people are unhappy. I’m amongst the very happy ones!

A follow up on this:

Increasing my HRV – What is working