I’ve been wearing my Oura ring for a few months now – it arrived at the very beginning of September, and I’ve pretty much worn it daily since. It is one of the best things I’ve bought all year, no question. Since Black Friday sales are coming up (and holiday wish lists!), I wanted to make sure I shared my review early enough for anyone doing some shopping.
What is an Oura ring?
For anyone not familiar, the Oura ring is a health tracking piece of jewelry. It does track workouts / activity, but that’s not really the main focus of the ring, and of course, it’s not what I use it for. The Oura tracks sleep, readiness, heart rate, blood oxygen, and temperature. It’s like an Apple Watch, but much smaller and sleeker and easier to wear. Instead of a display on the ring itself, it connects to an app that has all the information about your health.
The ring itself is super lightweight and easy to wear. It only needs to be charged about once a week, and charges within a few hours. When I tried sleeping with my Apple Watch, I found it too heavy and actually got a little heat rash from wearing it all night long, but I haven’t had any issues at all wearing the ring basically 24/7. I was especially concerned with the weight, because with my muscle weakness I notice even the smallest thing. But I was honestly really impressed with how lightweight it was – I don’t even notice it on my hand at all.
Using the ring
To use the ring correctly, you first have to make sure you get the right size. Oura sizing is different than regular jewelry sizing, so they highly recommend (as do I!) getting the ring sizing kit they sell. This way, you can wear the sizing rings for a full day, figuring out the correct size taking into account how your finger can swell and change sizes throughout the day. The sizing kit only costs $10, and that $10 can then go towards the cost of the ring if you buy one.
I have the 3rd generation of the ring, which means there are three little sensors on the right that stick out a little bit and should always be on the palm-facing side of your finger. The newer version of the ring has the sensors embedded rather than sticking out, but should still be worn the same way. Once you have the ring on, there’s nothing more for you to do!
The app is where you can find out all the information you’re looking for. Every day, it shares a readiness and sleep score, and it also shows your heart rate and stress levels throughout the day. After you’ve been using your ring for a month, it also gives you a resilience score. Sleep is pretty self explanatory, but it breaks it down into deep, light, and REM sleep, and shows movement and periods of awakeness overnight. Readiness is a kind of overall score of how ready you are to face the day. It can help you decide if it’s a day where you need to take it a little bit easier on yourself, and be less active, or if you’re feeling ready to take some action. Resilience is kind of like readiness, but as a two-week average, rather than a single day’s data. It looks at daytime stress, daytime recovery, and nighttime recovery, and from those calculates a score of how your body can handle and recover from stress over time.
There is also activity tracking, but since I don’t use that feature at all, I’m not going to talk about it! From what I understand, though, the ring doesn’t handle heavy-duty activity tracking as well as an Apple Watch or Fitbit does.
Why I love the Oura
So, there are two reasons I really love it. The first, and easiest to explain, is that I am great at talking about the importance of sleep, but much less good about actually taking my own advice. I am really, really good at revenge bedtime procrastination! But I am also very competitive. So being forced to look at my sleep score every night is a way for me to “compete” with myself to try to raise it.
The bigger reason is a little more complicated. As a disabled woman, I live every day trying to find balance. My energy is finite, and when I push my limits, I find myself facing some very real consequences. I either end up exhausting myself so badly that I struggle to get through a normal day, or I push myself to the point of getting sick (or, very worst case, hospitalized). I try to figure out those limits on my own, but it is HARD. My body’s energy can change daily, and while I’ve gotten much better at reading the signs over the years, it can still be hard to predict.
But having readiness and resilience and sleep scores helps give me a few extra, external clues about how my body is doing. I can look at my sleep score and my readiness score and decide if I’ve been pushing my limits a little bit too much, and if I need to take a day or two to take a break and take it easy. Or, if I see that my readiness is high for a few days in a row, I know that it’s okay to push myself a little bit more!
Living with SMA – or any chronic illness, really – means that you live with so many health-related unknowns every single day. I really love that my Oura ring helps make a little bit more sense of the unknowns!
