Surprising Oura Ring sleep insights

(Previous blog from 2022)

The Oura Ring is the wearable health gadget made famous by Prince Harry and I’ve been using it for a long time. Below you’ll find some surprising stuff I’ve learnt about the Oura Ring

First though, what is it? It's a tracking device that you wear on your finger and it measures your sleep, heart rate, heart rate variability, body temperature, and exercise.

Insight one: Rather shockingly I've consistently found when I even have a small amount of wine (or any alcohol), my heart rate variability (HRV) scores are way down, my resting heart rate increases and my deep sleep drops off the chart .

What's interesting about this is we all kind of know that we get hangovers when we drink and we are not at our best the next day. But this is cold, hard data that proves that my body don't work as well even after a small amount of alcohol.

Hmmm. The graph above is my resting heart rate when asleep (the two arrows were after the two nights out, and only 2 glasses of wine.

Oura Ring Review: Here’s my expert (ish) review of the Oura Ring results I’ve received, and some other things that I’ve noticed with HRV and Heart Rate Variability and the Oura Ring

More insights:

• Meditation before bed seems to have a beneficial effect on my sleeping heart rate and HRV. Just 10 minutes seems to do the trick. The Oura ring tracker likes it when I meditate pre-bed a lot.
• Eating early brings my HRV up and my heart rate down. Eating late increases my heart rate overnight.
• Phone in airplane mode seems to increase my HRV a bit on the Oura ring (and is generally just good bedtime practice)
• When I unplug all technology from close to my head and switch electricity sockets to off, that reduces HRV a bit.
• Consistent good exercise and workouts seems to bring my heart rate down over time. Sitting around doing nothing seems to raise my heart rate. Makes sense I suppose.
• The airplane mode on Oura is a godsend. Not many trackers have this feature, and it really marks Oura ring out from the rest. It means no radiation at all on your body while you sleep/wear the Oura during the day.

UPDATE:

• The big insight: My Oura Ring stats in January saw my best ever sleep times, sleeping almost an hour longer on average per night than previously (check out the graph below). Could it be down to the new organic mattress we bought to replace the old, tired, creaky one we had previously? Such a simple thing, but a good solid, comfortable new mattress seems to have done the trick.

Any others? Let me know.