The New Oura Ring Is Here

Better Sleep, Better Health
(And a better looking ring)

Sometime in early 2017, I bought an Oura Ring (For $300), because I'd heard it was 90% accurate to a sleep study center, and I wasn't feeling so great in the mornings (felt like wasn't getting refreshing sleep despite regular supplementation with Magnesium, etc).

The first week of monitored sleep showed I was getting 2-5 minutes of deep sleep* a night.

Looking into it a little bit I found that ideally a person wants/needs over an hour (at least) of deep sleep a night, an hour and a half or more is better.


*There's Deep Sleep, REM Sleep, and Light Sleep.  DEEP sleep is where the physical/physiological self-rejuvenation happens.  Injury recovery, general recovery, the body's regular self-regeneration process.   

Lack of deep sleep results in overall fatigue, poor cortisol levels (bad), poor recovery from workouts etc), slower/weaker healing, systemic inflammation (part of the heart disease dynamic, part of the arthritis dynamic, etc).

Plus, of course, tendonitis symptoms and dynamic.


The Oura ring did a lot of other things...like:

1. Acts as a step counter/activity tracker.  Want to know how many miles you hiked?
   
2. Tracks body temperature (See how your nocturnal body temperature varies, and find out early signs of impending sickness or a need to rest, or detect menstrual cycle stages.)
3. Tracks and calculates Heart Rate Variability
   
4. Calculates your resting heart rate
5. Calculates a 'readiness' score based off your activity levels, sleep scores, heart rate variability, etc.
   
6. Calculates a 'Sleep Score' based off your total sleep, sleep efficiency and latency, amounts of REM and Deep sleep, etc
   
7. Tracks sleep disturbances (yeay, I don't have sleep apnea)
   
8. Tracks the trends and keeps charts over time of all the above

Good news/bad news, the only thing I use the ring for is to track my sleep.  I only wear it at night.

And my real focus with it is getting better sleep, so I:

• wake up feeling refreshed
• feel better and have more energy during the day
• reduce systemic inflammation, and thus reduce any trend from the 'poor sleep' factor towards heart disease.
• better cortisol levels and hormone performance
• better recovery from athletics and activity (and normal day to day....I notice I'm getting older....)

But ultimately, I want to get better sleep to avoid developing heart disease.  These rings are a cheap and smart way to finese how your body operates by finally being able to SEE (and track) how it is operating.

These old versions work great but....not so pretty.

Help Avoid Heart Disease By Getting More Deep Sleep

My father, grand father, and great grandfather had heart disease. 

I plan on avoiding that.  One one of the measures I've taken is to focus on getting better restorative sleep.  ESPECIALLY once I got real feedback on how much deep sleep I wasn't getting, via the Oura ring.  

90% accurate to a sleep study center (and I don't want to pay to spend the night in a sleep study center....)

I was only getting 2-5 minutes of deep sleep a night?  Bad! 

Bad in theory, plus I just didn't feel refreshed in the morning.  It didn't feel good, and I don't like how that feels.

Long story short, I tried changing various factors for about 5 months to try to get better sleep.

I tried the following that made no noticeable difference in my deep sleep scores:

• different bedtimes, earlier and later (no noticeable difference)
• nap during the day, or no nap (no noticeable difference)
• more magnesium, less magnesium (no noticeable difference)
• totally gluten free, some gluten, a lot of gluten (pizza, yum!)(no noticeable difference)
• melatonin (no noticeable difference)
• extra water, normal water, less water
• more fat intake, less fat intake
• some honey before bedtime (no noticeable difference)
• No electronics an hour before bedtime (no noticeable difference)
• various other things I don't even remember (no noticeable difference)

What I finally came upon, using the scientific method (yeay!), was that if I did the following three things, I went from 2-5 minutes of deep sleep to 45-55minutes minimally:

• No alcohol (well, no more than one glass of wine)
• Stop all calorie intake by 8pm, 8:30 at the latest  (sleep scores don't increase if my last calorie intake is 6pm-7:30pm)
  
  

And if I sleep cold (meaning, in the cold, without a lot of hot heavy blankets, actually slightly uncomfortably cold), I get up to an hour and 55 minutes of deep sleep.

Damn!  That's almost two hours of deep sleep, up from 2 to 5 minutes of deep sleep.

Only possible with the Oura ring.

I would never have been able to solve my deep sleep deficiency issue without the Oura ring.

Improved Design, Improved Capability In The New Rings

Updated version of the rings are now available.  They ship in April.

Oura is familiar with this system as they started out as a Kickstarter.

What you do is:

1. Pay for and order the ring
2. Receive a ring sizing kit in the mail (different plastic rings of different sizes so you can physically try them on and select the correct size...no guessing on the right size)
3. THEN you tell Oura what size ring you want.
   
4. Oura ships the rings in April

The new rings are WAY more attractive than the old ones (see pic above).

The new rings are smaller and prettier. As the technology has been improved on, they have new capabilities built in:

• Improved battery life:  From 2 days to 7 days
• Improved sensor tech: Infrared optical pulse measurement, 3d accelerometer, gyroscope, body temperature sensor
• Water resistant to 100m (used to be 50m as I recall)
• Updated Oura app and Oura cloud:  Including notes, tags, trends and correlatino views, on=demand daytime heart rate and heart rate variability
• The ring now uses daytime measures and sleep activity to help show you your optimal circadian rhythm.