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