I wore the Gwyneth-approved Oura ring for a month – did it fix my life?

It’s 8pm at the pub on a typical Wednesday. Suddenly, I find myself bragging. I’ve reached my highest “sleep score”. My “readiness score” is looking impressive, too. And it’s all because of the new, high-tech, health-tracking Oura ring on my finger. My friend gives an impassive nod; another frowns and politely changes the conversation. That’s when I realise what I’ve become… I’m now a wearables person.

You know the type. They’re people who analyse their every step and breath via a Fitbit-style exercise tracking device, and have no shame in obnoxiously humblebragging about it at any given moment. In the past, I’ve been sceptical of wearables; I found the idea of a device monitoring my every move quite dystopian. Plus, the popularity of wearables – global ownership has doubled in the past two years – is surely a symptom of the wellness industry’s current vogueish sheen.

But when I learnt that you didn’t have to wear a chunky bracelet or watch, but reap the same results through a discrete ring on your finger, I was intrigued. Inspired by my desire to improve my poor sleep and lack of motivation for exercise, I decided to try the Oura ring, the supposed crème de la créme of wearables. Also known as “the Fitbit to the Hollywood elite”, it’s been worn by Gwyneth Paltrow (inevitably, an Oura investor), Jennifer Aniston, Prince Harry and the England football team (rings start at £299, plus a £5.99 monthly subscription fee for the app). Once you know what an Oura ring looks like, they’re hard to miss: they’re thick, titanium-coated gold or silver bands usually worn on a person’s middle finger.

Just like an Apple Watch, Fitbit or Whoop device, the Oura tracks your sleep, stress levels, activity, heart rate and menstrual cycle, and can provide more sophisticated health readings such as your blood oxygenation levels and heart rate variability – those are the milliseconds between each heartbeat. Data is then sent via Bluetooth to the Oura app on your phone, which translates it for you in the form of scores: “readiness”, “sleep” and “activity” range between zero and 100, but you can dig deeper into your results by looking at graphs and breakdowns of your weekly and monthly trends. In between all of that, Oura sends you friendly notifications like “Time to stretch your legs?”, “Just 10 minutes of brisk walking until you reach your activity goal!” and “Congrats on yet another good night’s sleep!” It’s like having a pocket-sized accountability partner.

I found that four weeks of trying the ring taught me more about the human body than my school science class ever did. Even though the entire purpose of getting the ring was to monitor my poor quality of sleep (and improve it), I now know about my HRV and blood oxygenation, and I know my cardiovascular age. However, such vigorous self-study didn’t come without hiccups.

Week One: A false start

The first two weeks of having an Oura ring are crucial because it’s when the app begins to absorb data about you to create your daily goals. I want to make a good impression. But my plan of going to the gym several times in the first week is derailed when my immune system gives up and I come down with a winter flu. It leads to me spending seven days horizontal. The Oura ring must think I’m a lazy sod so far.

This does, however, give me some time to play around with the app. In the “Explore” section, I’m pleased to find a series of guided meditation and breathwork activities, geared towards countering stress and winding down before bedtime. Oura works with Headspace, the popular mental health app, so the meditation routines are advanced and genuinely helpful when I’m grappling with the illness blues. During the “Calm Body, Calm Mind” routine, I’m encouraged to do the box breath exercise (inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, and repeat). Most of my results, like cardiovascular age and stress levels, won’t be calculated yet for a few weeks, so at this point there are still quite a lot of unknowns to all of this.

Week Two: Getting to know each other (finally)

With the illness behind me, I re-enter humanity and pick up my daily routine. My first quest is to get back in the gym, which is where I encounter my first hurdle with the ring. I complete 45 minutes of weight training and the Oura thinks I went for a walk; I take a swim and it thinks I went hiking. I feel gaslit. I’ve been brutalising myself while lifting heavy weights and the ring didn’t even notice. The inaccuracy also means I have to manually input my workouts into the app every time I exercise, whereas other wearables seem to be better at accurately detecting physical motion.

Sleep, though, this is where the Oura really thrives. The app begins to learn that, on average, I spend 24 per cent of my night in REM sleep – the dreaming state – and 21 per cent in deep sleep. It starts to monitor what bedtime works best for me, and begins to prompt me to prioritise winding down before sleep. When I have a poor night’s sleep, the Oura takes all of this into account in my “readiness” score, and will urge me to take it easy the following day. Being aware of this makes me feel more in control, and I slowly feel my sleep improving.

Week Three: Stress troubles

By week three, my new best friend seems to know me quite well. Maybe too well. On a random Thursday, Oura informs me that I spend multiple hours per day in a state of stress, even on weekends. It shows me a graph of my stress, which has four zones: restored, relaxed, engaged and stressed. Embarrassingly, I’m stressed in the cinema, at a sit-down concert, at the gym, at my friend’s house for a relaxed dinner and while filing an article to my editor. This is all rather unsettling and surprising (I didn’t think I was that stressed). To make matters worse, this knowledge of my high stress score only makes me more stressed. What’s going on?

When I eventually calm down, I take some comfort in Oura’s guidance, which states that not all stress is negative. Stress can be a sign of excitement, motivation or simply being really engaged. Research has shown that hormetic stress – moderate stress levels – can be positive for your health because it increases resilience. Oura says that, as humans, hormesis can happen during exercise, exposure to cold or heat, and small challenges like a crossword puzzle or mind game, so it’s important to “reframe” specific periods of stress as something positive.

Week Four: Disaster strikes

As you might be able to tell by this point, I am becoming slightly obsessed with the app, especially on days when I’m exercising flat-out and keeping track of my activity score. I desperately don’t want to disappoint Oura, so I feel a combination of app-induced peer pressure and motivation when it comes to exercise.

By now, I’m learning things about my body that I would otherwise be unaware of. According to the app, I’m young at heart: my cardiovascular age is four years younger than my actual age, my HRV is standard and so are my blood oxygenation levels. But I wonder whether this newfound knowledge is positive for me, or whether it’s only propelling me towards becoming fixated on aspects of my health that I’d usually be blissfully ignorant about.

According to various studies, wearables often promote increased physical activity and healthier lifestyles, but there can be a downside to them when the constant stream of data becomes overwhelming. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that wearing fitness trackers to monitor heart conditions can actually make some people more anxious about their health.

All of this aside, things seem to be going smoothly. Disaster strikes, however, as I’m doing a deadlift in the gym. As I grip the barbell, the skin on my palm gets caught between the Oura ring and the weight, ripping my skin and causing me to bleed. Okay, it’s a tiny cut, but I find that the ring makes it harder to grip weights, so I usually take it off in the gym to avoid the possibility of injury again. I’d advise that if you’re searching for a wearable to purely monitor your exercise, and you train with weights, then the Oura may not be the one.

In terms of my sleep in week four, I’m more in control thanks to the data Oura has collected about my sleeping patterns, while the app’s notifications encourage me to be more mindful of the importance of my sleep. On days when my readiness score is higher, I feel inspired to be more ambitious about my exercise goals and feel motivated by the presence of the ring. If I’ve had a late one the night before, the app is kind to me and will recommend less strenuous activity. Plus, you can switch it into “rest mode” when you want a duvet day.

I’m feeling more positive about my health, so I decide to stick with my Oura ring in the name of wellness, though I wouldn’t say that my skin is glowing quite like Gwyneth’s just yet. Ultimately, though, I find that when life gets busy it’s nice to have someone – sorry, I mean an app – to tell you what your body is capable of each day, even if it is a bit Black Mirror. I’m just learning to brag about it less.