Maybe it’s my competitive nature, but I’ve always performed better when there is a grade or ranking involved. The minute you tell me something is out of 100, I’m aiming for the 90s. If I’m at a workout class with a leaderboard, I’m trying to be No. 1. In school, I always tried to get as close to a 4.0 as possible. (Why I’m like this is probably a topic best explored in therapy.)
The one thing I’ve never been able to grade myself on is my health and well-being—though that’s not to say I haven’t tried. I’ve challenged myself to run a marathon, hold crow pose in my yoga class for a certain length of time, and perfect chia pudding concoctions made with Goop-y ingredients like colostrum and kefir. But to be able to achieve more holistic, every day wellness goals, you need to have a good grasp on your health baselines—something which I’ve always only been able to approximate. I always wake up guesstimating how many hours of sleep I had or how restful it was. I don’t know what the typical amount of stress is for me.
There’s long been wearable technology like Apple Watches or Google Pixels available to track things like this, but I have never been able to make any of it work for me; I’ve always found watches and bracelets a bit too clunky and uncomfortable. But there is the Oura ring, a smart device that tracks your sleep, activity, daily stress levels, and vitals, like blood oxygen, temperature, and heart rate—all via a simple, sleek-looking ring that you wear on your finger. I’d been thinking about trying one, and when I got drinks with a friend recently, she sung its praises, so I decided to take the plunge. I recently took an Oura ring 4 for a month-long test drive—keep reading for my full review based on its appearance, wearability, and key tracking functions.
OURA Ring 4
Appearance
Above all, I was initially attracted to a smart ring because, compared to other wellness tech, it’s pretty. I tried the newest latest iteration of the Oura ring, the 4 (a new version comes out every few years). It comes in six different colorways—silver, black, brushed silver, stealth (gun metal), gold, and rose gold. I always wear at least three silver rings on my fingers, so I chose the sterling silver option. It matches my jewelry well, and I layer a stacking ring on top of it. I’ve even gotten compliments on it from people who have no idea it’s the ring is a health tracking device, which makes me feel like I can wear it discreetly in any setting. I’m sorry, but nothing ruins formalwear like an Apple Watch!
From left to right: the Oura ring in gold, brushed silver, stealth, rose gold, black, and silver.
Sleep
When you wear it to bed, the ring tracks your sleep cycle. Every morning, it makes a graph depicting how long I was in light, REM, or deep sleep—plus when I was awake. From there, it creates a “sleep score.” This score is out of 100, and Oura suggests that 85 and above is optimal (my average sleep score for the past month is hovering around a 78). The app breaks down your score for you in a gentle way, encouraging you to take it easy if your score was low, or empowering you to take on your day with confidence if it was high.
I’ve never been a particularly good sleeper—my insomnia dates back to well before I had any real responsibilities—but my ring has helped me figure out part of the equation to sleeping better. For example, I’ve seen that eating dinner late can affect my sleep quality negatively and lower my sleep score. It also might be a placebo effect, but if I wake up and feel extremely tired but see a good sleep score, I feel like I can muster up the energy to take on the day. Now, I’ve started noting how many times my score was above 85 to mimic what I did to get there.
Readiness
Oura rings also give you a readiness score every morning, which offers a more comprehensive view of your overall health. Also ranked out of 100, Oura’s readiness meter takes into account your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, body temperature, respiratory rate, and your sleep. It also finds your unique base body temperature and tracks if you’re out of range or not; a high temperature can reduce your overall readiness score. Resting heart rate also looks at how well your body is recovering from stressors like high intensity training or a late meal.
As I write this, I’ve had three straight days of waking up to my ring telling me to “Pay Attention.” That’s because my body temperature has been slightly elevated—the first day it happened, I’d had a couple glasses of wine the night before, but after seeing it for three straight days, I wonder if I’m fighting something off. Just in case, I’ve been taking care to stay hydrated and bolster my immune system as much as possible.
Activity
Like an Apple Watch, an Oura ring also tracks your step count and activity throughout the day. It shows you how many calories you’ve burned through exercise by automatically detecting your movement and even translates it into a walking equivalency. The device can also guess whether your movement is due to yoga, pilates, strength training, running, or another workout. Based on your readiness score, it suggests how much activity you should do in a day. I like that it doesn’t encourage me to push myself past my limit if I didn’t sleep well or have a higher temperature than usual—it makes me feel like I have a personal wellness coach who is taking all of my needs into account.
Sometimes, I find that my ring lags in picking up on an exercise I just did. Most of my preferred forms of exercise also involve my hands (yoga, pilates, and even cycling), and I sometimes think that this messes with Oura’s ability to pick up on an exercise. I went to a high-intensity yoga sculpt class that barely registered on my device. But, for the most part, I’ve found the activity tracking very accurate and helpful.
Other notable features
If you’d like to track your menstrual cycle, Oura ring offers that feature as well. The ring can predict when your next period will start, as well as use your body temperature to offer insights on what phase of your cycle you’re in.
The ring also has a tab that measures your daytime stress based on your heart rate, heart rate variability, motion, and temperature throughout the day. A graph starts at restored and goes up to relaxed, engaged, and stressed. I find this tool to be scarily accurate—looking at mine today, my stress level was at its peak when I was presenting my ideas in a meeting, and I was most relaxed while I was drinking my coffee this morning.
In the “My Health” tab, Oura also tracks your resilience to stress, which is based on how well you recover while you sleep and during the day. It also lets you know your cardiovascular age, which is based on your pulse wave velocity (how fast a pressure wave travels through an artery). Mine puts me at six years below my actual age, which to me, is as close to an “A” that I can get from my Oura ring.
Wearability
Oura sends a sizing kit to you before you purchase a ring and recommends that you wear the sizing ring for at least 24 hours to get a feel for how it fits. My fingers are slightly between sizes, which proved to be a little tricky, but I eventually found the right option. I originally wanted to wear it on my ring finger but found it too loose, so now I wear it on my middle finger. It does require soap to take it off, but I use that as an excuse to clean my ring whenever it needs to be charged. My device stays charged for four to five days, and it charges quickly, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything when I take it off.
Key takeaways
No matter how hard I try, I’ve learned from the Oura ring that I can’t quite get a perfect score on my wellness. Even if I have what I might consider a near-perfect day of drinking tons of water, going to hot yoga, walking all over the city, eating salad, and getting over eight hours of sleep, I might not break an 80 on my sleep score or readiness score. At the end of the day, the ring has helped me look at my overall health holistically, something I could never do when I was just guesstimating my baselines—and that feels more valuable to me than any “exceeds expectations” report card.