My new sleep tracker – the one ring to rule them all? (fitness trackers, that is!)

 

It’s finally here – my Oura ring! I first heard about it through Chris Kresser, and since I’ve had severe sleep problems for the last ten years, I immediately thought this would be something for me.

The Oura ring is not a fitness tracker – it’s a sleep tracker. The difference is, although it tracks your fitness and how much you move – it also tracks your sleep in detail. (This is not a sponsored post by the way, although I wouldn’t mind being sponsored regarding this! Sleep is just that important, and this is a product I believe in).

Above all, it tracks your Heart Rate Variability (HRV) which most gadgets don’t track. Your HRV is an indicator for how much you recuperate after something like illnesses, eating certain foods, exercise etc. It also tracks your sleep stages and then takes all the variables into account and gives you suggestions for your day.

The tracker needs about two weeks tracking to be completely accurate, but already after 5 nights of sleep, I can see that my deep sleep is just rubbish! My resting heart rate is too high on nights when I’ve been stressed out during the day, and my HRV is also not that great. I have the mind of a much older person, in other words, and I need to do something about it. But one stress factor – how much I should move about during the day, and if all the wakings I have during the night make me ineffective – has completely disappeared! Now I have clear data that shows that although on some nights I don’t sleep as much, it doesn’t matter if the quality of the sleep was better.

My ring still doesn’t know me, so it tells me to get moving every day, as if I need to push myself! But in reality I’ve had to cut back on the amount of exercise I get. If my ring tells me I need to walk 7k, I usually get that just by being at home. We have a upper floor, and I move around a lot, all the time placing things in their order, fetching things or sometimes doing yoga.

At most my ring has told me to walk 10 km, and that is just the ordinary amount of walking I do! I haven’t so far had any day being completely optimal, especially since my deep sleep is so bad (about 20 minutes a night – you need at least 1,5 hours) and because I tend to walk too much, but now I at least have something to track progress with.

And it feels so good!

You can find the Oura ring here – I waited more than 9 months for mine. My dad got his a month earlier, so he’s had more time to track his sleep and his activity and his ring is definitely giving him results he can use. Since we preordered we got a nice sum off the final prize, but you can still get discount codes all over the internet if you are eager to have a sleep tracker too.

Here’s an interview with the Oura CEO with one of the persons in the Functional Medicine community:

Harpreet Rai on Bulletproof Radio:

(and fun fact: Prince Harry also has one! He got his after my dad got his, so my dad was ahead of Prince Harry and the trend!)

Some sleep tips I’ve picked up recently:

  • 1-2 teaspoons of raw honey before sleep can really help you sleep better, especially if you’re female (it has to be raw honey, and you can’t put it in hot water)
  • I want a weighted blanket for adults
  • True Dark glasses are now on my wish list
  • I tend to forget to take my magnesium – but it also affects sleep
  • you can’t fall asleep with cold feet or hands. You just can’t. Socks are a must if you have cold feet like I tend to have when I go to sleep.

 

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