Why I Ditched My Oura Ring

Simple Living

Oct 30

I’ve been on a wellness kick for a few years. I drastically reduced my refined sugar intake, began exercising - and teaching exercise classes! - and became mindful of all facets of my health.

Naturally, my progression with wellness would lead me to look into fitness trackers.

I wanted to track my steps, better understand my sleep habits, and determine how much time I actually spent in a stressed state. I was also hoping a tracker would motivate me to move more throughout the day.

The Apple Watch never appealed to me, too clunky, I wanted a subtle tracker, one I hardly noticed. I’ve used pedometers before and have been annoyed at having something around my wrist or hooked to my waistband. When I discovered the Oura Ring, it felt like the perfect solution.

And for eight months I loved it. (Psst! I used my HSA to pay for it. 😉) But I ended up taking it off as an experiment and never put it back on. Here’s what I loved about my Oura Ring, and ultimately why I decided to ditch it.

What I love about the Oura Ring

It’s Inconspicuous

Unless you know what an Oura Ring looks like, you’d assume it’s just another ring on your finger. Along with its subtlety and the ease of wearing it on my finger, I appreciate the lack of screen. One of my wellness goals is to reduce screen time, and I also thought that having to manually sync the data with my phone would prevent obsession over it.

I could turn off Bluetooth

The Oura Ring syncs with the Oura app via Bluetooth, and I appreciated being able to turn Bluetooth off on the ring. My main concern with this feature was avoiding EMFs, but it led to an additional perk: In order to turn Bluetooth back on and sync my ring, I had to place my ring on the charger.

This reduced how often I was able to check my ring data and initially held off my obsession over it, but later it became a nuisance and an additional ritual I succumbed to multiple times a day.

The Sleep Tracker Is Super Accurate

The Oura Ring started as a sleep tracker, so its sleep tracking technology is top tier. It shows, my sleep data was crazy accurate. It sensed when I awoke from a dream and when I drifted back to sleep. It was also accurate at identifying naps.

After a few months, the ring was able to determine my ideal bed time, wake time, and sleep duration, an insight I follow to this day.

The Stress Tracking Was Eye Opening

I didn’t realize how much time I spend in a stressed state until I started wearing my Oura Ring. It divides your state into four categories: Stressed, Engaged, Relaxed, and Restored. And it tells you how your stress levels compare to other Oura users. Mine were often higher than the average.

While Oura admits that it can feel arbitrary when you’re in a stressed vs. relaxed state, I did notice trends of what caused me to lean in the relaxed and restorative states and have incorporated more of those activities into my days.

Why I ultimately ditched my Oura Ring

I felt shamed by my activity score - despite being quite active

Oura Ring has a rest mode, but it’s intention is to only be used occasionally when you’re sick, jet lagged, injured, or need some extra recovery time. When you switch to rest mode, all of your activity tracking ceases. You can’t see your step count, or the results of any activity you do.

I wish there was a recovery mode that reduced your activity goal while still tracking your activity. Because, despite taking daily exercise classes and moving (almost) every hour, I often had to fight to keep my activity score high. I determined that I needed to do two workouts a day to maintain my score, which isn’t always feasible - or desirable.

At one point I figured out that if I tracked my housework, which counts as an activity, I could keep my activity score up. This was a nuisance, as I do housework sporadically throughout the day and had to remember what time I started and stopped. Because the Oura Ring doesn’t detect your activity when doing housework. (I also noticed that it didn’t always detect my activity during workouts, I often had to manually log them.)

Furthermore, I felt like the ring underestimated my calories burned during workouts, even when I adjusted the activity’s intensity level on the app. To compare, I’d ask friends who attend the same fitness classes and use Apple Watches what their calories burned were and they were more often quite higher than mine.

I became too obsessed with the numbers

Logging into the Oura app multiple times a day to track my housework became draining. I became tired of obsessing over my activity and stress scores. While I appreciate the insights my Oura data provided me, checking in and tracking every little thing (including my outdoor grounding sessions, sun exposure, and sauna visits) over stimulated my already dominant left brain.

I experimented with taking off my Oura ring for a week to see how I felt. It was refreshing. No more obsessing, less time on my phone, and I was able to listen to my body and honor what she needed, not what the Oura ring needed to keep my scores up.

Moving forward in my wellness journey, I’m going to follow my intuition and not “the numbers.”

The ring band was too thick

While I do think the Oura Ring is the most subtle of fitness trackers, the band is still rather thick. I have small hands and short fingers. I didn’t like how the thickness looked on my finger.

I also developed a callous on the base of my finger where the ring rubbed my palm. Occassionaly the ring would also pinch the skin at the base of my finger when I was holding dumbbells or the barre during fitness classes.

I’m weary of the privacy of my data

While Oura Health insists that it does not sell user data, I’m still skeptical. After all, users of the popular ancestry DNA company 23andMe were assured their data was safe until it came to light that the company was selling it.

In a world where our personal information is profitable commodity, I’m doing my best to keep mine private. It’s one of the reasons why I quit multiple social media platforms.

If you’re in the market for a fitness tracker, overall, I would recommend the Oura Ring. I just discovered that I’m not a fitness tracker person.

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