In this fun little solo episode, I talk to you about my sleep tool called Oura Ring. It actually does a lot more than analyze how well someone sleeps, but that’s my number one favorite feature of the ring.
It keeps track of your total sleep, your time in bed, your sleep efficiency (your REM, deep and light sleep), it keeps your heart rate, and keeps track of movement and restfulness. This new technology was smart enough to alert me that I had COVID before I actually had any symptoms.
Maybe having this kind of information could be helpful to you, would maybe “gamify” you as it gamified me! It might have a positive impact on your life!
Full transcript below.
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Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sleep, ring, track, Oura Ring, wear, heart rate variability, gamify, heart rate, variability, happy, bed, respiratory rate, check, guess, positive impact, diodes, feel, gamified, body temperature, lowest score
SPEAKERS
Mike Malatesta
Mike Malatesta 00:12
Hey, everybody, welcome back to a special Friday episode of the How’d It Happen Podcast. special because this is a solo, which I do every Friday or almost every Friday. Hopefully that makes it special. I guess I’m not 100% sure on that, but you’re the judge as the listener. So you tell me.
Today, I want to spend a few minutes talking to you about the Oura Ring. The Oura Ring, O-u-r-a ring. This is what it looks like, here. Okay, I first heard about this ring a couple of years ago at I believe it was an Abundance 360 Conference. I’ve never worn any type of device that keeps track of what’s happening in my body. Like, occasionally I would wear a heart rate monitor. But I never wore a Fitbit or an Apple watch or, or any of those things, and the reason is because I never wanted to wear anything bulky. It just didn’t feel like the right thing for me. And so when I saw Oura Ring, and it kind of looks like a wedding band, I thought well, that’s kind of neat. Maybe I could try that; it’s not going to get in the way of anything, and it’s really neat technology, because I don’t know if you can see the inside, but the inside has got these little diodes or sensors of some sort, that you know, take the readings off of your finger, I wear it on this finger on my right hand. But anyway, so now that I’ve had it for a couple of years, and I’m a fan. I don’t get anything from them, and they don’t even know that I exist, but I know they exist, and I like to talk about it because I want people to get a better understanding about what’s happening inside their body.
Particularly with the Oura Ring, it’s number one best feature, I think, is analyzing how well you’re sleeping. And that was another thing that I had no idea about. I go to bed at a certain time and get up at a certain time. And if I wasn’t, you know, tossing and turning or up at night, you know, trying to get back to bed, I figured I was sleeping well. And that could be the case. But it also could not be the case, because believe it or not, you’re not aware of a lot of things that go on when you’re in bed sleeping, or you think you’re sleeping. So what I’ve learned, the Oura Ring keeps track of your total sleep, keeps track of your time in bed, keeps track of your sleep efficiency, which is something I’ve never even heard of. But that’s the efficiency of your light sleep to your REM sleep to your deep sleep, keeps your heart rate, which a lot of devices do, but it establishes your resting heart rate, keeps track of movement and restfulness. So again, you may be asleep but you’re moving. And every time you’re moving, it picks it up, it’s really good about picking that up. Again, it tracks your REM and your deep and your light sleep, so you know how much of that those stages you’re getting. And it gives you an idea of what the ranges should be, how long it takes you to go to sleep. They call that “latency” in the app, but that’s another thing like I’m really bad at — I go to sleep really quickly almost all the time, which I always think is a good thing. The ring doesn’t always think that’s a good thing because it says that I might be overtired, but it’s just always been something that I’ve been fortunate to be able to do, because I know a lot of people struggle to get to sleep, but anyway, it keeps track of it so you know at least how long it does take you to fall asleep, the timing of when I went to sleep so it’s it encourages you to go to bed at a certain time to get the amount of sleep that you actually need, and then it tells you how well you did on that versus the goal.
It tracks your heart rate variability, which is essentially the variability of your heart rate as you sleep. I’m no doctor, but generally speaking, the more variability you have, the better. I like to drink wine regularly, so that keeps my heart rate variability down a little bit. That’s something that I need to, you know, eventually be working on. It tracks your respiratory rate, how your breathing is, checks body temperature, which is really interesting, because when I had COVID in November of 2020, before all the vaccines and all, my ring actually told me that something was wrong with me the morning the minute I woke up. It gave me the lowest score I think I had ever had. And because it does score your sleep for the night, it knew that my body temperature was elevated, it knew that something wasn’t right. Of course, it didn’t know that I had COVID. But it knew that something wasn’t right. And it was the first key for me, because I wasn’t feeling bad, but I knew something was off,especially on the temperature. Anyway, I was able to take action on that to keep the rest of my family away from me until I was able to verify with the test, and of course, I did have it.
And then it also does your recovery index, which is basically your positioning or how well-prepared you are to go at it from an exercise standpoint. And that’s just a that’s just the sleep stuff. It gives you a lot more, but all of that stuff was stuff that I never knew before. And you might be saying, is it important? I think it’s important, and I liked the Oura Ring, because it gives me that stuff. It’s rugged, it looks pretty good. It’s small. And it’s accurate. But what I really liked about the Oura Ring is that it gamified me. So like, I want to make that ring happy so that it rewards me with good scores. And I know that sounds a little bit weird to want to make a ring happy. But the reality is that it’s not the ring that I’m making happy, it’s me that I’m making happy; the ring is just telling me whether I am happy or if I am not particularly when it comes to my sleep. I don’t know, to me, that’s a good thing to be focused on every day, doing the right things to make me and my body as happy as it can be. And I’m far from being in the best shape of my life or far from being anything close to the perfect sort of eat, sleep, exercise person, but I do give it an effort ,and the ring helps me know whether the effort is paying off or not. So check it out. The ring is a few hundred dollars, and it’s a really interesting experiment. If you have that kind of money to spend and you feel like having that information would gamify you I guess it would have a positive impact on your life.
So thank you so much for joining me, and until next time. Be inspired to activate and maximize the greatness inside of you. Thanks for listening.
