I’ve now had a few days with the Oura ring and have some thoughts.
The ring itself is pretty neat. The brushed silver finish has a way of catching the light like tiger eye does, a sort of subtle texture that seems matte until suddenly it hits the right angle and is more of a satin finish look. The battery does indeed last a few days — I let it run from its initial maybe 70% charge down to about 30% before charging it at all, and it looks as if simply popping it on the charger while I shower is good enough to keep a useful level of charge.
The app is a bit scattered and requires some exploration to make sure you’ve found the relevant permissions, settings and features. Also some data requires a few (or several, depending) days of data before it starts to appear.
The ring measures a few things with optical and thermal sensors, and from those uses statistics-based analysis to figure out all kinds of stuff. What sleep stages you go through during the night, regularity of breathing rhythm, overall sleep quality, possible indicators of coming down with an illness and so on. There’s some AI involved, and I feel like some of it is useful and some is more questionable. You can take a photo of a meal, it’ll try to figure out what it is and comment on nutrition but there doesn’t seem to be too much regard for context, portion sizes etc. — just “food A good, food B bad.” Some of the rawer data (like heart rate) is more visible and some (like HRV, SpO2, skin temperature) is only presented in certain contexts. But for the most part, it does give quite a lot of data, quite a lot of analysis — some of it very specific, some of it on a more general level. You’re likely to find useful insights among it, even though you’ll probably figure out causes and effects better yourself than the app will.
The step counting doesn’t seem at all accurate, and the amount of activity it wants me to do doesn’t seem realistic. I might get up, go to the bathroom, go downstairs, go into the kitchen, fix breakfast, and go into the office and it’ll say I took two steps. When I walked 2.4 miles at a good pace for 40 minutes, that was… not quite half the day’s activity goal. But when I walked around the plaza more casually for 18 minutes at work, plus some other low-impact walking around, that was roughly half the activity goal. I’m just going to ignore that section, but I do appreciate the insights into heart rate zones and cardio vs. metabolic benefit.
I was somewhat hesitant about getting this ring because I’ve seen where people with health-related anxiety do worse when presented with all this data. And I kind of get it. HRV (heart rate variability) is supposed to be a sign of both good physical health and relaxation; athletes tend to have a relatively high HRV, and the parasympathetic nervous system (which calms you) is also supposed to increase it, observed during meditation and deep sleep. Mine’s quite low — due probably to some combination of anxiety, diabetes, obesity, a generally sedentary lifestyle, and maybe-or-maybe-not heart anomalies which may or may not be completely benign — and it tends to get lower or stay the same while meditating or using the Zenowell Luna, even while other factors such as skin temperature go the expected way and I feel more relaxed. So that’s weird. But in terms of how relaxed or stressed I am, I think where there’s a conflict between my feeling and the app’s best guess, my feeling wins.
I also had a stressful moment that led to heart palpitations (this is apparently the term for that “pounding”; I thought it was something else), but my heart rate wasn’t actually faster. I have been told multiple times my blood pressure is fine. Even when I had that pericarditis scare last year, the thing that was mentioned was sinus tachycardia — 108 BPM when I had the ECG. I am well and safely below that now, so that can easily be chalked up to the stress and pain of the moment and untreated anxiety. I’m reassured that palpitations generally are not dangerous in themselves (and some people experience them a lot, but have gone to multiple cardiologists and gotten their okay).
The “daytime stress” section just opened up yesterday, and other items such as sleep health, heart health, better calibrated analyses, etc. require more time yet.
I think generally I’m more reassured than worried by having this information. And overall it’s leading me to seek better sleep, more physical activity, healthier eating, and checking in on myself.
So that thing that caused me stress? The unprovoked, unnecessary, unauthorized, unwarranted, underhanded, unwise, but unfortunately not that unsurprising, attack on Iran. People of the world, please understand that most Americans think Trump is an absolute tool, a corrupt, incomepetent, negligent, small-minded, insecure, evil man. (There is a small minority of people who like him because of these things.) When he campaigned for President, among all his other lies he claimed he wouldn’t get the US involved in wars. And then his administration renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War, showing the true intention. It’s been murder and kidnappings and destruction and dirty dealings outside our borders, and murder and kidnappings and dirty dealings and tearing down our best institutions inside our borders. Trump doesn’t actually care about anything other than his own ego and wants everything else stomped flat; he has only the most tenuous grasp of reality and is easily manipulated by the equally corrupt, grasping, hateful and immature people surrounding him. Hegseth likes to play soldier. Miller is a Nazi. Vance is a disturbing sicko with a cruel streak. Rubio just wants to feel important. They all know their days are numbered (to the extent that Trump is cognizant of anything) and they’re flexing while they can. This is all deeply upsetting and embarrassing to us all. I don’t understand how people were fooled into voting for Trump a second time, but it feels so much worse this second time around. More reckless and desperate and vindictive.
Deep breath…
So that was a lot of what I talked about in therapy yesterday. And I’m not alone; most of my therapists’ clients have been adversely affected by the fact that an unstable, demented criminal is running the show and is willing to sacrifice lives, peace, stability, the economy, the environment and goodwill without any clear reason or goal. Of course it’s upsetting to people who don’t have anxiety as well.
We talked about coping strategies. Mostly it comes down to: set and keep boundaries. Find the balance between staying informed and being hurt. Get away from news and social media when needed. Talk about it with a sympathetic person if you need to, but recognize when the talk is getting to be too much. Distract yourself, touch grass, and/or practice mindfulness.
I talked with my mom last week, and my therapist yesterday, about when I was about 9 or 10 and my parents took me to a child psychologist (or whatever he was). My memory of that: I was a very sensitive kid, I could not regulate my emotions well, I was upset and frustrated a lot and cried a lot. I think now that I was easily overwhelmed/overstimulated, had anxiety, did not fit in with other kids (as a nerd, fat, gifted, and unbeknownst-to-myself nonbinary). And they wanted to help me with that.
Mom’s recollection is that I “wasn’t settling down in school like everyone seemed to want” me to and… maybe they took me on a teacher’s or principal’s recommendation? I need to ask her more about this.
What I remember from the one appointment was that I didn’t like the guy, and I was upset about having to demonstrate walking in a straight line in my underwear (that one seems really weird in retrospect; I don’t recall if parents were there for that part too but I think so). I recall Dad telling the guy that sometimes when I was supposed to be getting ready for school, he’d find me sitting on the floor reading a book (I’m not sure that was actually true, but I did love reading and I did have focus issues with homework.) The doc said I needed to build up my self-esteem and should work on hand-eye coordination as a means to that, and recommending that I take karate lessons. That also upset me because I associated karate with violence. I wound up in YMCA judo classes for a while instead. And I was prescribed… something. Which I vaguely remember taking briefly and then not refilling because something the doctor said to my parents set them off — something about “that’ll keep him quiet” in a smarmy way? –and they decided he was a quack and that was the end of that.
My mom says it was Ritalin. And she was convinced I couldn’t have had ADD/ADHD because the son of one of her coworkers had it and I was nothing like him. Of course, there are different kinds of ADHD, two main ways in which it expresses in people, and people just generally have different personalities in the first place. There was a public scare about Ritalin being “overprescribed” which… probably it actually wasn’t, and in fact other stimulants are still used and prescribed more than Ritalin ever was. She says whatever it was, I seem to have outgrown it or gotten over it.
The therapist thought it was odd that I and my mom had different impressions of why I was there, and that “self esteem” and “hand-eye coordination” and Ritalin kind of don’t go together. But I told her about my focus issues and she said, yeah, you quite probably do have ADHD. She asked about how I deal with it, and pointed out that a lot of folks of our generation went undiagnosed (lacking the more socially difficult signs of hyperactivity in school) and there was a stigma around it — and built up their own coping skills instead. I’ve got note-taking, reminders, GPS (or my spouse) to keep me on course, etc. and my reputation at work is “the person who gets a lot of stuff done fast” (*), so… no need to get an official diagnosis and treatment.
(*) despite blogging on company time ::cough::
Of course there’s also the factor that gifted kids often get bored of normal lesson plans, and that leads to bad study habits and lack of focus. Some claim that ADHD is overdiagnosed among them for that reason… but I think, bit of both here.
So anyway, that was an interesting bit of insight and validation.
Recent reading:
Jeff Noon, Automated Alice: weird, funny, punny. Alice (of Lewis Carroll fame) accidentally time-travels to alternate 1998 where the Civil Serpents have accidentally unleashed “the Newmonia” in an attempt to pacify the population, and termite colonies compute using “beanery logic” (a bean is either there or not there), and the author self-inserts as “the writer of wrongs.” My experience with reading it was somewhat hampered by it being an Open Library PDF title and the app is not great. But I still had fun with it.
Frances Trussel, You Are Not Your Thoughts: a very short book on mindfulness. As in, not many pages, and a lot of empty space on those pages due to most chapters being a paragraph or two. Seriously in need of copy editing to fix grammatical issues. I don’t think it really presented anything new that I didn’t already get from Fully Present or other reading on the subject. But I did like one quote in particular: “There is nothing in this world that can happen to you which can’t be made worse by thinking about it.”
Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul: I’m partway through but am finding it to be a mixed bag and I don’t like some of what’s mixed in. It turns out to be mostly from a yoga mystic perspective. At first there’s discussion of the self, and the difference between the voice in your head (what the book calls “your roommate who won’t shut up”) and the “you” that observes sesnations, feelings and thoughts. That bit was pretty interesting and ties in well with mindfulness. But then it got to a second part where it launched into talking about “energy” and chakras and I started to get a sinking feeling.
Any sort of claim that people have access to infinite energy, all they have to do is keep their heart open to it, is immediately suspect… and kind of offensive when you’re a person who has issues with fatigue. There’s even a point where it almost claims this energy is enough to live on and you don’t need food…? Come on. The book apparently was beloved by Oprah and Ray Kurzweil, and… that’s not really doing its credibility any favors either, honestly. I’ll go ahead and read the rest in case there is something practical to be found, but I’m fully prepared to hate it.
