I've been wearing smartwatches and fitness trackers around my wrist for years, but I’d never worn an Oura Ring before. I hadn’t considered myself much of a “ring guy,” but I admittedly wasn’t a watch guy before I started wearing an Apple Watch. Now I can’t go a day without it. After wearing my Oura Ring Generation 3 for more than two months, I can almost say the same thing about the tiny sleep monitor that currently lives on my finger at all times.
As a sleep tracker, the Oura Ring 3 is remarkable. As a fitness tracker, it’s not bad, could be better. As a piece of wearable tech, it’s comfortable to wear constantly and consistently, even in bed.
Let’s get straight to it. Does the Oura Ring do enough to replace a smartwatch? No. I think it serves an entirely separate function. To answer the trickier question of “Is an Oura Ring right for you?” it depends on what you’re looking for in a wearable health tracker.
If you want extensive amounts of data about your sleep and daily health tracking, as well as an accurate step counter, yes, it is. Want all that in a package that doesn’t look techy whatsoever? An even better reason to choose one. If you want a completely smart device that will show you texts, calls, and reminders and, most important, tell you what time it is, buy a watch.
My Oura Ring journey began like any other—with a sizing kit. After you choose your make and model, Oura will send you a box of ring sizers ranging from sizes 6 to 13. They recommend you wear the smart ring on your index finger, but—due to a Little League–related accident in my youth—I’ve found it most comfortable to wear on the middle finger of my non-dominant (left) hand. Indecision frequently haunts me, so I was initially worried that my chosen size (11) would be too tight or too loose, but after weeks of everyday wear, I can safely say I don’t think about it too much anymore.
Once your device (it feels strange to call something this small a “device”) arrives, it’s time to download the app. The setup process is pretty easy and the onboarding is gradual. Certain data, like stress levels, resilience, long-term trends, and reports tabs, are inaccessible on day one. To start, I primarily relied on the ring for sleep and restfulness data. In this way, the Oura Ring puts its best foot forward.
Oura offers several style and finish options for your ring. You can opt for Heritage, the original design with a raised plateau segment, or the fully rounded Horizon. Each has a selection of metal finishes to choose from. In terms of tech, the rings are all identical. No plus or pro offerings, just one ring to rule them all. Each Gen 3 has three sensors on the inside of the ring that use biometrics to track daily functions, including heart rate and blood-oxygen levels.
About a month into my time with the ring, I went on a family vacation and multiple people asked me if my Horizon Oura Ring was a wedding ring or an engagement band. That’s how slick it is. It’s that normal looking. The fact that it’s so high-tech and looks like any other SGD450 ring made it easy to incorporate Oura into my daily routine.
Since you are supposed to wear it all the time yet it’s also an electronic device, one of my first questions was “When will I charge my Oura Ring?” The answer: during showers. The ring itself is waterproof up to 330 feet; that means swimming is no problem, and the same goes for doing the dishes, washing your hands, etc. This is meant to monitor you at all times, remember? That makes it a great choice for swimmers who want to track their workouts.
Every morning, I wake up to see how I slept and to confirm the previous day’s activities, then I slip my ring off to shower and back on before I start my day. It ends up fading into the background of my busy life. Sometimes I’ll check the app to see my daily stress levels, but generally I only think about my Oura Ring in the morning and at night.
While heart rate and blood-oxygen sensing are the newest features of the Oura Ring (only available on the Gen 3), sleep tracking is the most impressive feature, and it has only improved with each iteration. This is where the form, factor, and function fully align to accomplish something a smartwatch has yet to do: provide accurate, seamless data about my sleep health.
At first, I felt the insights were a bit obvious. But I soon realised that I trusted the data, since it reflected how I was actually feeling in the form of a score. Now I wake up each day, ready for my scores to tell me how I slept, not the other way around. Even knowing simple information, like when exactly I fell asleep and precisely how many sleep minutes I get per night, feels like a breakthrough in understanding my body. And that’s just scratching the surface.
The main thing I gravitate toward is the scores. Each morning, once the ring determines I’m fully awake, I will get scores from 0 (typically above 50 if I slept at all) to 100 that rate both my sleep and my readiness for the day. I cannot emphasise how much I love these stupid numbers. Seeing a high readiness score can reinforce a feeling that I’m going to have a good day, while a lower sleep score is an excellent validation of why I feel like shit. In fact, this is where the sleep tab of the app truly comes into play. Broken-down stats on REM and deep-sleep time, or my overall sleep efficiency, allow me to quickly compare each night’s sleep with my norm.
Eventually, the app will start providing a Resilience rating. Mine currently reads “solid,” but with proper self-care, I can raise that to “exceptional” over time. This aspect is actually quite vague and difficult to engage with, but another Oura Ring wearer I spoke to called it her favourite feature. To each their own.
The health data is impressively accurate for a device like this, but it’s not perfect, especially the further your health is from the baseline of what’s expected. An example: I was born with a congenital heart condition, a bicuspid aortic valve, so I have a very strange-sounding heartbeat. My heart also has to pump twice as much as most people’s to produce the same blood flow. The point is, I already have a reason to be suspicious of how accurately the Oura Ring can monitor my heart health, confirmed by its rating of my “cardiovascular age” as thirteen years older than I am. Do I have the heart of a man in his early forties? Maybe, but I’m sure plenty of forty-year-olds have stronger hearts than I do.
The issue is, if I were unaware of my condition, this would be concerning. And everything that the Oura app can recommend is general, lowest-common-denominator health advice. Eating fruit and working out won’t actually do anything substantial for my cardiovascular readings. This is all to say, you are probably never going to get life-saving data from this thing. The most it can do is help you get better sleep and exercise more, which can admittedly feel life-changing.
In terms of general health tracking, like daytime stress and heart-rate data, the Oura Ring and app are very comprehensive. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce, and every week I swear either I’m gaining access to new features or the app is being updated. The amount of information here can be a little overwhelming.
When tracking my activities and exercise, the Oura Ring 3 has advantages and downsides compared with the smartwatches I’ve used. As a pedometer, it’s more accurate at tracking my steps and daily calorie burn than my smartwatch. It also provides way more data than I’ve ever gotten from my Apple Watch, but it’s worth mentioning that I don’t subscribe to Apple Fitness+. For this review, I received Oura’s subscription to test out all of the ring’s features, but there will be more on how that works later. Just know that for now, I was very impressed by the amount of fitness data provided. But when it comes to workout tracking and recognition, the ring lags.
This is one of my favourite features of the Apple Watch. When I start an elliptical workout or a bike ride or even a long walk, it will accurately identify it 95 percent of the time and ask me if I want to record the workout. As a result, I always have digital records of all my workouts on my phone, fully automated. Its tech wasn’t always this accurate, but Apple has invested a lot of time and money into it. I can’t say the same for Oura, unfortunately.
For starters, having to open the app to retroactively confirm and log my workouts is one more step than I’m used to taking. Beyond that, I found the functionality often lacking. Once, my Oura Ring correctly identified a forty-minute elliptical workout. More commonly, though, it will misidentify it as (maybe?) a walk, as it does most non-running workouts. Most days, I have to confirm four or five walks in my exercise log, meaning the ring doesn’t know the difference between a trek to the subway and a short hike.
Up front, an Oura Ring will cost you from approximately SGD450 before tax, depending on which style and finish you choose. The newer Horizon models will generally run you slightly more than the OG Heritage design, and fancier finishes like Brushed Titanium, Gold, and Rose Gold will add to the price tag. While that’s not nothing, I live in a city where a cup of coffee rarely costs less than five bucks. Four or five hundred dollars for something you will use every day is reasonable compared with, well, the state of everything else.
What really irks me is the subscription model that’s tacked on to that. After an included free month of fully featured access, Oura begins charging SGD9 per month for access to in-depth sleep insights, heart-rate monitoring, body-temperature readings, blood-oxygen readings—pretty much everything you would use it for.
It isn’t so much the cost that frustrates me (it’s fairly affordable compared with direct alternatives like Apple Fitness+) but rather the dread of that payment hanging over my head every month until I want to stop using the device—all to use its basic functions. What baffles me is how fundamentally useless the Oura Ring 3 is without a subscription. It just feels like another company trying to bleed its users dry when we’ve just invested hundreds of dollars in a product. You’ll have barely unlocked access to all the features after one month of use, making the free month feel like even more of a “lite” version of the true experience than is advertised. A free year would’ve at least been a compromise.
I really, really like the Oura Ring Horizon Gen 3. I like how it looks and how much of a conversation starter it has proved to be. Most of all, I like how it’s confirmed something I’ve always known but never had the data to prove: I get a pretty healthy amount of sleep. My bedtime is way more consistent than I expected. Even a small insight like this has started to change how I think about my sleep and, by extension, my mood and energy levels.
Even as an Apple Watch user for several years, I’ve found a way to slot the Oura Ring into my life and teach me something new about myself. That’s something I can’t say about most products I try. If I ever take this thing off, it’s either because I’m taking a shower or my subscription has finally lapsed.
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At Esquire, we’ve been testing and reviewing the latest and greatest products for decades. We do hands-on testing with every gadget and piece of gear we review. From portable monitors to phone cameras, we’ve tested the best products—and some not-so-great ones for good measure.
To review this Oura Ring, I tried it out for many weeks before even sitting down to start writing. Plus, I spoke with other Esquire staff members about their past and current experiences with the product to get the fullest picture possible.
Originally published on Esquire US
In the fast-paced, first-world professional world, the employee who’s most on the ball, responding to emails past midnight and in the office before nine, is glorified. It has almost become a boast to say that you’ve been too busy to sleep. We all know someone who mentions his or her lack of sleep with pride. Along with ‘sleep is for the weak’, there persists a stubborn yet baseless business culture that adheres to the futility of sleep.
The phenomenon of encouraging insufficient sleep is strange, given how much attention corporations pay towards other areas of employee health, safety and conduct. Somehow we’re stuck on the notion that time spent on task equates to efficiency of task. Regrettably, this is not just a misguided blunder, but a costly one too.
A net annual capital loss of SGD18 million, a result of collective declined productivity rate, is found in companies where employees don’t get enough sleep. These employees are not just less productive, they are also less creative, less motivated and prone to making unethical decisions. On a managerial level, this makes them less charismatic and more abusive. On a national scale, inadequate sleep robs countries of more than two percent of their GDP—roughly the entire cost of its military and almost as much as its investment in education. Just let that sink in.
Sure, there exists a sleep elite, a group that is adept at getting six hours of sleep with minimal impairment. Members of this group carry a sub-variant of the BHLHE41 or Dec2 gene that allows them to sleep no longer than this duration even in the absence of alarms. Don’t be deluded into thinking you could be one of them because this anomaly is so rare that you stand a higher chance of being struck by lightning. Expressed as a percentage of the population, the rounded whole number would be zero.
So for the rest of us mortals, here are three things that could help improve sleep quality.
You probably know Melatonin as a hormone responsible for your dozing off, but sleep is not a block of time when you are knocked unconscious. Human beings, and all living things, live in constant oscillation. You have a circadian rhythm, an internal clock which coordinates according to external social and environmental factors (running at 24 hours and 11 minutes, according to an extensive cave adventure by the godfather of modern sleep medicine, Nathaniel Kleitman, and his science buddy Bruce Richardson). You are simultaneously on another beat working at 90-minute cycles. The ultradian rhythm is what maintains the equilibrium of rest and fatigue.
Besides melatonin, "quick fixes" like a nightcap may shorten the amount of time taken to fall asleep, but its presence in the bloodstream can disrupt the second half of the sleep cycle and the important information consolidation process that takes place during REM sleep. Meaning you get sleep, but not deep, restorative sleep. Alcohol also impairs breathing in sleep, affecting the brain’s breathing centre by masking the effect of low oxygen levels in the bloodstream, which leads to sleep apnoea. So while sleep is one way of energy renewal, the other essential things we do while awake also play a big role in the quality of our sleep. Nutrition, hydration, movement, relationships. Melatonin and the likes are merely the signal to sleep and not what effectualises it.
The thing about chronic (yes, chronic) sleep deficiency over years, or simply months, is that deteriorated alertness, energy and general capacity become the norm to the individual. Even while reading this, you might feel perfectly all right. But what if we told you that based on epidemiological studies of average sleep time, you are living in a sublime compromise in your mental and physical states? If you were to compare it to alcohol, which we all know can severely impede our mind, being awake for 17 hours (usually between 7am and midnight), makes your cognitive impairment no different from one who is legally drunk.
This was proven by the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, which took two groups of healthy adults, intoxicated the first bunch to the legal driving limit, and kept the other bunch awake. The results of the concentration test by the latter were equivalent or worse. And if you think you can take the weekend to pay off your sleep debt, dream on. Assuming you sleep much less than eight hours a day, Stanford University Sleep Research Center shows even after three nights of ‘recovery’ sleep, your performance will not return to the original baseline of those who sleep the regular eight.
Not the sleeplessness, the positive wind-down rituals. You know them, the ones prescribed by Doctor Google. No heavy meals hours prior, switching off your phone, breathing exercises, etc. Setting an alarm to sleep is a good one. You have one to wake, so why not? It’s all about discipline. Even if they don’t show immediate results, practice them for at least 21 days (the average span for an action to become a habit).
This is true. But only for 40 percent of the population. In adults, our preference for sleeping and waking times are based on our chronotype, which is pretty much programmed into our DNA. Unfortunately for the 30 percent of ‘evening types’, common societal practice restricts them from performing to their potential (usually past work hours), and leave them prone to ill health as a result of a forced early waking time and an innate inability to sleep until far later.
The reason for this genetic inequality? In a time before warm, cosy homes came along, this variation would reduce the period of vulnerability in a community of species living together. So while everyone gets ideally eight hours of sleep, the collective group is only in danger for half that duration. If you believe you belong to a special nocturnal group... the remaining 30 percent are just chronotypes who function best between morning and evening.
While it is good practice to stick to a sleep schedule, don’t lie in bed awake if you simply can’t fall asleep. Don’t allow yourself to be susceptible to attentional bias. Instead, go do something relaxing. Read (but not on devices because you know, blue light). Drink some milk. Daydream even. Picture yourself doing what you enjoy. It’s crucial to avoid exposure to information about sleep to take your focus off trying to sleep and unnecessarily scaring yourself with symptoms you believe you have that you actually don’t.
Every gamer knows the feeling. You're enjoying your favourite game, when all of the sudden: the sun rises, the clock reads 6am, and you realise that you've accidentally played through the night. We've all done it, so don't lie to me and say that you haven't; just accept that we've chosen to walk the Gamer's Path. Curse our squishy, human bodies for needing to shut down for a third of every day! If only we could play Tears of the Kingdom forever.
Well, those diabolical geniuses over at Nintendo were listening—and they've somehow done the impossible yet again. Enter Pokémon Sleep, which is a combination of two totally disparate things: a sleep tracker and a video game. Has Nintendo finally created a title that you can play when you're unconscious? Is 24/7 gaming now a reality?! Surprisingly... yes. In just my short time with the game so far, the mobile app is clearly more than a glorified alarm clock. Pokémon Sleep is the most intriguing experience the popular collect 'em all franchise has created in recent memory. Well, at least since Pokémon Go had me running around outside at night, pointing my phone at trees.
Here's the gist: like any sleep-tracking app, Pokémon Sleep needs to sit on your bedside, listening to and registering every toss and turn. Based on how well you slumber, different Pokémon will appear in the morning. If you were restless all night, maybe you'll see an exhausted Pikachu but get the recommended amount of deep, well-rested sleep, and your Pokémon Sleep camp will be full of slumbering creatures. Pokémon Sleep also boasts a full Pokédex of adorable entries, all of which describe various Pokémon's favourite ways to sleep.
Don't enjoy the gameplay? Well, Pokémon Sleep is also a fully-functioning sleep tracker, providing insight into not only how many hours you snoozed per night—but how well you slept. Pokémon Sleep splits your sleep quality into three categories: Dozing (you probably have one eye half-open), Snoozing (solid!), and Slumbering (you went full Snorlax, buddy)and at the end of every night, you get a sleep score. (More on that soon.) The game is clearly geared toward teaching a younger audience into creating a good sleep schedule and develop habits. The thing is—I can easily see Pokémon Sleep actually working for kids. The experience is cute, won't demand much of your time, and it features Pokémon. Who wouldn't want that?
There is, of course, some weird mobile-game wonkiness going on in Pokémon Sleep, which might leave you wanting to use a Fitbit like a normal adult. Pokémon Sleep's story revolves around a Snorlax that you're raising and researching while you dream. When you wake up, your sleep report converts to "Drowsy Power," which is a numerical score in the millions. I slept for six hours and earned a sleep score of 60/100. When multiplied by Snorlax's 40,000 strength, it became a Drowsy Power of 2,400,000. (Makes sense!) You can also increase Snorlax's strength with meals, snacks, and countless other little treats that serve as in-game microtransactions—which cost real money. I can't imagine spending a dime on this game just to get a higher score. But who knows! With access to their parents' credit card information, children wield unlimited power.
I'm not sure if Pokémon Sleep will fix my real problem: how late I stay up watching TV and/or doomscrolling. But last night, I went to bed thinking, Pikachu is going to be so mad at me! And he was! It wasn't my intention to upset the little guy! So maybe, just maybe, Pokémon Sleep will fix me.
