How you can leverage the data from an Oura Ring (sleep) or an Apple Watch (exercise and general health) to change your habits for a better, healthier life.
Today I’ll be going through a quick breakdown of two tech wearables that I use and how they’ve improved my life. The first is the Oura Ring which tracks your sleep and the second is the Apple Watch Series 6 which tracks your general health. I’ll share why I bought these devices and how they are influencing my health on a daily basis.
Have you ever bought an online course and been super excited about it in the first few days/weeks/months? You couldn’t wait to start. You loved diving into the course material and learning. And then the days rolled by and that initial motivation started to wane a little. Well, that’s sort of how I see the use of trackers. Trackers don’t improve your life per se. Once the novelty wears off you will be left with a tech accessory and a picture of your health on an app or website. The trackable device won’t in itself change what you do day-to-day. The accessory simply tracks — that’s all it does. It doesn’t create new behaviors. It’s not a magic bullet. But the picture of your health provided by the data might just create enough activation energy to encourage you to make changes in your life. It might inspire the personal growth you’ve been looking for. That’s what happened to me.
Trackable technology has personally been a massive breakthrough in my life. The tech you wear generates specific data points and a user interface shares this feedback with you via a mobile app or a website in a way that’s digestible. If you’re deciding to get a wearable tech piece I would advise asking yourself the following questions before investing in it:
Am I actually interested and curious about what information this tracker will provide me? Another way to ask this: have I wanted to know about this part of my health in the past (sleep/heart-rate/steps/exercise)?
What benefits will buying this tracker provide me/my life in the longterm (think mental or physical health)? Do I think it might create some form of habit/behavior change?
Do I think I will be wearing it a year from now? Again sort of hard to know but worth just exploring the answer that comes up.
I’ll now share a little more on two wearables that have personally been great buys. The Oura Ring and the Apple Watch have influenced the way I live my life — by changing my habits and behavior — and they continue to do so. I hope that the following breakdown might encourage you to consider investing in your own health, regardless of the tech you decide to invest in.
Oura Ring (Sleep Tracker)
So let’s start with the Oura Ring. I think what’s important for me to share is that it’s not the watch or the ring that I find useful in itself. What I mean by that is the tech itself is just a small ring packed with some pretty cool and advanced technology. I don’t really know the details of what’s going on under the hood. Instead what I find fascinating is the data that is coming through on the app and how I can apply the insights to change my life.
For instance, the Oura Ring reminding me that I’ve recently been going to bed quite late might provides me that extra nudge to get to bed a little earlier → see below screenshot: “Today’s for rest”. It incentivizes me to get some better sleep and to feel the benefits as a result. In addition, the Oura team does a really great job of sending through regular updates on how to understand the information. Oura shares what you should notice and keep track of. I find this hugely useful especially when starting to use a new trackable device. In a lot of cases, I’m not really sure what each data point means and what it ultimately says about my health. So having those explanations available really helps. The Oura team is on a mission to help you grow and develop your health and your life in general through better sleep and you really feel that as a user.
Another aspect that I love about the way Oura presents your sleep data is you have so many different data points that capture your overall sleep. It allows you to focus on different areas of interest. For instance, at some point, I had just read the 5 AM CLUB by Robin Sharma (a great book btw). Although I really enjoyed certain aspects of getting up early (not all 😆), as a result of viewing the information on my Oura Ring app, I also started noticing that I wasn’t getting enough REM sleep — some days none at all practically. REM sleep tends to take effect towards the end stages of your time asleep — again something I learned as a result of using the Oura Ring and reading up on Oura’s health background explanations. As an example, the below excerpt is from an article on the Oura website:
Well, according to Harvard Medical School, focusing on increasing your REM sleep can be a great place to start on your journey to better mental health.
“REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is the period when people dream . . . Studies report that REM sleep enhances learning and memory, and contributes to emotional health — in complex ways.
Although scientists are still trying to tease apart all the mechanisms, they’ve discovered that sleep disruption — which affects levels of neurotransmitters and stress hormones, among other things — wreaks havoc in the brain, impairing thinking and emotional regulation.”
Having noticed my lack of REM sleep on the app I was able to make a change to shift my sleep cycles (either get to bed earlier or wake up a little later).
In the below screenshots you can see a breakdown of the multiple data points you have access to through the app. You can pick and choose the ones you would like to work on at any given time. For example, your sleep “Efficiency” is a measure of how long it takes for you to fall asleep. Some of the things that can impact your sleep efficiency are doing workouts or eating meals late in the day, blue light from your laptop screen, or heated discussions with a partner or friends close to bed-time. The type of actions you could take to tackle a low-efficiency score would be to have your workouts or meals earlier in the day. You could meditate or read to calm your mind. Or finally, you could install an app called flux to turn on past 6 pm which blocks blue light from shining through. Just as a few examples.
Apple Watch Series 6 (General Health And Exercise Tracker)
The other trackable I currently love using is the new Apple Watch Series 6. I got this because (1) it was my birthday and turns it out it was a pretty sweet gift for myself, (2) because I love how much Apple is investing in their tech and healthcare space at the moment. I felt it was a solid investment towards my future self. I always try to look for quality and long-term purchases over a bargain — if I can find both then that’s obviously what I go for (I’ve had an iPhone 6s Plus for coming up to 4 and a half years and it still works so well).
Where Apple is absolutely genius is in the way they create their ecosystems in which products and services fall perfectly into place. That’s again what I found when I started using the Apple Watch Series 6 and when a few months later Apple released its new health and exercise service: Fitness+.
When we were forced into lockdown as a result of the pandemic last year in 2020, I turned to running as my go-to form of exercise. I used to be a regular at the gym but here in the UK gyms have been closed multiple times since March last year.
Where the Apple Watch comes in is that I am aware that to take care of my body there should be a balance between intense physical activity and elements related to recovery, for example, mobility and stretching. Since getting my Apple Watch and the release of Fitness+ I’ve started doing core workouts after my runs. This helps build up my strength and make sure I reduce the probability of injury. The instructors are fun to work out with (can’t complain about the tunes 🎵 either) and the app provides some key details telling you how much time is left in your workout as well as your heartbeat and other factors.
There was a bonus incentive for getting the watch. There is a partnership between my private health insurer, Vitality, and Apple Watch. Vitality essentially encourages you to stay active and will cover up to 80% of the price of your watch. How it works is that based on how active you are Vitality will cover up to 100% of a £9.5/monthly repayment towards your Apple watch. More than anything I see the incentive by Vitality as more of a game than anything else. I find it fun to try to be as active as possible each month, to compete against myself, to hit those 160 activity points required to cover the full £9.5 per month. If you can find a way to have fun with your goals I find that to be way more effective as a way to stay on top of your health.
I love talking about personal development, tech, and health, so if you have any questions or just want to connect you’ll find me here on Twitter.
Keep being awesome.
Nick