Prince Harry’s health hack changed my life

Using Ōura to track my sleep has changed my life

From the first few nights of wearing it, I became hooked on checking my Sleep Score each morning, which calibrates your awake time, light sleep, REM and deep sleep during your time in bed. Depending on your sleep, Ōura gives you a ‘Readiness’ score, which determines how ready your body is to take on the day. 

I’m undecided on whether or not seeing a poor Sleep Score negatively affects my mood purely because I’ve seen it written down, or if Ōura’s readings are actually accurate enough to predict my mental and physical performance for the day ahead. 

Where a bad night’s sleep would normally be something I’d just ‘get on with’, I’ve found that poring over every percentage of my post-sleep stats can sometimes make me feel more anxious, especially if I’ve slept poorly on a night where I have work the following day. 

Having said that, becoming obsessed with my Sleep Score is – in my opinion – a healthy obsession because in turn, I’ve paid closer attention to optimising my sleep schedule.

I was averaging around 6 hours 45 minutes of sleep per night before wearing my Ōura, and now I rarely get less than 8 hours 10 minutes – a benefit that has improved my brain and body performance. If Ōura tells me it’s time to wind down, I’ll always listen to it.

My Ōura Ring flagged that I was getting ill before I had symptoms

As part of your immune system powering up to fight infection, your body usually raises an inflammatory response if you’re about to get ill – and my Ōura Ring flagged this to me before I’d even felt symptoms. 

I was initially concerned when my Ōura Ring notified me that there were signs in my biometrics of something straining my body. The next day, I had flu-like symptoms followed by a week-long cold. While I try not to rely on technology to dictate how healthy I am, I have found the Ōura to be a source of comfort when I would previously ignore symptoms. 

Seeing a low Readiness score, high-stress statistics or poor sleep data makes me take a step back to focus on recuperating, whereas before I’d almost always power through as normal.

I love that it automatically tracks my workouts

I fell out of love with my fitness watch for several reasons, but mainly because I’ve never liked how it looks with an outfit. 

The Oura looks like any other piece of jewellery in my collection, but I’m left feeling secretly smug knowing that it’s tracking my heart rate, cycle, sleep and stress levels throughout the day. 

As a keen runner, the only element I miss is that the ring can’t link to Runna, the training app I use for marathon training. It can auto-detect when you’re working out, which is great for tracking a workout screen-free, but it’s certainly not the device to use if you want to log your mile splits or distance markers.