Making sleep a top priority – Oura ring review

Sick too often? Weak immune system? Low sex drive? Overweight? Over stressed?  Challenged to keep your weight under control? At risk of diabetes or heart disease? Having issues thinking clearly and performing well at work?

Do you know what all of the above have in common? A lack of good and restorative sleep! In our modern society, sleep is too often seen as something we need as little as possible as performance is measured by the amount of time we are awake and get stuff done. Well it turns out that without enough sleep our body can’t really function to its optimum potential and can actually negatively affect our longevity and overall well being.

In this blog post, I would like to go over why sleep is so important in our life, how we have managed to optimize it and what device we’ve been using to make sure we stay on top of our sleep no matter where we are. If you never focused much on your sleep, you might want to read this blog post and it might be life changing for you. 

Why is sleep important?

Cancer cells multiply faster the more sleep deprived

Sleep goes way beyond recharging our battery. Sleep also acts as the dish washing machine for our brain. It helps consolidate our short term memory, clean up the brain and protect it to perform on the long run. Without proper sleep we can suffer an increase of chronic health problems, our ability to think, react, work, learn and even get along with each other!

So it is important that we prioritize getting enough sleep as part of our day-to-day life because without proper sleep, your body will have a hard time performing at its optimum potential. 

How much sleep do we need?

7-9 hours for adults, 8-10 hours for teens, and up to 14-17 hours for newborns) seems to be the recommended amount of sleep we should get (source). Though it is not because we are closing our eyes for 7-9 hours that we automatically get good and restorative sleep. It is actually much more complex than that.

What are the sleep phases?

It is important to understand that there are 4 main sleep phases and we cycle through multiple times each night:

• Awake (Stage 0 sleep)  – This is time spent in bed before/after falling asleep but also brief awakening during sleep
• Light sleep (Stage 1+2 sleep) – This is when muscles relax, respiration slows, heart rate decreases and body temperature drops 
• Deep sleep (Stage 3+4 sleep) – This is when blood pressure drops, body promotes muscle growth and repairs and brain flushes waste 
• REM sleep (Stage R sleep) – This is when respiration + heart rate increases, temperature regulation is switched off and when vivid dreams may occur. Our body becomes immobile to stop you from acting out dreams.

If we don’t have a good night of sleep this might be because we don’t cycle properly through each phase. For instance, do you dream every night? Well if you don’t remember your dream, this might be because you are not getting enough REM sleep through your sleep cycle.

What are the keys to a good night of sleep?

As we said earlier, getting enough sleep isn’t only about total hours of sleep. You want to make sure you get effective sleep. An important contributor to good sleep has to do with our overall life hygiene as well as our sleep environment.

• Overall hygiene includes caffeine (from coffee, tea, soda), alcohol, sleep apnea, insomnia, stress or anxiety. These all can negatively affect your sleep quality. 
• Sleep environment includes temperature, light or noise level in your bedroom. These can all negatively affect your sleep quality. 

How to optimize your sleep?

Here are a some tips to optimize your overall hygiene:

• Spending time outdoor everyday (good to get exercise but also get Vitamin D through sun exposure)
• Avoid a big meal before going to bed (we like to eat around 6pm)
• Avoid caffeine later in the day
• Avoid using blue light emitting devices a couple hrs before bedtime (smartphone, laptop, TV are included). As an alternative you can consider reading on the Remarkable tablet or Kindle with no bluelight.

Here are some tips to optimize your sleeping environment:

• Keep the bedroom pitch dark. Turn off or block any LED as even a small amount of light can disrupt your sleep (it turns out that we have body receptor on our entire skin that can detect even the smaller amount of light and send a signal to our body to wake up)
• Keep your bedroom quiet
• Keep your bedroom cool (too hot and you won’t be able to sleep properly). 
• Turn off any electronic devices you keep in your bedroom (we even go as far as turning off wifi and put our smartphones on airplane mode and in the living room to reduce the amount of EMF emission)

While you can partially assess good quality of sleep by assessing how you feel overall as you wake up and perform through the day, there are more subtle changes that happen when you sleep that can be measured to help you understand how good your sleep was.

Introducing the Oura ring

Oura developed a really cool device that gives you great insight into your sleep and overall performance. I discovered Oura in their early days with the first version of their device they released in 2016. They have come a long way since this first quite bulky iteration. 

Their latest device (Oura Gen 3) looks like a sleek ring that is available in many sizes and different colors. It charges wirelessly, is waterproof and needs to be charged only once a week. Here is what the ring looks like.

Their Oura ring provides 24/7 heart rate monitoring, personalized health insights, sleep analysis, and so much more. The device also packs 7 temperature sensors to get to know your “normal” body temperature and picks up even the smallest changes!

Once you wake up, simply start the app on your phone to receive three daily score to guide you through your day:

• Sleep – This is an overall score that tells you how well you slept. This takes into account not only how long you sleep, but how much time you spent in each sleep phases, your heart rate and much more
• Activity – This is an overall score that tells you how you are balancing your activity, inactivity and rest. This takes into account your daily movement, how much rest you are getting and much more
• Readiness – This is an overall score that tells you how much you and your body takes on. This takes into account your sleep, activity and body stress signals like body temperature and HRV.

For the ladies, the ring is so good at measuring body temperature that it can even help you predict your menstruation cycle thanks to their sensor that can measure temperature change with a precision of  0.13°C (0.234°F)

The ring is also going to support later in 2022 a better sleep algorithm and the ability to measure your blood oxygen while asleep through software updates. 

I’ve been using the ring since 2016 and convinced Mrs. NN to get one in 2021 and this has truly been life changing. Thanks to trends Oura provides, we can assess the quality of our sleep based on the place we are staying at as well as our lifestyle.

Looking at trends to understand your sleep

Here is data from our 2nd year or nomadic travel. I can look at 20+ metrics ranging from time in bed, sleep score, activity score, average heart rate, time awake, time in deep sleep and so on.

The Oura ring platform let you look at each of the metrics over the period of time of your choice. In the example below for instance, I can see that my average bedtime during our 2nd year of nomadic travel (7/1/2019-6/30/2020) was 11:14pm 

I can also correlate two metrics together to see if there have a relation between them. In the example below for instance, I can see a positive correlation between the bedtime and the amount of deep sleep I am getting:

Correlation between Bedtime and Deep Sleep

Or I can see a positive correlation between the total amount of sleep I get and the overall quality of my sleep. With an average total sleep time of 7h30

The best part is that this data varies per individual so once you have enough historical data, you can start making tweaks and see how you can improve your score.

And since I love how gamified the experience is (you get a crown for nearly perfect scores), this is something that has definitely been helping me focus on my sleep. (Though as I’ve been working on this post, I’ve realized that our sleep schedule has been off lately, so this is a good reminder to get back on track!)

To learn more about the Oura ring, make sure to check out their website. Also, if you are interested to get yourself one, use this link to get 50 USD/EUR off your order and more! 

Bottom line

Everyone’s priority should be to live a long and healthy life and hence sleep should be a priority. The good part is that once you set up your environment and a healthy routine, it should be easy to stick to it. And if you are always on the move like us, make sure to get an Oura ring so you can always make sure you are getting the best sleep possible and make adjustments. 

So what about you? Do you feel that you are prioritizing sleep? If you like to prioritize sleep, would you have other recommendations that we should look into? Please feel free to let us know by leaving a comment in the comments section below!