I bought a smart ring for the vibes. It ruined my sleep.
A week with the Oura Ring 4 taught me more about placebo effects than it did about my own body.
The Oura Ring 4 arrived on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, I had my first bad night’s sleep in months.
This is, statistically, a coincidence. Bad nights of sleep happen. I had a late coffee. The windows were open and I heard a fox at 2 a.m. The ring, in fact, did not cause the bad night.
But on Thursday morning, I reached for my phone and opened the Oura app before I’d stood up, which I had promised myself I would not do, and there it was: a score of 64, and a little chart telling me my “readiness” was low. And from that moment, I was — against my will, against my better judgment — a little worse.
I’ve worn the ring for a month now. I have come to believe that wearable health tech, at least for me, at least right now, is a trap. Not because the devices are bad. They’re good. They’re, frankly, miraculous. But because I am bad at being told a number about myself before I’ve decided how I feel.
Here’s what I learned.
The ring is a beautiful object
Titanium. Matte. Weighs nothing. Fits under a watch. Doesn’t set off metal detectors, though it makes the TSA agent squint.
Charging is a tiny plastic puck you plug into USB-C. The battery lasts a week. Updates happen overnight. The app is tasteful, the charts are legible, the data export is a CSV file, as God intended.
If you’re buying a smart ring because you want to own a piece of small, beautiful, well-made hardware, you’ll be very happy. The Oura is a nicer-feeling thing than most watches I own.
The data is pretty good
I’m not a scientist. I can’t tell you whether the heart-rate variability it measures at 4 a.m. is clinically accurate. But I can tell you that when I stayed up late, it knew. When I drank, it knew. When I went for a run, it knew, and when I skipped one, it knew that too.
For the first week, this was thrilling. I was — I thought — getting a window into myself. My body was a system. The ring was an oscilloscope.
For the second week, I started to notice something uncomfortable.
I was optimizing for the ring
Not for sleep. For the ring.
I started going to bed twenty minutes earlier because I knew the ring would reward me. I stopped eating dinner after 8 because it docked me for late meals. I stopped drinking the occasional glass of wine because the readiness score was brutal about it.
These are, mostly, good choices. Eat earlier. Sleep earlier. Drink less.
But I was making them for the wrong reason. I was not making them because I felt better. I was making them to move a number. And because the number was opaque — “readiness” is a composite of sleep, HRV, temperature, activity, and ineffable Oura Magic — I couldn’t tell which of my new behaviors was helping, or whether any of them were. I was doing rain dances for a god whose preferences I couldn’t decode.
The mornings got worse
The worst thing the ring did was take over my mornings.
Before the ring, my morning routine was: wake up, feel a way, decide if the way was good, get out of bed accordingly. Sometimes I’d feel tired and go back to sleep. Sometimes I’d feel great and go for a run. My body and I had a working relationship. We disagreed sometimes, but we were in conversation.
After the ring, my morning routine became: wake up, check the ring, discover whether the way I was about to feel was allowed. A 90 readiness and I’d go for a run, regardless of how I actually felt. A 55 and I’d mope, regardless of how I actually felt.
A hundred thousand years of listening to my own body, and a twelve-hundred-dollar piece of titanium had replaced it with a number.
The placebo works in both directions
Here is the most unnerving thing. On the days when the ring said I’d slept badly, I’d be tired — whether I had or not. On the days it said I’d slept well, I’d be energetic — whether I had or not.
I tested this, casually. A few times, I looked at yesterday’s score instead of today’s, by accident. When I saw a low score, I felt worse than I had thirty seconds earlier. When I saw a high one, the tiredness I’d felt a minute ago got reinterpreted as the kind of good tired you get from a useful workout.
The ring was, in some non-trivial sense, manufacturing the feelings it claimed to measure. Or at least shaping them, at the margin, in a direction I hadn’t asked for.
Who the ring is for
I think there are two kinds of people who should own a smart ring, and I am neither of them.
The first is someone with a specific, tractable health problem — a sleep disorder, a metabolic condition, a training plan that genuinely needs HRV data — who treats the ring as an instrument. They look at the data when it’s useful and ignore it when it isn’t.
The second is someone so psychologically sturdy that a 64 is just a number on a screen. These people exist. I know two of them. They wear the ring to bed and treat the morning score with the same affect they give the weather.
I am, it turns out, neither of those people. I am a person who will happily let a little titanium loop tell me, against all my accumulated evidence, whether I had a good night.
The verdict
I took the ring off last Monday. I haven’t put it back on.
The data is in a folder on my computer. I’ll look at it, occasionally, when I want to know something specific — did I actually sleep badly that week, or does it just feel like I did? Those checks are useful. They’re the way instruments should work: you reach for them when you need them.
What I won’t do anymore is strap an instrument to myself all the time and let it tell me how I’m doing.
I can just ask.
Matt has the opposite take on the Oura — he wore his for a year and loved it. We recorded an argument about it for the channel. Spoiler: we didn’t resolve anything.
“The worst thing a sensor can do is be wrong. The second worst thing is be right, at 3 a.m., about something you can't do anything about.”