I had just received my 18th parking ticket of the year when a notification from my Oura app offered some “insights” on my “daytime stress levels.” Would I like to see them?
Hooray! A new thing to worry about. And yet I asked for it. In fact, I pay for it—$6 a month on top of the $300 ring. Every step, palpitation, toss, turn, temperature rise, sleep stage, oxygenation level, heart-rate variability, menstrual symptom: each second of my life is calibrated, celebrated, and castigated in its data.
At least I’m in good company. About one in four Americans now wears a smartwatch; the category leaders, Fitbit and Apple Watch, have 110 million and 100 million users, respectively. The global market for fitness trackers was valued at $47 billion in 2022; Fortune Business Insights estimates that this figure will grow to at least $180 billion by 2030. (Meanwhile, the market for weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic is expected to reach just $100 billion by 2035, according to BMO Capital Markets.)
It seems so quaint now that I think back on how this all started for me, with an innocent-looking little Fitbit I bought in 2015 when I was training for a triathlon. For the previous 20 years, I had just gone running. Three miles, maybe four. Or five? Or two? It didn’t matter. I enjoyed the sweat and the scenery, so the metrics seemed irrelevant.
In those days, trackers focused mostly on movement, and I wore the Fitbit sparingly because it looked awful, like an ersatz Baby G-Shock, but the numbers pushed me to push myself. Study after study reveals that, overall, trackers lead to higher levels of activity, with users increasing their previous rates by approximately 1,800 steps per day.
Dr. Harry König, a naturopathic doctor who runs a wellness clinic at Villa Stéphanie, in Baden-Baden, Germany, often uses the Oura Ring as part of a treatment plan. “We love it, because it accurately collects a broad array of data,” he says. “And it’s the only device I know that is able to do so discreetly.” Masters of the Universe—Jack Dorsey, Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow—tend to love them; Prince Harry’s is matte black. Gucci recently unveiled its own edition, shellacked in 18-karat gold and priced at a cool $950.
Each second of my life is calibrated, celebrated, and castigated in its data.
Last summer, when my sleep went so sideways that I started googling “Ambien without a prescription,” I tossed the Fitbit and upgraded to the shiny gold Oura, because sleep is its specialty. In addition to monitoring pulse, heart-rate variability, and restlessness, it uses a proprietary algorithm to interpret body temperature, sleep cycles, the previous day’s activity, and oxygen saturation to arrive at a Sleep Score, which ranges from 1 to 100.
And it works. I started off in the low 60s, but a year later, I occasionally wake up to an 85 (!!), because I know, definitively, what precipitates disaster. Now I drink only a glass or two of wine once a week. No food after eight p.m., but who cares? I’m usually in pajamas by nine. When I’m short of 10,000 steps a day, I occasionally walk late-night laps around my bedroom. I leave my phone charging in the basement. This all sounds virtuous, but at dinner parties, abstemious with the drink and birdlike (relatively) with the cuisine, I’ve become a seat-filler. The Oura approves, but my husband and friends do not. At least I go home early.
I’m hopelessly addicted, and it’s not just the dopamine rush that accompanies a high Sleep Score. As with a long-discarded boyfriend, our relationship is co-dependent and occasionally toxic. After enjoying four glasses of Pinot Grigio at my birthday party, it set me into a shame spiral that I thought only my relatives could provide.
My annual physical, once a chore, is now a performance review. Everything is fraught: last year, my doctor murmured something about hypertension. To prove him wrong, even though he was wielding the blood-pressure cuff, I thrust my phone under his nose and started scrolling through Oura’s graphs of my heart rate. He promptly referred me to a psychiatrist. (Thank goodness no one was measuring my daytime stress then.)
Fitness trackers have become a treasured tool among the “worried well,” a term used by doctors to describe people who are generally in fine fiddle but become anxious about specific concerns. “There are people who cannot handle overinterpretation of health data, and for those I would not recommend wearing such a device,” says Dr. König. “But, generally, I believe that most of us do benefit very much from tracking our daily habits.”
Now, thanks to the Daytime Stress feature, we can see exactly which traffic jams are the most soul-crushing, and which components of “me time” are the most effective. With every software update, the Oura’s metrics become sharper; its data, more reliable. (Although, sometimes I distrust what it says about my stress levels, which have inexplicably skyrocketed during a pedicure.)
The corporate world loves this thing, because it promises to maximize employee performance. The Nascar and the U.S Army have already signed on to Oura for Business, which the company says will “deliver compelling group-level insights to connect individual wellness to organizational outcomes.” (Gulp.) During the coronavirus pandemic, the N.B.A. bought 2,000 rings for its players to track their temperatures, identify outbreaks, and stop community spread of the virus. (One study found that the ring could detect coronavirus symptoms three days in advance of onset, with 90 percent accuracy.)
If it all sounds Big Brother-y, that’s because it is. But who cares about privacy—we’re optimizing longevity and competing with A.I. here, right? Speaking of, within five years, some software owned by Microsoft will probably be able to predict exactly how and when death will come for us. No wonder data-obsessed super-fans like me occasionally find all this tracking a bit much.
The most stressful experience of the past year happened when I left Oura’s charger at a hotel. Until its replacement arrived, I spent a week with absolutely no information, judgment, or praise. I knew I was moving, but I couldn’t tell how far I had come. It was glorious. But I couldn’t wait to put it back on.
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast