Oura Ring 2 - One Year Honest Review

So ladies and gentlemen, the terms I will sleep when I'm dead, lleep is for the weak or bragging about getting two, three hours of sleep a night is a thing of the past. I think over the past three, four years. The general sentiment around sleep has really changed.

My name is Iman Gadzhi and I will be reviewing the Oura Ring after 18 months of use. Now real quick, I do want to mention that I am not paid to say to this and there will not be any affiliate links in the description or anything like that. I should probably mention though that Oura Ring was a client of my advertising agency for a long time.

That said, again, I was a customer of theirs prior to them becoming a client and the reason I want to say this is because I may be like slightly biased cause I had a working relationship with them, but I will try to be as neutral as possible in this video and give you the good, the bad and the ugly. Now I want to break this video down into four parts. First of all, the user experience.

Second, the data that the ring gives you. Third, the impact of the ring, like the real world application of it. And lastly, the value of this ring.

First things first, let's talk about the user experience of owning an Oura Ring. I think this is really where Oura Ring stands out amongst the competition because prior to Oura Ring, I tried in the past, but like never in a million years. What was I going to wear?

A wearable tracker, device health device thing, because they're also like clunky. They're uncool. I think the main thing that I can say about this is Oura Ring is the first company in history to make tracking your health.

Cool. You know, because you look at, for example, a Fitbit and it's just like, I don't know, they're clunky. They're not, they're not even accurate, I think, or his main competitor.

WHOOP. Which by the way, I've tried all of these things. I've tried group as well, like especially if you're someone who wears watches.

I'm very big into Watchers. I'm very passionate about horology, so I've always got a watch on. Sometimes I've got gold watches, sometimes I've got steel watches sometimes about watches with rubber bands and a black band on the other hand doesn't go with anything.

And just to be very honest with WHOOP, like I just was not a fan of it at all. I think for me there's a hierarchy of things at the top of the hierarchy and the thing that enables me to enjoy the benefits of the tool is am I going to use it and what kind of touch on that in point number three but back to sort of use your experience, everything from the product itself to the app and everything else kind of within the ecosystem. As I said, you really can where Oura Ring with anything and got the cause to do so.

They've got silver, they've got black matte black, they used to have a Rose gold, which is a shame cause they don't sell any more. My ex girlfriend actually got one of the Rose gold ones and it looks really good, like it genuinely looks like a nice ring. Now one thing that I will mention is I only wear my Oura Ring at night.

Now, the reason that is, first of all, I just day to day, I don't like rings, not state, it's unintrusive. This is such a comfortable ring. It is so unintrusive.

But as I said, most of the time I'm the type of guy who I just like to wear one watch, no other jewelry except for that, maybe a few light pieces here and there. Just in general I don't like to have rings on and if I have rings that feels I should have multiple and are just one ring. I've always felt as though it kind of looks out of place, especially if you're wearing a watch.

But as some of you guys know I also own a clothing line. I'm very sort of like fashion conscious, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the main reason why I also don't wear it in the day is because I feel as though the day data doesn't really give you that much.

Now there's three main factors around the Oura Ring. It's your sleep score, your readiness, and then lastly, your activity score. Oura Ring doesn't really give you real time feedback while you're training.

Like for example, I have an Apple watch. I've used that in the past while I'm doing CrossFit workouts and that's useful in terms of your heart rate and then also setting timers and this and that. So for me it doesn't really make sense to use this while I'm training and then kind of the rest of the day to day I found that it doesn't really do that much.

Now. One of my concerns was that because I don't wear it in the day that might affect my readiness and my sleep score or am I think that the Oura Ring thought I was literally lying in bed the entire day or just sat at my desk the entire day. Now as I said, Oura was one of my clients.

I asked Harpreet and the entire team over there basically about this question. They said, no, no, no. Like the Oura Ring is smart enough to know that you're not on standby for 16 hours and a lot of their users and a lot of my friends that I know actually do the same thing.

They only wear it at night. They don't wear it on the day. Now the user interface of Oura Ring is beautiful and very easy to understand.

Once again, if I compare it to something like whoop, where it is very clunky and kind of confusing. And the other thing that's super important to me is when you wake up and you can actually put this on airplane mode so you're not getting blasted with EMS all day. When you wake up and you turn it off of airplane mode, I'd say probably within 30 seconds, all of your data is there.

Whereas if I compare it to say something like the woop, it would take like minutes, like I was confused why it was taking so long. Maybe that's because I own the aura in first. As I said, the app is genuinely a joy to use and the other thing that I love is the fact that they have the web version of it.

Now, I know most people won't ever sign into like the cloud version of Oura, but the main reason that I use it is because every day I use it on my team call. Now I actually get everyone who works for me, they all get an Oura Ring. It's just one of the company perks.

It's really cool because we love like kind of competing against each other and or as something known as Oura teams. So basically you can get everyone in a team together and I literally have like six, seven, eight peoples or stats and every single day we're comparing, we're competing, we're, we're joking around, you know, we're, we're kind of poking fun at people who haven't had as good sleep scores. And once again, I love the fact that it's gamifying sleep.

It's, it's incentivizing sleep and it's incentivizing good health and good rest and recovery. Now the only thing that I don't like and as a negative in terms of Oura with it's sort of a user experience is you can't sync to two devices. Now I know for most people this is like, this doesn't matter in the slightest, but for me, I actually have two phones.

I have one phone that has like Spotify or audible at Uber and that's it. Like this is my focus phone. So this is the phone that I'm using most of the time and my other phone that only comes out of my like five, six hours a day is the one where I'm getting braided with messages, WhatsApp, this, that.

So my point is yes, 95% of time I'm waking up in this the phone I'm using, but sometimes when I'm on holiday then I need to make sure that I have this phone with me no matter what to check my stats because it doesn't sync to two devices, which I don't really understand why, especially when I'm logged into the same account, I don't understand why I wouldn't be able to sync to two devices and this may be applicable for you guys if you have like an iPad and you have an iPhone and like even if you're just downstairs in your, your next year iPad, like I don't understand why you wouldn't sink, especially considering it's such a smart ring in every other aspect. Now the next thing that I want to talk about is the data and the accuracy of the ring. Now the data that you get from the ring can be iffy.

At times I've found now there are people who claim it has 60% accuracy and there's people who swear by it and they're like, it's a hundred percent accurate. Now from a training perspective, as I mentioned, like I, it gave me no notable data. In fact, the data that was more interesting was my HRV, so I said, while I'm wearing it at night, I can look in the morning and with my HRV and then when I'm training I can kind of know how hard to go and whatnot, but as I said, the actual wearing it in the day didn't really give me any data that was of any use or interest.

Now with the data that you get from Oura Ring, immediately when I wake up, I'm looking at my readiness and my sleep score and if both are above an 85 I know that it's going to be a good day. That's kind of my barometer for like, okay, I am well rested and am I like look a little bit more into the data and stuff like that, but it's permanently the days when I've gotten bad rest that then I'm digging more into the data. I'm looking more at my latency, my percentage of deep, my percentage of REM at what point in the night was my lowest heart rate, my HRV, like that's where I'm really kind of using the data and digging into the data to self evaluate like what went wrong last night.

Now for me using the data from the spring, I was actually able to figure out a couple of stuff and I was actually able to bust a couple of general myths that didn't apply to me personally in the way that my body works now. For me, one big thing that I found was if I eat any closer than two hours prior to bed, like my sleep has a significant decrease in quality and how much deep sleep I'm getting. Any alcohol anywhere close to bed once again just throws off my sleep entirely.

And one thing that I actually found that didn't apply to me. I know that a lot of people say, you know, don't have any caffeine after 12 or after 1:00 PM for me, I can have coffee at like three or 4:00 PM and I use the ring to find this out and still have like a five to seven minute latency, even at like nine 30 if I go to bed and once again my deep and my rim are totally fine. So that's just something that I was able to use the ring to figure out like, Oh, okay, it's not ideal, but if I'm having coffee with a friend and we're meeting at like three four o'clock it's still fine for me to have a cup of coffee.

It's not going to, for me personally affect my sleep that much. Now the meeting is, this device will give you clear feedback so you can adjust your habits. It gives you enough details so that you can be specific about things, but not too much detailed that you get overwhelmed.

I think for me it doesn't really matter whether it's 80% or a hundred percent accurate. It's consistent enough that you can tell that it's in the right direction. Like if all the variables in my life have not really changed that much in one day.

It's saying my HRV is like 107 the next day it's saying it's 25 and the next day it's saying 65 then maybe I might be a little more concerned, but for the most part, everything that Oura has said has kind of reflected what I felt mood wise. Kind of what I can remember kind of looking back at my habits the prior day. It all seems pretty consistent.

As I said, this is after 18 months of use. The next thing that I want to talk about is the actual impact of the ring. Now I've spent obscene amounts of money on biohacking equipment.

Some have been cool, some have been mildly useful and most of them have actually just added way more stress to my life. The natural value that they brought. This is once again where the Oura ring truly stands out because it's so passive in the background.

It's comfortable, it's not loud and if you apply the that it gives you and you do enough self experimentation, you'll start to see immense value from it. Now to me it truly comes down to whether you can make yourself a test subject. You know, if you just look at the data and you're like, Oh that's cool but you never actually apply it or you never try to tweak or you never try to improve, then obviously it's not going to do anything for you.

As I said, the other thing is if you can get your partner or your friends or like maybe even your team involved and have some other people that you can kind of compare stats with them and see who did better and who had a better readiness and a better sleep score, then it's that whole aspect of gamifying it. It's truly powerful and it just, it makes you upset. What I love about worrying so much because I think they are the first company ever to make sleeping cool, make sleeping fun and make sleeping something that you look forward to to get an amazing score.

I know in the past with all trackers like Fitbits and stuff like that, kind of like 2014 2015 they did that with steps and I know certain people who would not go to bed unless they got their 10,000 steps for that date. Oura ring is the first tracker to do that for sleep and do it in such a user friendly pack. I've experimented with tons and tons of other devices and the only one I think that kind of comes close in terms of how accurate the data is and not just being some add on to a different wearable device like being one of the main things and one of the main focuses is whoop, but as I mentioned to you guys earlier, I've tried group.

I honestly give him my basketball. I used it for two months, I hated it. Now, the last point I want to mention is value because I've had this ring for 18 months and funnily enough somewhere around the six month mark the ring was acting super funny and it wasn't a loading or sending any of the data to my phone.

Now Oura Ring sent me one entirely free and I do want to mention I ain't got like special treatment because they were a client of mine. Like I just went straight to their customer service is very weird. Like I don't know.

It's very cool to see how they knew. Like they literally knew, they emailed me back very quickly and they were like, yeah, we can see on our side that your ring is like overriding or like overheating or like there's gathering too much data or something like that. I don't know, I forget what it was specifically, but my point is they were like, yeah, on our side we can see that this is our fault, which I thought was just super dope.

Like me running my own businesses, physical businesses, service space, B2B businesses, B to C businesses in all of my businesses. I need to make sure that I have incredible customer support and also client care. So for me it's something about a business having really good customer support that is quick prompt and doesn't give you any troubles.

For me I just think is like the coolest thing ever. Now the reason that I mentioned this in terms of value is from the first three points I think you can kind of decide whether this is a valuable item to you or valuable piece to you or not. For me, the reason that I mentioned it is the longevity of it.

I've had this thing for 18 months, it's been robust, it's never broken except for that six month mark and they sent me out a new one, no questions asked. This packs a hell of a punch for such a small item and said, all in all, I don't think there's anything on the market that for the price has delivered me such value. And this is the thing that you will have for one year, two years, three years, four years.

Like, I think it's been two years since this has been released and I, you know, it's not like an iPhone, you buy it in the next year. There's a new one. I think there's definitely like a two and a half to four year period between the different versions.

And on another note, they're always updating the firmware, always updating the software. In fact, I think they've got this new meditation thing where real time they can see your breathing and your heart rate and it's almost like a guided meditation thing and that's very new feature that they've implemented. In fact, I have a tool called the muse meditation headband that I've used in the past for that exact same purpose.

So all in all, my point is I think bang for buck. This goes a long way. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed this Oura Ring to review after 18 months of use, after spending thousands and actually tens of thousands of dollars on different biohacking equipment and different trinkets and try and kind of all the different competition out of my entire sort of deck of biohacking tools and equipment.

I think, as I said, this is the one that I have enjoyed. And to me, the one that's been the most valuable because of the simplicity, the elegance of it, and just how easily it kind of slots into your lifestyle. So if you enjoy this video, can you go ahead and smash the like button and while you're at it, go ahead and leave me a comment, let me know.

Have you used the orient yourself and kind of what's been your experience, or have you used a different competitor? What did you think of them? And also make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button if you're into anything in the world of advertising, marketing, entrepreneurship, bio hacking, finance, et cetera, et cetera.

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