The Tyranny of the Oura Ring

Listen dumbass, there no such thing as too much data.

The Tyranny of the Oura Ring

I started by counting my steps. Soon, I was counting every other biometric. Was that a good thing?

By Pamela Paul, WSJ

March 29, 2026 5:30 am ET

My entry into the world of wearable fitness, as with much new technology, was grudging, fitful and ultimately all consuming.

In 2022, after years of monastic refusal—I already know I need to move more! There’s no need for an app!—I discovered I’d already inadvertently succumbed. I had an iPhone and therefore I had a fitness app; its built-in ring was lying in wait. Overcoming years of principled resistance to monitoring my absence of well-being didn’t even require lifting a finger.

Is this how it happens? One minute we are raging against the perils of A.I., and the next, docilely accepting Gemini’s take on the best Caribbean vacation. Passionately defending cinema on the big screen and then waiting for the next suggested movie to segue into our queue. We let ourselves blend into the algorithm, feeding and obeying the machine. A choice or decision that once felt like an essentially human act can easily slip away.

Or maybe it’s just me.

Soon I was another fierce 10,000 stepper, marching in silent competition not only with fellow ringbearers, but also with normal people enjoying an afternoon stroll. Caught up in my own personal videogame, I would furiously listen to podcasts about fitness, purity, self-actualization, completing my ring.

But in retrospect, my relationship with that ring was superficial. The phone was not physically attached to my body. I could put it down. We didn’t even sleep in the same room.

I didn’t fully become One with a ring until this January when my extremely fit, pickleball-playing sister-in-law bowed out one morning from a family hike at the urging of her ring.

“Something is definitely off,” she said, pointing to a phalanx of red clouds raging across her phone screen. “Major symptom signs” the Oura ring app warned. “Your biometrics show major signs of something straining your body.” The following day, she tested positive for Flu A.

A hand holding an Oura Ring, a wearable sleep tracking device.

The Oura ring tracks steps, sleep, fitness and more. Emilie Megnien/Associated Press

I was sold. Adding my $499 to the $1.7 billion sleep-tracker market—13.7% of which comes from wearable rings—I bonded with my Oura immediately. After our first night together, the app gave me a sleep score of 99, accompanied by a small golden crown and an “optimal” grade. My ego soared when a few mornings later, the app said, “Call an architect! Your readiness just blasted through the roof!”

“But don’t you already know if you’ve had a good night’s sleep?” you or my husband might ask. And you both might be right. But such detail! The ring may not interpret dreams, but it does tally light sleep, dark sleep and R.E.M. sleep down to the percentage point. It knows how long it takes you to fall asleep and reports alleged wakeups in the middle of the night. Snorers, beware.

It wasn’t the affirmation I appreciated (though I liked the way it spun a day sacked out on the sofa: “You’ve had more restorative time than usual today. Nice!”). It was when it reported on matters of which I had zero awareness: my HRV balance, for example, or my chronotype, albeit a wishy-washy “late morning,” a designation I plan to flip to early bird.

True, we’ve had misunderstandings. Though the ring knows when I’ve been walking, it confuses my harried morning routine for housework. After making a dinner one night, the ring asked whether I’d been on the elliptical. Shoveling out my car after a snowstorm while chatting with an Oura-wearing friend, we speculated about whether the ring would know what I’d been up to. “Stressed” it reported once I’d kicked the snow off my boots. “Stressed,” it also said after I’d had a particularly fun time at a party. I chose to overlook these things.

On the morning of Feb. 19, I awoke to the fiery red clouds. This “Major Symptom Alert” was vague but crushing. Just two days earlier, I’d been on the slopes in Vermont fancying myself a paragon of wellness. I canceled a book party in Brooklyn. I turned down theater tickets at the Shed. I declined to see a friend in town from Cambridge. I drank tea, quaffed vitamins, eschewed sudden movements.

What were my symptoms? No fever, no gastrointestinal distress, nothing resembling a cold, flu or Covid. What I most definitely had was malaise: The ring had issued a warning, but why? My thoughts turned to the 2002 horror movie “The Ring,” in which that era’s technology—a videotape—caused viewers to die within seven days. Creepy ring iconography crowded my consciousness: the unsettling surveillance of Amazon ring devices. The Ring of Gyges. Gollum’s “precious” tormentor.

Two days later, the red clouds cleared. I never got sick. “It may be that the ring can detect something out of whack but then our bodies fight it off,” Ricky Bloomfield, the chief medical officer at Oura told me in an interview. The machine learning model considers a range of metrics for each individual wearer, including temperature, respiratory rate, heart-rate variability (H.R.V.) and resting heart rate. “I don’t think we have every answer,” he said.

It could be the sign of some hidden immunological superpower. Or a sign of the power the ring had over me. Why, like the person who believes the weather app over what’s visible outside the window, had I believed the ring over my body? The ring’s elusive AI wasn’t sharing the answer.

But the aftereffects lingered. For days, the Oura had urged me to take it easy. I’d obeyed and failed to hit my Activity Goals for several days. My Readiness score plummeted. My Resilience shifted from “thriving” to “needs care.” I was no longer optimal.

Was I wearing this ring or was it wearing me?

Orthosomnia is linked to dysfunctional beliefs about sleep and has the potential to increase sleep-related anxiety as well as harmful sleep behaviors that may exacerbate insomnia symptoms, such as spending an excessive amount of time in bed awake. According to a recent study on wearable fitness users in Canada, where one in four people sport a wearable medical device, demographic characteristics associated with wearing devices to monitor sleep include having a mental disorder.

Studies point to wearables’ tendency to induce “self-tracking anxiety” or “health data anxiety,” the byproduct of too much information about one’s inner workings. These are now known risks in the Quantified Self movement.

Perhaps we can only optimize ourselves so much. But not me, not yet. I listen politely to those who have sworn off their rings but find greater kinship with those who not only wear the ring but do so on the same dominant pointer finger (at a party recently, three of us noticed this and spontaneously clinked glasses).

As I write this on my birthday, my precious tells me my cardiovascular age is 6.5 years younger than I am. “You’re on a roll!” it says. I choose to accept this. If the ring fits, you wear it.