“How can I sleep better?” It’s a question you may ask yourself after a night of tossing and turning. Whether it’s going to yoga, turning down the thermostat, avoiding blue light before bed, or forgoing that late-night snack, you might be at the point where you’re willing to try almost anything to unlock the key to more sleep.

But all of your efforts may leave you with another important question: “How well is this really working?”

With Oura’s Tags feature, you can explore how your habits, behaviors, and choices affect your sleep and overall wellness.

What works best for you? Find out by learning about Tags and how you can use this feature to get better sleep.

Using Tags in Oura

First, start by creating Tags for workouts, health conditions, or behaviors you want to monitor. Once you’ve built up enough tags, start looking for patterns and drawing correlations by viewing those Tags in the Trends feature.

Choose your Tag

There are four ways to assign a tag:

  1. Manually select a tag: Tap plus (+) on the bottom right of the Oura home screen, select “Add a Tag,” and select from the list of available Tags.
  2. Manually enter a workout: Tap plus (+) on the bottom right of the Oura home screen, select “Log a Workout,” and define your workout start time, duration, and intensity. When you click “Done,” a tag is automatically created.
  3. Take a Moment: Tap plus (+) on the bottom right of the Oura home screen, select “Take a Moment,” and select your preferred mindfulness session: Presence, Rest, or Body Status. When you finish, save your Moment session and a tag is automatically created.
  4. Sync with other apps: If you enabled syncing with Apple Health or Google Fit and use a fitness app to track your bicycle ride, walk, or other activity, your workout will automatically import as a tag.

View Your Tags in Trends

In the mobile app Trends view, you can call up your tags to draw meaningful, personalized conclusions. Select a specific stat—such as your Sleep Score—and highlight a specific tag—such as alcohol or caffeine—to identify any correlations between the two.

Here’s how to get going:

  1. Tap the menu (≡) icon in the upper left-hand corner of the Oura home tab.
  2. Select “Trends.”
  3. Select a specific metric (i.e., Sleep Score).
  4. Select the “No tag selected” button below “Highlight days tagged with.”
  5. Select the tags you’d like to highlight.
  6. Select the “Daily” view and days with those tags will be highlighted.

You can also view your tags through your “Weekly” and “Monthly” Trends views. Weeks or months in which you used that tag will be highlighted.

 

How About An Example?

If you push yourself hard on a Sunday (tagging 2 runs and cycling), you can see the impact on your body by looking at your next night of sleep. You may see something like this, where there is a large increase in the amount of deep sleep you get as your body prioritizes repair and recovery.

The tag is listed on “Sunday,” but the night of sleep that you’re looking for will be reported on Monday. Toggling back and forth between days is a great way to explore the relationship between your tags and your body’s response.

Reflecting on Your Trends

Setting Tags and viewing them in Trends is the first step towards understanding your body’s patterns.

If you want to take the next step, you can start testing out which behaviors or habits make a material difference in your sleep by running your own personal experiment.

For example, you could test whether taking a hot bath before bedtime leads to better sleep. In this experiment, you can use tags to easily identify any correlations in Trends. Before you know it, you’ll be running your own single-subject clinical trials, with you as the one and only focus.

If you find that you get more deep sleep on the nights you take a hot bath before bedtime, you may want to incorporate that into your routine.

You won’t take home the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, but once you crack your sleep code, you’ll sleep better and wake up feeling like you’ve got what it takes to chase any prize you want.