What is Sleep? It’s when you head to bed to recharge from the day.

What is Activity? Well, it’s that run you’ve been putting off but should probably go on.

Now, what is Readiness? It’s something far more complex. Readiness is Oura’s unique philosophy on the definition of healthy and your ability to own your inner potential.

Ready Rather Than “Healthy”

Oura believes that there is no single definition of “healthy.” To an athlete, healthy may mean a high activity goal and a resting heart rate in the 40s, but to someone who started a new job, healthy could mean trying to minimize stress and aim for 6 hours of sleep.

Our lives can’t be simplified into states of being “healthy” vs. “not”  because every person is unique. We all have different physiologies and are faced with distinct life challenges.

Focusing on optimizing your Readiness means improving what your body is prepared for, regardless of what you’re facing in your life or the status of your health.

How Is It Measured?

Readiness is Oura’s proprietary score from 0-100 which is designed to help you figure out what works for your body on your personal spectrum of wellbeing. Higher scores mean your body is ready to face and rebound from greater challenges while lower scores indicate your body needs recovery and support.

To provide you with the best insights, Readiness prioritizes these elements:

  • Multiple Metrics:  Stress, recovery, and relaxation are both mental and physical. These complex patterns are reflected in multiple signals from your body. To account for that, Readiness takes a holistic view by adjusting your score based on your recent activity and sleep patterns, as well as direct body signals such as resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and body temperature.
  • Personalized Baselines: Rather than relying solely on population averages, Oura’s Readiness metric is tailored to you. Your “95” won’t be the same as someone elses to encourage you to compare your metrics only to yourself, rather than others. Truly understanding your body and owning your health is possible only if your metrics are just that: yours.
  • Evolving Scores: Your Readiness updates with you as your health status changes. Rather than a static metric, Readiness evolves with your body over days, weeks, and even months. If your resting heart rate goes down after long-term training or your HRV becomes higher after giving up caffeine, your scores will adjust to provide you the most valuable insights.
  • A Wide Spectrum: Tools that frame elements of health, like sleep, as goals that can be either met or missed can be discouraging. Rather than pushing the idea of a high step count or low calorie goal, Readiness is a spectrum. Whether you’re testing out if a new meditation practice can get you scores in the 90s or taking time to rest after a cold took you down to 40, your Readiness Score can help you measure your progress.

To learn more about how your Readiness score is calculated, read this Readiness Guide.

How Can I Use It?

It’s important to keep in mind that, regardless of the challenges you face, you and only you have the power to make meaningful changes in your life. No one knows you better than yourself.

Observing what lifestyle choices (e.g., meal timing, activities, sleep hygiene) raise and lower your Readiness empowers you to make data-informed decisions about your health.

For example, a new parent can’t control their schedule but, rather than resigning themselves to a lifetime of sleepless nights, they can identify strategies that improve their body’s Readiness so they feel more rested each morning. That parent might find that cutting afternoon coffee helps them fall asleep faster, ending meal times earlier boosts their deep sleep, or that simply heading directly back to bed rather than browsing their phone and being exposed to bluelight leaves them more refreshed in the morning.

Another person might discover that their Readiness declines during a mentally tough week at work and that takes a toll on their physical performance as well. They might explore adjusting their workout routine so that they have a stronger recovery balance on taxing weeks.

Readiness represents how our lives impact our bodies.

Learn More

Your health is complex and adaptive, but a metric like Readiness helps all of us truly understand what’s happening on the inside.

You can read more about how Oura users have used elements of their Readiness to:

Want to learn more about your health? Explore Oura Ring.