When was the last time you checked in with your body? Easier said than done, right? Science shows that you have more than 6,000 thoughts a day, which can distract you from the signals that your body is trying to share.
Joining Oura is like giving your body the microphone — amplifying conversations between your body and your brain that were once impossible to hear.
How Your Brain Communicates with Your Body
Our cells are always talking. Brains communicate via neurons (fast cells with direct targets) like a direct telephone line. These neurons have branches, which can receive and send messages from other neurons. Neurons release neurotransmitters, chemical compounds that travel across the branches onto other neurons, to deliver messages.
Tons of chemical messages are constantly traveling throughout your body. This allows your organs to be flies on the wall of every conversation, listening in on everything, even if it wasn’t intended for them.
How to Interpret Your Body’s Signals with Oura
Most of these diffused messages never make it to our conscious awareness, because all this information would be overwhelming. Our brain shields us from these messages and lets organs make their own decisions without our conscious input.
That’s where Oura comes in.
Oura gathers and interprets messages from your body, including your resting heart rate (RHR), body temperature, and heart rate variability (HRV). These metrics provide important insights into how your body is doing, and how it’s responding to your daily choices ver hours, days, months, or even years.
READ MORE: How Accurate Are Oura’s Heart Rate & HRV Measurements?
There is no one signal that gives you perfect information on its own. For instance, only listening to your heart rate is a bit like listening to a static-filled radio: you can catch sentences, but not the whole story.
Oura allows you to listen in to all of your body’s channels. By tuning in to all of these channels, you get a clearer picture of what’s happening in your body despite the static.
Oura interprets these signals and provides insights on the patterns and deviations that emerge. You may be able to see that your body is responding well to your new diet, or that you are staying sufficiently active, which is helping you get plenty of REM sleep. Or perhaps you. might see an elevated body temperature, signifying an illness, or a sudden drop in your HRV, signifying that your body is under stress.
RELATED: HRV and Stress: What HRV Can Tell You About Your Mental Health
Pay Attention to Certain Trends
Your circadian rhythm isn’t the only biological rhythm: there is also the reproductive cycle, your fitness routine, your metabolic health, among others. These rhythms can affect how you feel – but often, we dismiss these feelings. Many people drink caffeine when their body is expressing tiredness, and stay up late watching tv, snubbing melatonin and disrupting their body clock.
Using Oura gives your body a microphone to better understand your body signals, so you can know what your body needs, and when.
Over time, you may start to notice patterns emerging. For instance:
- You may notice that a late-evening meal inhibits deep sleep
- A morning workout may boost your HRV the following day
- Changes in your heart rate variability might indicate that you’re stressed
- An elevated body temperature might reveal that you’re getting sick
- You may notice that your sleep gets poorer in the days leading up to your period
You can Tag these daily variables on Oura to start seeing patterns in how your body responds to certain lifestyle changes and factors.
When you’re aware of how your body is doing on a daily basis, you understand how your habitual choices are affecting you. Long-term patterns can reveal whether you’re falling short of goals or how lifestyle changes like learning to meditate or starting a new job can impact your health.
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