The Ring

No this isn’t about horror movies where small girls crawl out of small wells and creep through your tv and eat you. Although if that happens to someone after reading this post, I can only apologise. I wasn’t trying to start anything, promise. No, what it’s actually about is this new ring that I’m wearing which amongst other things tracks my heart rate, sleep patterns, steps, ‘stress’ or heart rate variability and activity levels. It syncs with an app on my phone and if I’m inactive for fifty minutes, it tells me that I’m a lazy bugger and I need to move around a bit for ten minutes. More technology running my life.

I suffer with stress and it’s affected me in ways that are quite physical for which I’ve had to receive attention from doctors. That’s as much info as I’m going to hand over on that, but stress is real in my life and has physical manifestations. Now the ring itself measures heart rate variability (HRV) which isn’t the same thing as stress. A good friend taught me recently that HRV is:

The slight variation in time between heartbeats. It’s a measure of how well your auto-nomic nervous system is regulating your heart rate and other bodily functions. HRV can indicate your physical resilience, cardiovascular fitness, and ability to adapt to environmental and psychological challenges.

With thanks to google gemini – more ai

Now it’s the psychological challenges bit that interests me when my HRV is monitored and how I’m coping with them. I had an important and difficult meeting recently and I looked at my HRV after and it was in the green which was great. I’d coped with that tough meeting well. I looked at my HRV after watching a tense episode of TV and it was spiking throughout, even though I was having fun and not feeling challenged. So I’m going to have to be careful with just looking back on the results and deciding that ‘I am stressed’ all the time, because I’m not.

Sleep is a big challenge for me at times. I struggle to switch off and get to sleep and then I’m tired for two days. And it’s amusing me that now that I have this ring and app and the app attributes a score out of one hundred for how well I’ve slept, I’m now finding myself wanting to get good results. It measures all sorts about your sleep and works out a score. And I feel annoyed when my score drops and I actively want my average score to be high. By quantifying sleep, I may have found an impetus to sort out some mechanisms to help me sleep better. Now I could have done this anyway, but it’s a game I need to win now. I am a simple creature.

I’ve no idea if this simple piece of metal with some complicated sensors welded to it will bring positives to my life, but I needed to try something and it’s all mixed in with my drive to sleep more / better, eat more healthily and exercise more. Let’s see what happens.