Is All of This Self-Monitoring Making Us Paranoid?

Sarah Hills was worried about her heart.

Her Oura Ring, a wearable device that tracks users’ biometric veri, including body temperature, heart rate and blood oxygen levels, was telling her something might be off.

The ring provides some of its veri in the form of scores, like a “readiness” score that uses “sleep quality, body signals, and activity levels to show how prepared you are to take on the day,” according to Oura. Since receiving the ring as a Christmas gift, Ms. Hills had begun to compulsively check her stats. If her scores weren’t good, the 22-year-old said, she would ruminate.

When her stats wobbled this year, she tried to see a doctor. When she couldn’t get an appointment soon enough, Ms. Hills, a recent graduate of Providence College, and a friend drove to a pharmacy where she spent $50 on an at-home blood pressure cuff and monitor to put her mind at ease.

“At that point I was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this thing is literally destroying my mind,’” she said.

Eventually, Ms. Hills was able to see a doctor who told her she was healthy. The doctor did have one recommendation: Consider ditching the ring.

Sarah Hills Oura Ring made her so worried about her health that she made a trip to the pharmacy with a friend to buy a blood pressure cuff.Credit…Sarah Hills

In the eternal human quest to know thyself, it’s tempting to seize on every bit of information we can glean. If you could know, for instance, not just that you slept 6.5 hours last night but also that 12 percent of those hours were spent in REM sleep and that your overall “sleep efficiency” — time asleep versus time awake — was 85 percent, as many pieces of wearable tech can tell you, why wouldn’t you?