Posted on
by

One of the first things my Oura ring helped me figure out when I got it 4 years ago, was that if I eat a meal in the 4 hours before bedtime it interferes with my sleep. The effect was dramatic enough that Jackie and I switched to eating just two meals a day: breakfast an hour or two after we get up, and then our main meal of the day around 2:00 PM. Since that change, I’ve slept much better.

Sometimes though… life intervenes. Yesterday was one of those days. My local Esperanto group had its annual Zamenfest, and I brought pizza and cookies to the meeting, and ate a lot of both. (In fact, I not only ate several of the ginger sparkles I bought, I also ate some green star-shaped sugar cookies and some peanut butter cookies brought by other members of the group. It was a real cookie fest, as well as a Zamenfest.)

Unsurprisingly, I saw a repeat of the various issues that showed up 4 years ago, as can be seeing from looking at my Readiness metrics from my Oura ring:

Screen capture from the Oura Ring software showing a resting heart rate of 53, an elevated body temperature, and a poor recovery index.

The “Recovery index” basically means that my heart rate remained elevated until shortly before I woke up. That’s on top of the fact that it only got down to 53, which is rather high for me. My body temperature was 1.1℉ above baseline, which is probably just that my body was very active digesting food, rather than being a fever due to an infection or something.

A single day of this is no problem. Today I’ll eat on my usual schedule, and I expect I’ll sleep very well tonight. But I thought it was an interesting example of the sort of thing that the Oura ring is good at alerting the user to.

I didn’t get a picture of yesterday’s cookies, but here’s some from a prior year’s batch:

Ginger sparkle cookies

Posted on
by

One metric that the Oura ring tracks is inactivity time: basically, the amount of time spent just sitting. It is here that I perhaps see the biggest dog-related change.

I have always spent a lot of time just sitting: I sit to work, I sit to read, I sit to watch TV, I sit to play a video game, I sit to write a blog post, I sit to eat. I sit in the morning while I drink my coffee, and I sit in the evening before getting ready for bed.

The Oura ring folks rather emphasize this particular metric, suggesting that “Keeping your daily inactive time below 8 hours works wonders for your body and mind.” I didn’t doubt this, but I did a pretty poor job of actually doing it. I had the occasional individual day when my inactivity was below 8 hours, but it was usually somewhat over. In fact, my average daily inactive time for the year before we got a dog was 9h 2min.

Since getting the dog, I’ve been way, way more active. I mentioned a few days ago that I was sleeping lot better, and listed a few metrics that had changed that seemed to be related—in particular, walking a lot more, but I hadn’t thought to check how my inactive time had changed, and the results are significant. My average daily inactive time over the 5 weeks since we got the dog has fallen to 6h 38min.

The shift is pretty obvious in a graph of my inactive time starting one year before I got the dog and continuing through yesterday:

Graph of my Oura ring "inactive" time data, showing a long stable period followed by a sharp drop off
Graph of my inactive time from November 2, 2021 through December 10, 2022

The change was dramatic enough that just 5 weeks of post-dog data pulled the overall average down by almost 15 minutes per day. (It’s actually kind of interesting how variable the individual data points are in the first year, and yet how absolutely flat the average is, until Dog Day.)

Well, I have been sitting for rather longer than I probably should to get this post written. I’ll go ahead and post it, and then carry on with the activities of the day.

Posted on
by

A neighbor’s dog ran over to meet Ashley this morning. I’ve been a bit leery of that, because Ashley tends to growl and lunge when she meets other dogs. Today all went well, and I am much encouraged.

View of the prairie on a foggy morning
No photo of dog interaction, but here’s our little prairie

Posted on
by

Ashley and I have been figuring out how the dog should be walked, in order to get her enough exercise that she isn’t a pest, and to make sure that she doesn’t have “accidents” in the house. Here’s how things seem to be shaping up:

  • First walk: As soon as we get up we go out for a peeing and pooping walk. This walk is usually very short, as the dog is happy to come right back in again when it’s cold and dark outside.
  • Second walk: After I’ve had a cup or two of coffee, Ashley is ready to go out again to Check All the Things. At first she just needed to check the patio. Then she needed to check the courtyard outside the patio. Now she wants to check the nearby courtyards and sidewalks as well.
  • Third walk: After breakfast (for her and us), and after it’s light outside, we go for our Long Walk of the Morning. This walk is often three miles or more, and often involves leaving Winfield Village and walking in nearby neighborhoods. Its goal is to give the dog enough exercise that she’s happy to doze for an hour or two after we get in.
  • Fourth walk: If our main meal of the day is late, I want to take the dog out for another short walk before we sit down to eat, so she can pee again.
  • Fifth walk: After our main meal of the day, we go out for another walk. Again, this walk is for peeing and pooping if necessary.
  • Sixth walk: Ashley’s main meal of the comes at 3:00 PM, so I can take her for another walk ahead of cocktail hour. The intention is for this to be her Long Walk of the Afternoon, although there’s not really enough time for as long a walk as would be necessary to get her to be calm during cocktail hour. So this is still a work in progress.
  • Seventh walk: Just before bedtime, I take Ashley out for another walk so she can pee, so she doesn’t need to pee during the night. This walk tends to be quite short, as Ashley is as ready to go to bed as we are.

The Fourth Walk doesn’t always happen, if she doesn’t seem to need to go out before our main meal of the day, so some days we’re already down to six walks per day. (We were doing about eight walks per day for the first several weeks, as anything less led to peeing or pooping in the house.)

Photo of Ashley
Ashley during today’s Long Walk of the Afternoon

Longer term, I’m hoping to get down to about four walks: First walk, Long walk of the morning, Long walk of the afternoon, and Just before bedtime.

Wish me luck.

Although we’re doing slightly fewer walks, we’re probably walking longer distances—I’m averaging a full 8 miles per day last week and this week.