Devices can be wrong for people prone to anxiety, and still be useful

The NYT article linked below talks to several people with anxiety or OCD, and somewhat reasonably comes to the conclusion that the Oura ring and similar devices are not for them.

I have a different perspective.

I wear an Oura ring and check it daily, and I’ve had none of these problems. I take what it tells me seriously, but I never let it override my own opinion on how I’m doing.

One fairly new feature is a warning when your metrics (temperature and resting heart rate in particular) suggest that you might be coming down with something. Even though I’m somewhat prone to hypochondria myself, it hasn’t been a problem for me.

Wednesday this week it warned me that I might be coming down with something. I felt fine, so I was inclined to ignore it. By evening I’d realized that I was coming down with a cold. (I felt pretty crappy all day Thursday. Today I feel nearly all better.) Although I was inclined to ignore it, I did take it seriously enough to skip my workout that day, which was probably a good idea.

I did react rather strongly the first time I got that warning, but only because I was visiting my 92-year-old mother, and didn’t want to risk passing something on to her. So I took the warning seriously enough to get and take a Covid-test and to wear a mask around my mom. Maybe that was an over-reaction—I wasn’t sick—but I am sure happier over-reacting than I would have been under-reacting and passing Covid on to my mom.

My brother teases me constantly for wearing such a thing, but I fall very much in the category of people who think, “Why not have as much information as possible?”

“They were like, ‘This is just not necessary information for a healthy, able-bodied person to have.’”

Source: Do You Have ‘Oura Paranoia’ From Having Too Much Information About Your Body? – The New York Times