Stress is your body's natural response to both internal and external challenges and is not inherently good or bad. Everyone feels stress, but the causes are highly personal — work, jetlag, social interactions, and stimulants like coffee can all be stressors on the body. Daytime stress enables you to track your individual physiological stress during waking hours so that you can understand, manage, and recover from it more effectively. The feature started rolling out to active Gen3 members on October 10 and will be available to all members in the near future.
What Is Daytime Stress?
How Daytime Stress Works
Things to Keep in Mind
More Information
What Is Daytime Stress?
Daytime stress measures your heart rate, HRV, motion, and temperature throughout the day to provide ongoing insights into your physiological stress. Your stress will be categorized into one of four zones:
- Stressed: The highest level. Common and normal, but a sign to seek Restorative Time
- Engaged: Some elevated signs of stress, but potentially good for productivity
- Relaxed: Your body has moved from a state of stress into one of mild recovery
- Restored: Your body is recharging in a pure state of calm
How Daytime Stress Works
Daytime stress measures your physiological stress responses, which include both physical and mental responses and adaptation to different internal and external factors. Internal factors, for example, can include a lack of sleep or illness. External factors can include things like work-related stress, alcohol, or social activities.
Your Daytime stress information can be found on a home card each day, where you'll see a stress graph that's updated in real time. The stress graph is color-coded to allow you to easily visualize your current or latest detected state, and it updates every 15 minutes during periods when you're awake, wearing your ring, and relatively inactive. You must have five days of data in order to see Daytime stress results.
Your HRV reflects the activities of your autonomous nervous system, which regulates how your body adapts to stressors. Daytime stress inspects your HRV, among other measurements, relative to your personalized baseline. Your baseline is adjusted with new data every day as long as the data is available (e.g., you wear your ring during the day and night).
You can click into the home card for additional insights, a daily movement chart, and information about how much time you spent in stressed vs. restored states. The daily movement graph is identical to the movement graph in the Activity tab and can help provide additional context about the relationship between activity and stress. Daytime stress analysis is not available during physical activity as physiological stress and recovery states can only be measured during no or low movement periods.
Daytime stress is only calculated during waking hours. You will see stress insights in your Home tab two hours after you begin your day and various insights throughout the day. In the evening, you will see a daily summary, and you can also scroll back to see insights from the previous days.
For more information about HRV and stress see HRV and Stress: What HRV Can Tell You About Your Mental Health
If you see gaps in your Daytime stress graph, these may be possible reasons:
- Your stress isn't measured during movement, including workouts. When periods of movement are over, you'll see their impact on your stress graph
- Your stress isn't measured during sleep
- You weren't wearing your ring for an extensive period of time
- Your ring wasn't able to measure your heart rate due to a poor or loose fit
- You had cold hands, which can cause signal problems
Things to Keep in Mind
- Daytime stress results may not be valid for users with heart diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, or pacemakers
- You must wear your ring during the day and night to establish your baselines for Daytime stress results
- Daytime stress cannot differentiate different stress sources, as the body physiologically reacts the same way to different stressors, whether it's physical or mental. You can also do a self-reflection each day using Reflections or add and view tags in your trends view to track your daily actions and behavior
More Information
Track, Understand, and Manage Your Stress With Oura
Reframing Stress: The Difference Between “Bad” and “Good” Stress
