Daytime Stress

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. This feature is not available for Gen2 or older.

What Is Daytime Stress?
How Daytime Stress Works
Things to Keep in Mind
More Information

What Is Daytime Stress?

Stress is your body's natural response to both internal and external challenges and is neither inherently good nor 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 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 real-time stress graph. The stress graph is color-coded to help you easily visualize your 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.

For more information about HRV and stress, see HRV and Stress: What HRV Can Tell You About Your Mental Health.

Contextual Stress

You can tap the home card to be taken to a detail view with additional information. This detail view includes two toggles: one for "Daily movement" and one for "Tags and activities." Toggling these will create an overlay on the daily stress graph that can help provide additional context about the relationship between activity and stress.

The daily movement graph is identical to the movement graph on the Activity screen. 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.

Tags and activities are marked on the graph's timeline. Tap on a tag to highlight it on the graph. You can also add a tag directly from the Daytime Stress screen.

Below the insight message are totals for your day's Stressed and Restored times. Tapping on either will take you to that metric's graph in Trends.

Gaps in Stress Graph

Daytime Stress is only calculated during waking hours. You will see stress insights on the Oura App's home screen beginning two hours after you wake up, with various insights displayed 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.

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