Oura Resilience: How to use the stress feature to track your body's responses

Oura continues to be at the forefront of stress tracking - and its latest feature, Resilience, is a superb way to keep track of your wider trends.

First launching in January 2024 and now available to all Oura Ring Gen 3 users, we've found it to be one of the few stress-related features that actually provides useful feedback. 

While some stress features are limited to informing you of stressful events, Resilience is Oura's way of contextualizing them into a long-term view, with guidance and tips also provided to help you tackle them.

Given that Resilience is a proprietary Oura calculation, however, getting the most out of the feature requires some learning. That's where this guide comes in. 

Below, we've explained how to get the most out of Resilience on Oura, with exclusive expert insight from the company's senior vice president of science, Shyamal Patel.

What is Resilience?

Wareable

Oura defines Stress Resilience as an estimate of your ability to withstand and recover from physiological stress over time. Think of it as the intersecting measurement of stress and sleep. 

It relies on three key measurements - daytime stress load, daytime recovery, and nighttime recovery - to determine your resilience before categorizing it as Exceptional, Strong, Solid, Adequate, or Limited.

Patel tells us that Resilience will correlate strongly with the Oura Readiness Score, since the two calculations each rely on heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and recovery index data. 

The difference here, though, is that Resilience uses a wider lens.

One bad night of sleep or a low Readiness Score won't see your Resilience level tumble - it's all about judging your body's physiological response over 14 days.

When the feature first began rolling out, Patel explained to us the motivation behind Resilience:

"Stress is something that is an inevitable part of our lives. But we also know that chronic stress, a sustained level of stress that stretches on for days or weeks or months has a very detrimental impact on our health and well-being."

"So what we wanted to do with Resilience is build a sort of a window into that to help you understand your capacity to respond to and recover from stressful situations," he said.

Resilience vs. Daily Stress Tracking

Wareable

You may already track your stress with Oura's Daily Stress Tracking feature, but Resilience is designed to live alongside this and broaden the range. 

Checking in on your daily stress allows you to analyze which moments resulted in a physiological response, which can sometimes be helpful, though Resilience delivers insights and guidance on your trend.

"We can track your stress levels and tell you what you're experiencing. But then I think what is important here is telling the user how they've recovered from that stress," Patel told Wareable.

"If you are somebody who experiences, let's say, high levels of stress, it’s essential to know whether your body is able to come back to homeostasis."

How to improve your Oura Resilience level

Wareable

You've noticed your Resilience is Low or Adequate, so what now?

This is the biggest question you're likely to encounter using Resilience.

Seeing that you're not necessarily managing your stress levels and recovery well can be interesting, but one goal of Resilience is to help users understand the factors that may be affecting it, Patel says. 

And, as you would probably guess, focusing on your sleep is the first step if you're looking to improve Resilience.

"I think there are a lot of different levers with Resilience, but one of the biggest here is going to be your sleep," Patel told us. "And it comes back to your foundation. Sleep is such an essential aspect of health, and a lot of people still don't pay enough attention to that, I think."

"If your sleep is compromised - if you're not sleeping well - that would be the first place I would want to go to and say, ‘OK, this is a place where I can potentially move the needle on my resilience'."

Why some stress is good for you

Improving your Resilience isn't about eliminating stress entirely, though - and some might even contribute to an improved level.

Patel also explains that using Oura's stress-tracking duo together can help you pinpoint the moments of 'good', low-stress events and differentiate them from chronic high-stress.

"There's this idea of hormetic stress - this well-understood scientific mechanism where low levels of stress that you experience can actually be beneficial.

"I think exercise is a great example of this - if you go out on a run, you’re exposing yourself to low levels of stress for short durations. Something like this is helpful to build up that resilience."

"And you can have other examples, like exposure to cold or heat exposure. Intermittent fasting could also be an example of low-level stress," he says.

Accepting the reality of tracking stress

Oura is acutely aware of the challenges it faces in presenting personalized stress tracking, Patel says, doubling down on how Resilience has been designed to provide users with a way to understand their stress capacity.

By doing so, reducing stress and handling inevitable situations should, in theory, be less challenging.

"I think that stress is sometimes less actionable than with other things. And, for me, it would be quite frustrating if a product was just telling me, ‘Hey, just minimize your stress’.

"We know there are certain types of stressors that you're experiencing in your life that are not really things you can truly act on.

"With Resilience, the aim is to help you begin minimizing them or figuring out how to deal with them," Patel says.