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[MINILIK SALSAWI]

One day this past fall, I found myself wearing four different wearable wellness trackers at once. My running watch was strapped to my left wrist, and a Whoop was on my right. My Oura Ring was on my pointer finger, and my Lingo continuous glucose monitor was on the back of my arm. When I went to sleep, my Eight Sleep Pod and Ozlo sleepbuds joined in to track my breathing patterns, heart rate variability (HRV) and REM sleep.

With all of these devices combined, I was collecting data from my blood, my steps and even my breath, but I wasn’t using it for anything other than my own awareness. So I decided to take a step back and be more intentional. I set a 90-day goal to pare down the number of fitness trackers I wore and to then actually use the data to make meaningful changes to my health in three specific areas, the core components of longevity: stress, sleep and fitness. Through this journey, I relied on the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic, Garmin Venu 4 and Eight Sleep Pod 5 to help me become the best version of myself. Here’s what happened.

How I planned to improve my longevity metrics
Longevity is currently a bit of a buzzword. While the dictionary definition refers to “a long duration of individual life,” the tech world sees it as a lifestyle built around “biohacking” our bodies to live forever. Personally, I see longevity as more of a marker of living comfortably in good health for as long as possible. At 30 years old, I have an autoimmune disease that eats away at my cartilage and causes arthritis and chronic fatigue. Instead of accepting defeat and succumbing to the couch, I hope to use new technology and data to help my body move (and stay moving) with minimal pain. Living for 100 years would be nice too, but that’s more of a secondary prize in my mind.

There are many niche metrics you can measure when tracking sleep, stress and fitness, so I narrowed down which data points to focus on for this 90-day challenge.
Sleep

For sleep, I used the Eight Sleep pod to analyze my deep sleep data and energy levels. I chose deep sleep because this is the stage where your body rebuilds your immune system, releases growth hormones that restore muscle and bone tissue and stores memories, per the Cleveland Clinic. I have arthritis and had a string of colds this past fall, so I was willing to do anything to support my joints and immunity.

Before beginning this challenge, I was getting anywhere from four to six hours of sleep each night. I would wake up a few times to go to the bathroom, switch sleep positions or throw on some extra layers if I was chilly. This led to many drowsy mornings, anxiety and an overconsumption of coffee that brought about an endless cycle of bad sleep, moodiness and stress.
Fitness

For fitness, I used my Garmin Venu 4 to track my VO₂ Max. “VO₂ Max is a marker for how much oxygen your body can use during intense exercise, which is a good indicator for your overall cardiovascular and metabolic fitness,” Kristina Centenari, a wellness expert and Nike running coach, said. “Keeping track of changes in VO2 Max over time can help show whether training is actually improving aerobic capacity versus just feeling hard.”

Most people have a VO₂ Max score between 20 and 60. A “good” VO₂ Max depends on your gender and age. For example, 42.4 is a good score for men between the ages of 40 and 49, and a 36.3 is a good score for women in that same age group, per Garmin. The University of Kansas Medical Center has a handy calculator in which you can input your age, score and sex and output a percentile rank that’s comparable to people of the same age and sex.

According to Harvard Medical School, a high VO₂ max “correlates to better physical fitness and is associated with a lower risk for cardiovascular disease and increased longevity.” Sedentary people lose cardiovascular capacity twice as fast as people who exercise consistently, per the American Heart Association. So, tracking this score and working to improve it is beneficial to long-term health.

To track my fitness, I also used Garmin’s race predictor in tandem with VO₂ Max measurements. During this challenge, I was training for a marathon, and it predicted I’d finish in three hours and 37 minutes. My starting VO₂ Max was a little below 52.
Stress

Lastly, for stress, I relied on Oura’s daytime stress feature, which measures heart rate, HRV, motion and temperature. “HRV reflects how well your nervous system is responding to stress,” Centenari said. “This matters because your body’s ability to handle and recover from stress largely determines how well it adapts to exercise. Higher or more stable HRV generally means your body is recovering and adapting well. Prolonged drops can mean you are overfatigued or under-recovered.”

The Oura Ring 4 Ceramic tracks how long your body is in a stressed state every day, so I decided to compare my average daily stress from the beginning to the end of this challenge. At the start, my daily average for stress was between two and six hours during the work week and below two hours on the weekends. READ MORE https://edition.cnn.com/cnn-underscored ... -challenge