Navigating Health Anxiety: My Experience with the Auraring

So a couple of my friends recently have asked me to talk about my Auraring experience. I know there are a lot of different videos on here talking about the Auraring, but I really want to make a video talking about it from the perspective of my health anxiety. Because due to a combination of how I grew up plus my experience with just chronic illness, I have a lot of anxiety that is targeted at my health. And so getting an Auraring, just to be clear, I also never had like an Apple Watch or any other type of trackers. This is actually like my first experience with something like this. I didn’t know if it was going to be really helpful or really harmful to my health anxiety. And so the overall summary is that for me personally, it has been extremely helpful in mitigating my health anxiety. The reason being is that my anxiety often makes me think there is more wrong with me than there actually is. So I will wake up and be like, oh my gosh, I didn’t sleep well or oh my gosh, I didn’t like recover enough for my workout yesterday. And then I’ll check my ring and more times than not, it’s like, you’re good. Like, you’re OK. And like if you had asked me outside of my ring, I would say I did not sleep well last night. However, it thinks I did a pretty good job sleeping last night instead of a night of deep sleep. And I think the reason that I would think I didn’t sleep well is because see this period of time where I woke up for a while, like to me, that starts to elevate my anxiety of like, oh my gosh, I didn’t get enough sleep. But despite that, it still lets me know that I have enough energy to, you know, go on with my day and even work out today if I wanted to. Another area that really helps me is with this resilience category, because despite the fact that I have like a lot of stress in my day today and frequently, this ring is telling me that my stress is elevated. It’s telling me that what I’m doing as far as recovery is keeping it at least in the strong category enough where I am still OK to continue moving on with my day. I am not exhausting my nervous system to a point like I used to back in the day. My qualms with it are like the things that I don’t like as much are I don’t love its HRV tracker. I feel like it really doesn’t take into consideration people with like autoimmunity because I do think I have some POTS related symptoms. And so my heart rate is always all over the place. And I feel like it will take that number and then factor into this recovery number and make it seem like my heart rate isn’t lowering enough. But that also is just my baseline. So if you do have health anxiety and chronic health issues, that is something to consider when you’re looking at these numbers. I also just find that it does not do a very good job of tracking my workouts. I don’t know what it is, but I always have to manually go put in the workouts. And then lastly, I’m always just like a little bit concerned about how much EMFs are coming out of this thing and like going directly into my finger. But you could say that with like any of these type of trackers. However, overall, as a very anxious girl, it has given me a very solid baseline to compare like what I’m thinking to and has also helped me reframe my anxiety because when I see these and I’m like, oh, I’m actually doing a lot better. It helps me reflect on the ways in which like my anxious cycle and spirals are going. And I sure saw this in the beginning that this is not sponsored at all. My husband paid for this for me, but I’ve just been wanting to share my thoughts because it really, really has helped with my health anxiety. So it’s something to consider.