I Stopped Wearing My Oura Ring for a Week. Here's What I Learned.
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What happens when you stop tracking everything?
In this deeply personal solo episode of The Inner Script, Stephanie Baubie, NP shares what happened when she stopped wearing her Oura Ring for a week during a wellness retreat in Portugal — and why the experience challenged everything she thought she knew about health optimization, wearable technology, and what it really means to feel well.
After a season of feeling stuck, disconnected, and increasingly uneasy with the culture of constant tracking, Stephanie reflects on stepping away from the data and reconnecting with something far more important: joy, intuition, meaningful connection, and the parts of health no wearable can measure. She opens up about the pressure to optimize everything, the disconnect that can happen when we rely too heavily on wearables, and the surprising way she felt during a week that looked objectively “unhealthy” on paper but felt incredibly good in her body.
From Oura Ring scores and HRV to stress, loneliness, and life transitions, this episode is ultimately about more than health data. It’s about learning to trust yourself again, creating a life that feels aligned, and remembering that wellbeing isn’t just something we optimize — it’s something we experience.
This episode is for you if…
You feel overwhelmed by health optimization, wearable technology, or the pressure to track every metric.
You’re navigating a season of transition and wondering whether it’s time to trust your intuition over certainty.
You’re craving more joy, connection, and authenticity instead of constantly trying to become a “better” version of yourself.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:17 Feeling stuck before my Portugal trip
03:24 Health optimization vs. true wellness
06:16 Oura Ring, wearables, and health tracking
09:25 Why I stopped wearing my Oura Ring
11:15 Joy, connection, and mental wellbeing
13:44 My Portugal wellness retreat experience
18:58 How solo travel changed my perspective
20:13 Navigating life transitions without fear
22:07 Trusting yourself over health metrics
Resources & Mentions
Lisbon & Comporta, Portugal
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
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Please consult your healthcare provider before starting any new supplement. Food, lifestyle, and nervous system support always come first.
Quiz: Are You Addicted to Optimization?
Discover whether your healthy habits are supporting your wellbeing — or quietly creating more pressure. Download it here: Patreon companion resource
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Meet Your Host: Stephanie Baubie, NP
Stephanie Baubie is an integrative nurse practitioner and the host of The Inner Script Podcast, where she explores the deeper stories behind health, healing, identity, and transformation. Through a blend of functional medicine, nervous system awareness, emotional insight, and honest conversation, Stephanie helps women better understand their bodies while questioning the narratives they’ve inherited about wellness, worth, and what it means to truly feel well.
On The Inner Script, Stephanie sits down with physicians, founders, thought leaders, and experts in women’s health, while also sharing solo reflections on the transitions and inner shifts that shape our lives.
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FAQs
Can you become addicted to health optimization?
Yes. In Episode 24 of The Inner Script, Stephanie Baubie explores how healthy habits can gradually become unhealthy when the pursuit of better sleep scores, lab values, supplements, and wearable data starts creating stress instead of improving wellbeing. She explains how the desire to optimize every aspect of your health can quietly shift from empowerment to obsession and shares practical ways to reconnect with your body instead of constantly chasing better metrics.
How do I know if I'm relying too much on my Oura Ring or wearable device?
In this episode of The Inner Script, Stephanie Baubie explains that wearable devices like the Oura Ring can provide valuable health insights, but they should never replace your own intuition. If your mood, energy, or daily decisions are influenced more by your readiness score, sleep score, or HRV than by how you actually feel, it may be time to reassess your relationship with health tracking. Stephanie shares what she learned after taking off her Oura Ring for a week while traveling in Portugal.
Can wearable technology make you less connected to your body?
Yes, it can. On The Inner Script, Stephanie Baubie discusses how constantly checking sleep scores, HRV, recovery metrics, and other health data can sometimes disconnect us from our own internal cues. Rather than suggesting people stop using wearable technology altogether, she encourages listeners to use these tools as information—not as permission to decide how they should feel.
What are the signs that health optimization is becoming unhealthy?
In Episode 24 of The Inner Script, Stephanie Baubie describes several signs that health optimization may be creating more stress than health. These can include constantly thinking about wellness routines, checking health data throughout the day, feeling guilty when resting, believing you always need another supplement or protocol, or finding it difficult to enjoy life without tracking it. She explains why joy, connection, presence, and meaningful experiences deserve just as much attention as measurable health metrics.
How can I improve my health without obsessing over tracking everything?
Stephanie Baubie believes that true health includes experiences that cannot be measured by a smartwatch or health app. Throughout this episode of The Inner Script, she explores the importance of laughter, community, purpose, meaningful relationships, adventure, and simply enjoying life. Her message isn't to abandon evidence-based healthcare or wearable technology, but to create a healthier balance between data and self-awareness.
What can solo travel teach you about mental health and personal growth?
In this episode of The Inner Script, Stephanie Baubie shares how attending a wellness retreat in Portugal by herself became one of the most transformative experiences of her life. She explains how solo travel helped her reconnect with joy, authenticity, meaningful relationships, and a renewed sense of direction during a season of uncertainty and major life transition.
Why do high achievers often struggle with health optimization?
High achievers are naturally wired to improve, measure, and accomplish goals, but that same mindset can sometimes extend into their health. On The Inner Script, Stephanie Baubie discusses how constantly striving for better routines, better metrics, and better performance can unintentionally create anxiety instead of wellbeing. She encourages listeners to pursue balance over perfection and reminds us that some of the healthiest parts of life—joy, belonging, connection, and purpose—cannot be measured by a wearable device.
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Everything shared here is for educational purposes and personal reflection only. Not medical advice. Always work with your own healthcare provider for individual care.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Inner Script. So Today's episode is going to be a little bit of a different type of episode. So we're doing a solo episode, but, you know, it's less of a structured topic and more of a personal update.
Honestly, this episode, it's going to feel like I'm almost reading from my journal, and that's kind of how I intended it to go. Because I was actually journaling on everything, and I was like, "This should actually be the episode," because this whole podcast is about transitions, transformation, and life changes, and I'm really going through a lot at the moment.
And a lot of it is positive. There's some negative aspects, anxiety-inducing aspects to it, but it's... The undertone of it is positive. So You know, I can't really wait to get into it with you guys and kinda share what's been going on. So a little over a week ago, I got back from Portugal. I spent a few days in Lisbon before going to Comporta for a fitness retreat called Salt Escapes.
If you're not familiar with Salt Escapes, it's essentially a wellness retreat where you're doing workouts, yoga, eating incredible food prepared by a private chef, spending time by the pool, and just slowing down enough to actually enjoy life and enjoy people. And on the trip, there were a group of 12 of us from all over the world, and it was really cool because somehow, within a week, it felt like we'd known each other forever.
I just can't emphasize that enough. Like, sometimes it can take a minute for me to warm up to somebody, but we were really in this group where we just meshed really well. It was a really cool experience, and it was really one of those experiences where you're reminded how quickly people can become important to you, no matter how long you know them.
A lotta the times, it just goes back to this quality over quantity situation, and that applies to people. You know, I think we meet people in our lives, and you have this ability to just connect with them instantly, and that's always, like, such a signal that you guys are meant to cross paths. Overall, it was just such a cool opportunity to feel that with multiple people.
I'll stop there. I'm gonna get more into kind of the trip, but before I get into the trip itself, I kinda wanna talk about where I was mentally before I got on that plane because honestly, I don't think Portugal would've impacted me the way it did if I hadn't been in this place beforehand. And for probably six to eight weeks leading up to the trip, I really felt stuck.
It wasn't that I felt unhappy because, you know, I was in a job that I really liked. I have great friends in San Francisco. It wasn't even, like, anxiety necessarily, not burnout in a way, but I just felt misaligned and that my life was stagnant. I almost felt like I was growing out of my life faster than it was happening.
That's the best way I can explain it, and I just- Couldn't shake this feeling that something was ending in my life, that there was a chapter that was about to close, and I could just feel this. It was this just stagnant energy that I just needed to expel. And there have been some shifts happening in my professional life that I can't really get into right now.
I will eventually. But, you know, they've forced me to ask bigger questions about what I actually want moving forward. I found myself wondering whether San Francisco was done 'cause it was starting to feel that way, but I couldn't really put a place on where I was gonna go next. It was just this feeling that something bigger was meant for me.
The thought was really scary because I do love so much about this city, and I didn't wanna think about starting over again in a new city. You know, I've built meaningful friendships here, and some of the people I've met over the last two years while I've been in San Francisco have really helped me through some of my most difficult times.
Even with all of that, I couldn't ignore this feeling that something just didn't feel right, something felt misaligned, and that this life I was living wasn't fitting anymore. At the same time, I found myself questioning my relationship with healthcare and wellness in a way that I haven't before, and it had a lot to do with some of these changes that were going in my professional life, which again, I can't get into right now, but I will eventually.
And it just really allowed me to reflect on what I want in a career as a nurse practitioner. So during this time of me feeling really stagnant in San Francisco, it caused me to reflect on how I felt professionally in my career. I was starting to feel like my relationship with healthcare was starting to change, like almost I was outgrowing that aspect of it, too.
You know, I wanna be clear that prevention and holistic health and health and wellness is a huge passion of mine. It will continue to always be, and I continue to believe in prevention. I believe in taking care of ourselves. I believe in understanding our bodies and, you know, using data when it's helpful.
But lately I've just been feeling increasingly disconnected from this culture of optimization. You know, when you're working at a longevity clinic, you are talking a lot about optimization, and I started to just feel disconnected from it because we're putting so much emphasis on data Lab values and not on how our bodies actually feel, on things that give us joy, and I just feel like we are chasing numbers and data instead of enjoying our lives.
I slowly started to feel this way over the last six to eight weeks before kinda leaving for Portugal. It was this low grade that optimization culture isn't wellness, it's becoming more like fear. Again, just not living because you're trying to optimize your health. And all of this information out there about track this, measure that, take this supplement, try this peptide, wear this device, improve this metric, and while those tools absolutely have value, like I have an Oura Ring, I get it, you know, I find myself wondering if we've become so focused on improving ourselves that we've lost our relationship with ourselves, and we've even lost our drive to, like, live and enjoy and indulge because that stuff matters, too.
With some of the patients I was having conversations with, we were talking about HRV or heart rate variability. We were talking about our sleep score, our glucose levels, but do we actually know how we feel? And I started kind of transitioning these conversations into, "Well, how are you feeling?" And I would get some blank stares here and there.
That's just kind of the question I've been sitting with lately because so many of the conversations I have with people revolve around what else they should add, whether it's another supplement, another protocol, another intervention. And very rarely do we stop and ask whether the thing making us feel awful is actually chronic stress, emotional suppression, nervous system dysregulation, loneliness, lack of joy, lack of experiencing life, or simply just being disconnected from who we actually are.
Again, that's kind of where my head space was at before I left on that plane to Portugal. You know, one thing I've done over the last few years is periodically take breaks from my Oura Ring. As somebody that has one and wears it, and I've talked about it many times how it has helped me, and I know this sounds kind of hypocritical because I do have one, but because I know that sometimes I can be so obsessed with the data and the numbers and wanting to get a good sleep score, that can mess with me a little bit, so I do take breaks from it, especially when I'm traveling.
So I took a break from my Oura Ring. I didn't wear it. I'm still not wearing it right now. Again, it's not that I think wearables are bad anymore, not at all. I actually think they're very incredible and useful tools. It helped me a lot when I was kinda going through my sleep issues, but I just never wanted the data to become louder than my body's signals.
And especially when I'm traveling, you're not gonna get the best sleep scores, so I kinda think you're setting yourself up to fail if you're wearing it with travel. So that's just kind of where I was at. That's how I approach wearables. But I think when we are consistently wearing these, we start to trust the score more than ourselves.
And, you know, we wake up feeling pretty good, check the app, see how low the readiness score is, and suddenly we don't feel so good anymore, and we're like, "Shit." That's just not a good feeling. It can suck. I think it can be really subtle, but over time it can really create this disconnect where we stop asking ourselves how we feel and start asking for the devices You start looking at the data.
I don't think that is a healthy relationship with technology. So before Portugal, I had already stopped wearing my Oura Ring for a few weeks, and then I went on this trip, and here's what was interesting. If you looked at the week objectively, it wasn't my healthiest week on paper whatsoever. You know, I was exercising one or two times a day because it was a fitness retreat, but I was drinking every night.
I was eating dessert every night. So my sleep wasn't amazing because alcohol impacts sleep. I was also going to bed really late, waking up early for the workout, which I was able to do. If I had worn my Oura Ring, my scores would've looked terrible, like my sleep score would've been God awful. Readiness score, who the hell knows what it would've been like?
But the strange thing was when I woke up, I felt completely fine. I was like, "Ooh, maybe I'm a little tired," but I never felt hungover. I made the workouts without a problem. Like, I felt great. I was, like, ready for the day. I was excited. I can't believe, like, where I was at, and I felt great. I'm somebody where, you know, I can have, like, two to three drinks, and then the next morning I wake up feeling hungover.
Like, and I didn't at all. I didn't h- experience one hangover. I was texting my friends when I was in Portugal, and I was like, "I guess sleep deprivation and hangovers don't exist in Portugal" because that's where I was at. Again, like, it was... It's not that I was feeling, like, perfect or this superhuman, but just genuinely good, and I felt like I had energy.
I was able to stay present. It felt right. I felt a lightness, and I really couldn't stop thinking about that because if health was simply calories, sleep scores, alcohol consumption, and recovery metrics, I should have felt much worse than I did. Instead, I think what I was experiencing was something that just doesn't fit neatly into a graph or a data point.
I was experiencing joy. I was experiencing connection. I was laughing all day. I felt a sense of community with people. You know, for an entire week, we were together. You're with like-minded people doing these really cool experiences that you can't put a price on that, and I was really surrounded by people who inspired me.
These people were open-minded. They were curious, kind, adventurous, and generally fun to be around, and there was just no pressure to be productive, no pressure to achieve or to optimize. Obviously, we're not working, and that's a luxury, so I'm sure that adds to why I felt Great, because stress wasn't a factor here, which makes sense.
But it just felt like people enjoying their life together. Like, that's pretty much what it was. I just started wondering how much of our health actually comes from that, and I've talked about this before, the importance of joy, alignment, and authenticity. I always go back to that, but it was also such a good reminder of, no, it's really about the connections and the experiences you have and the people you get to experience life with.
It was such a good reminder that it's not always about the wearables, the lab values. You know, and I just started asking myself these questions about, like, how much of health comes from feeling connected, and I think we all know that, but we don't understand the extent of how much that matters. You know, like how much of health comes from feeling excited about your life, from belonging.
I just don't think we talk about that enough. Those things are really difficult to measure, so how do we even measure that, in a sense? And you can't really put a number on feeling inspired or aligned, and you can't quantify meaningful conversations, and you can't track the physiological impact of laughing until your stomach hurts, at least not easily.
Maybe you can, but not easily. These things I just mentioned are some of the most important aspects of health, and they're just not getting enough attention. We're not measuring them. There's no way to measure them. Like, do we even want to measure them? Honestly, that realization was one of the biggest gifts I took away from this trip.
So let's talk about the actual trip because it was incredible. The retreat was hosted by Salt Escapes, which was founded by a couple, Mike and Amy, and they host fitness retreats all over the world. If you're considering doing something like this, I have one piece of advice. Go alone. Seriously, go alone.
Get out of your comfort zone. You do not need to go with somebody. You will be completely fine. I promise there will be at least one person that you can connect with, and you will surprise yourself. And I think one of the reasons the experience was so impactful is because nobody had their usual safety net.
We all went there by ourselves, not knowing anyone. You know, nobody came with a group or with a friend or with a partner, and we were all kind of stepping into this unknown together in a sense of meeting up with strangers. The trip officially started on a Sunday, but a handful of us met earlier that day at a beach club outside Lisbon before heading to Comporta because we couldn't check into our villa in Comporta until, like, the evening, like 4:30 or something.
So we all decided To meet at this beach club, had a few drinks, had some lunch, and really got to know each other, and that was, it was a really fun time. I felt like there was this immediate ease between everyone, and the energy felt really good from the start. The conversations flowed naturally, and everyone was just really showing up as themselves.
Eventually, you know, we get to the villa and met the rest of the group, and somehow it only got better from there. And the cool thing about this, you know, I'm very into astrology, and I like to bring up people's birth charts and ask the date And time people are born. If you guys have seen those memes of, like, if somebody asks the da- time you were born, run away, like, that is me.
You know what? I felt comfortable bringing it up. I was like, "Let's do birth charts right now," and everyone was so open to it. They were so, honestly, kind of excited about it. I thought that they were excited about it, but they were also very intrigued, and then when I read kind of their full birth chart, they were very shocked at how accurate it was.
And again, I don't know these people. They were like, "How is this possible?" Like, "How is this birth chart explaining my entire personality?" So yes, I was pulling it up. Absolutely, I was not holding back in those instances, but I will say, I successfully converted a good amount of people throughout the week about the importance of astrology and how accurate it is.
Or maybe I got them curious, I don't know. We'll see. We'll follow up. And the workouts we did were literally no joke, very difficult, and they were definitely more kinda strength training, cardio circuits, high intensity interval training, and then there were yoga sessions, which I will be honest, I didn't make it to a majority of the yoga sessions because I decided to lay by the pool.
And look, that's fine. That was my vacation, and you're allowed to do whatever you want. I will say, I was honestly the most nervous about doing the cardio portions because I don't really do a bunch of cardio like I used to. I used to do a lot of HIIT training back in the day, and I really cut back cardio and HIIT just because of, like, some health issues I was experiencing in the last few years.
But the most cardio I do is, like, I go on a run, like, once or twice a week, which is, like, maybe three miles. And so I was certainly nervous about that whole aspect. But what I will say, I was pleasantly surprised. The workouts were really challenging, but in a fun way. Like, I was able to do the cardio. It was hard, but I was definitely surprised myself.
It was just, there was this sense of collective suffering in the classes where everyone was just dying together, and somehow that made it more enjoyable. It was also like there was some, like, accountability with it. It's like, ugh, okay, you see them going to the workout so you can't skip it, so you just go.
You don't wanna miss out too. You know, after the workouts, we'd have breakfast, spend time by the pool, go to yoga sometimes. I think I went to, like, two or three yoga classes. What... The yoga instructor was amazing, Jade, but I just wanted to lay by the pool. I probably should've done more. Go for walks. We got massages one day.
We went horseback riding one day. We surfed and we attempted ice baths. I refused to do more than a minute because I don't love ice baths or cold plunges for women. It actually is, like, not good for Our hormones. So I was really sore, so I knew that I needed it, but I didn't do it for more than a minute.
Yeah, just kind of all of us just enjoyed being present and hanging out with each other. The food was amazing. Conversations were amazing. You know, I think my favorite part was just watching complete strangers, all of us becoming friends. There were people forming deep friendships. There were people forming romantic connections.
There were people sharing things about themselves that they really hadn't shared with anyone in a long time. And it reminded me how much we all crave connection and this feeling of inclusion, even if we don't always admit it. And by the end of the week, it generally felt like leaving family. It was really sad.
I was really sad to leave. I could have stayed for weeks, months. You know, I found myself feeling really emotional on the flight home because I knew I wasn't just leaving Portugal. I was leaving a version of myself that felt really alive and that felt really aligned in joy and authentic, and I really wanted to hold onto that.
I realized, you know, maybe that's the point. in all of this. Maybe, you know, traveling is a way to expand yourself, to kinda come back to the person you always were without all of this conditioning from our careers, from life, from our obligations. So it's such a luxury to be able to go travel. But it was just kind of this realization that we're just not living.
I feel like we're not doing enough living anymore, especially with all of this optimization culture, which I think is be- just becoming more fear-based culture. And the true way to get optimal health and wellness is to find joy, build new connections, have new experiences, and discover new things about yourself, and just allow yourself to fucking live.
So when I got back to San Francisco, the questions I'd been wrestling with before the trip were still there, and I still don't know exactly what my next chapter looks like. You know, I have an idea, which I'll share later. That's also kind of the exciting part of it. I don't know where I'll be living a year from now or even maybe three months from now.
I don't know exactly what my career is going to look like in the next coming months. While that does give me some anxiety, I feel like that's just old programming right now that I just need to get out of my head and just kind of accept with where my life is going, and I'm really excited about it. I really can't wait.
It just... It feels very fated, some of the things that have happened in the last, like, six to eight weeks, just with the buildup of everything, feeling like this chapter of my life was closing and starting this new chapter, and I'm just trying to go with it and not lead with fear because that's never gonna work.
We have to get rid of this fear-based living and start to just go with our guts, understand that people and things come into your life for a reason, and just go with it. And trust yourself that if things don't go exactly as you want them to or expect them to, it's gonna be okay, and trust yourself that you're gonna be fine.
You're gonna bounce back. And just know that we're all on a journey to figure it out. 'Cause we are all still just figuring it out at the end of the day. I think another good reminder in all of this, and how I'm going to close this episode is, I think we need to stop having all of the answers, because I feel like we are always trying to look for certainty, and you're never gonna get it.
I think the more we are searching for answers, the more we are outsourcing our happiness. And instead of maybe trying to find answers to these questions we are constantly asking ourselves, it's instead just finding alignment, and maybe that alignment is connection, connection with others, with yourself, with experiences.
And it's just never having all of the answers, not having a perfectly optimized life, 'cause that would be boring, and not having the perfect job, relationship, city, or routine, but creating a life that feels true, that feels aligned, that feels connected. I think that's what many of us are constantly searching for, and I hope we all find it.
That's kind of where I'm at in my life at this season. So I will share more about what's going on when I have more information, maybe in the next solo episode, maybe not. We'll see. I'm just excited for this new chapter. So that's all I have to say. Please rate, review, subscribe, all the things. It helps a lot for the podcast.
Send me a DM on the interscriptpod on Instagram. I also launched a new website, stephaniebobby.com, which will now be in the show notes. I launched it. It doesn't look perfect right now, and that's okay. Like, again, we're getting it out there, and it's not 100% done, but again, imperfection is beautiful. So that's where I'm at.
Thank you guys for listening, and I will talk to you guys next week.
Disclaimer
Everything shared in this episode is for educational purposes and personal reflection only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your own healthcare provider for individual care.
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Podcast production by Jamie Brooke.
