What you need to know
- Oura released its 2024 Year in Review report highlighting Oura Ring users' Global Community Data.
- New Zealand retained its 2023 crown for the country with the best sleep scores, followed by Australia and Sweden.
- The United States is the "most stressed country," with North Dakota topping the states.
- You can check your personal 2024 trends in the Oura app's Today tab, with monthly stats for steps, resilience, stress, and so on.
Oura Ring users looking for some insights into what went right (and wrong) in 2024 should open up their apps: Oura just released its 2024 Year in Review reports, with "personalized insights" based on your sleep, stress, and activity data this year.
The report will highlight your average sleep and wake times, and how those changed every month, noting if you weren't consistent or formed bad habits over time, based on data from your Oura Ring 4 or Oura Ring 3.
The Oura Year in Review report will also indicate the times of day when you were most active (or stressed), your total steps and naps for the year, and whether your Cardiovascular age (relative to your real age) trended upwards or downwards in 2024.
Outside of your personalized data, Oura is also releasing some curated Global Community data about its users, showing international trends and average stats.
According to Oura, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Finland, and Austria had the five best sleep score averages worldwide. Compared to the 2023 report, the Kiwis improved their sleep average by 1.8 points to 79.8 to keep their top spot, while Australia rose from #5 to #2 and Austria kicked off Switzerland. The worldwide sleep score average is 77, or Fair.
Ireland led the daily step-count average at 10,079, the only country to hit the 10,000-step mark — though there's reason to question how many of those steps are false positives. Estonia, the UK and Northern Ireland, Sweden, and Czechia took the next four spots.
Sweden seems to be the all-around champion of this Oura 2024 report, as its users have the lowest cardiovascular age gap of -2.63 years, followed by Norway, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark. Generally speaking, these Scandanavian and middle-European countries seem to have a healthier lifestyle worth emulating.
If you've noticed America's conspicuous absence from this list, the U.S. did show up #1 in one category: most stressed. Oura attributed it to our "fast-paced cultrue, sedentary lifestyles, and pervasive sleep deprivation," as well as a "high-stakes election" pushing up stress in recent months.
Oura didn't share specific U.S. state data in this summary, but it did share some interesting tidbits with us directly: Montana had the highest sleep scores, New Yorkers were the most active, Hawaii had the lowest Cardiovascular age, and North Dakota was the most stressed.
We love this trend of fitness companies sharing general trends, as a baseline for people to compare against. For example, the Strava annual report showed the median averages for runners, cyclists, and hikers across age groups, along with their favorite devices for activities. And the Garmin annual report discussed people's average Body Battery, Daily Readiness, sleep, and stress scores; Garmin users seem to sleep worse and be less "ready" than Oura users, though this may be because of a more active lifestyle.
Get annual insights
The Oura Ring 4 is the best smart ring of 2024, with the only downside being its monthly subscription. But paying for it gets you insights like today's Year in Review, spread out across the year to encourage you to form better habits and warn you if you're making bad choices with sleep, activity, and overall health.
