AUSTIN — Local product manager Bryce Holloran, 33, has confirmed via a 1,400-word Substack post titled What I Learned that the Oura Ring is, in fact, not designed to be worn around the penis, and that doing so for sixteen consecutive days had what he described as “a measurably negative impact on both my recovery scores and, eventually, my circulation.”
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Holloran, who began the experiment in mid-October after what he described as “a really productive ayahuasca journey,” wrote that he had hypothesized the ring would yield “more accurate parasympathetic data” if positioned closer to “the body’s primary autonomic nexus.”
It did not.
“My readiness scores tanked immediately,” Holloran wrote. “My HRV dropped 41%. Oura customer service stopped responding to my emails after the third one. In hindsight, I think they could tell.”
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By day twelve, Holloran’s app had begun flagging him as “consistently in recovery mode despite zero training load.” By day fourteen, the ring had stopped syncing entirely. By day sixteen, he was in an Austin urgent care explaining the situation to a 28-year-old physician’s assistant named Carla, who, he wrote, “was incredibly professional, all things considered, although she did leave the room twice.”
The ring, removed via a procedure Holloran described only as “specialized,” is now sitting in a small ziplock bag on his kitchen counter. He has not yet decided what to do with it.
“I’m not going to put it back on my finger,” he wrote. “That feels like a step backward.”
Holloran ended the post with what he termed seven takeaways for biohackers, the first of which read, in its entirety: the manual is the manual for a reason.
The Substack has 11,000 subscribers.