I wear the Oura Ring 5 to track my sleep and overall health, and it has proved to me that it's still the best smart ring on the market right now.
This isn't the first time I've taken a break from alcohol, but this time, I wanted to see what the new and improved Oura Ring 5 could tell me about my health over 30 days of complete alcohol abstinence.
There are, of course, the potential physiological benefits of quitting alcohol, like losing fat and improving markers such as sleep and heart health, but I was also concerned about the psychological impact on well-being, such as better mood and productivity.
After a month of tracking, here's the one metric that really surprised me, and how it flipped pretty quickly when I reintroduced alcohol back into my life.
What is stress resilience?
The Oura Stress Resilience feature starts tracking in the background after you wake and continues throughout the day. This assesses your ability to withstand and recover from physiological stress and looks at how you recover, sleep, and the types of activities that may cause stress.
During the day, moments of calm, naps, mindfulness and movement can help you build resilience, while at night, sleep quality, latency and the number of hours you rest also help the body recover.
Your resilience scores go between "limited" and "exceptional," and the only time I've ever managed an exceptional score is when I have been completely alcohol-free for a period of time.
The first time I tracked using my Oura Ring 4, I leveled up three times, from "adequate" to "exceptional," in just 30 days. This time, I started a little higher on the resilience scale but still saw another increase to "strong."
More interestingly, I'm surprised by just how quickly this dropped when I had a busy social calendar after the 30-day experiment ended and I returned to various events or functions that involved social alcohol; within a few weeks, my daily readiness scores began to tank, sleep quality scores dropped and my exceptional stress status plummeted all the way down to limited, with Oura's symptom tracker immediately picking up minor signs of strain on my body and recommending rest.
Your resilience scores go between "limited" and "exceptional," and the only time I've ever managed an exceptional score is when I have been completely alcohol-free for a period of time.
Oura told me back in August this year: “Your resilience is strong! You’ve experienced low levels of physiological stress recently, and your overall recovery has been high.” Oura told me just this weekend: "It's normal for resilience to shift between days...even small moments of relaxation can help," and recommends a diaphragmatic breathing routine for me to settle into based on my declining scores.
Bottom line
There's an increasing amount of attention on the negative impacts of alcohol on health, including worsened stress, sleep quality and anxiety (dubbed "hangxiety"), reduced ability to handle stressors and worse recovery.
Not only that, but many find hangovers reduce their ability to cope with next-day plans and exercise regimens, choosing to skip the cocktails in favor of a healthier, more active lifestyle. According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2025, alcohol consumption in the U.S. is at an all-time low, with 54% of Americans abstaining from alcohol altogether.
We know that alcohol is a depressant, although it can temporarily reduce feelings of stress because it stimulates the brain's GABA receptors and increases GABA activity (this is an inhibitory neurotransmitter in your central nervous system, which promotes calmness), causing sedative effects. That's short-term. Long-term, it can raise cortisol and inflammation markers.
Evidence tells us that prolonged and excessive alcohol consumption can become a stressor itself by dysregulating the brain reward and stress systems. Neurobiology of Stress in ScienceDirect suggests a link between stress resilience and alcohol consumption; developing better stress resilience could act as a protective measure against using alcohol, though reducing alcohol could also improve stress resilience.
My resilience started skyrocketing when alcohol was removed from my lifestyle completely, not just reduced. This brought me back to a conversation I had with an Olympic recovery expert last year: Shona Halson told me that while she uses certain metrics to track athletes' recovery, she prioritizes how someone feels over the data.
With that in mind, how did I feel taking a month off versus returning to social drinking again? Honestly, I really, really felt it, and I don't think it's just because I'm now in my mid-30s. I felt less motivated to exercise, and I made worse eating choices, as well as feeling a little off after even just a glass or two of wine or a beer at the soccer game.
Aside from sleeping and recovering better when I abstained completely, I felt more level-headed, calm and balanced, and it's a bonus to wake up each morning to strong, positive metrics on my Oura Ring and track those uptrends over the weeks.
Will I go back to abstaining? The jury is still out, but I could easily see myself taking on board what my ring and body are clearly trying to tell me, which is that I'm better off physically and mentally when I'm not including alcohol in my lifestyle, whether that's an action I want to take or not.
It's worth noting that while nothing noteworthy had changed in my lifestyle outside of cutting alcohol, this wasn't a lab-tested experiment where every variable could be controlled. Could daily stressors also be impacting my scores? Absolutely, but it was helpful to know how my body responded throughout.
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