Your HRV Isn’t That Important. This Is The Metric You Should Be Watching Instead

For years, we’ve been told to optimize HRV. But what if the real signal your body is sending… is the one you’re not even looking at?

By Valérie Orsoni — Biohacker & Longevity Expert
Valérie Orsoni is a biohacker, author of 56 books, and founder of biohacker.fr. She has been tracking her biology through N=1 self-experimentation protocols since 1998. She has completed a Stanford Genetics Longevity Research certificate, a Stanford Medicine Nutrition Science certificate program and is currently enrolled in the Stanford Medicine GLP-1s & weight loss certification program. She was named in the Top 50 Longevity Leaders by Life Spanning magazine and is currently the #1 on the Longevity Cup Leaderboard (chronological age -23 years).

Everyone talks about HRV. It’s become the darling metric of the biohacking world, the number you check every morning before getting out of bed (well not me since I don’t sleep with my phone :), the data point that tells you whether to push hard or pull back.

But there’s another signal sitting quietly in your Oura data (and other wearables) that most people scroll past without a second glance.

I’ve been tracking both since long before wearables made it fashionable. And I can tell you that understanding the relationship between these two metrics changed how I structure my recovery protocols entirely.

What is this data that we all ignore?