Written: March 24, 2018 | Released: May 28, 2021
I suggest running experiments every month or two to find new ways to improve your life. The basic procedure is simple:
(1) Think of something important you’d like to try to improve (e.g., your fitness, sleep, anxiety, dating life, friendships, productivity, happiness at work, etc.).
(2) Come up with a few ideas for something safe you could start doing (or start doing differently) that you think may have a reasonable chance of substantially improving the situation. (Don’t aim for things where the best case is that they would only very slightly help.) Pick from among them the one that you think is most likely to work.
(3) Do that new thing for long enough that you have a reasonably reliable guess of whether it caused an improvement (usually 1-6 weeks, depending on what you’re trying).
MORE ABOUT HOW TO DO SELF EXPERIMENTS WELL
It’s usually smart to limit yourself only to experiments that are very unlikely to cause a significant amount of harm. Otherwise, if you do enough of these trials, then eventually, you may be likely to significantly harm yourself. Remember that if you do N experiments, each with an approximate probability, p, of causing you significant harm (where p is smallish), then you’ll have roughly an N * p probability of significantly harming yourself at least once. So you’ll want to keep p (the probability of significant harm) very small if you make N (the number of experiments you conduct) large!
As I mentioned, it’s also usually a good idea to focus your experiments on interventions that could plausibly cause moderate to large impacts since you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between no effect and a slight effect, given the amount of day-to-day variation we usually experience. For instance, if something improves your mood by 2%, my guess is you won’t notice it unless the effect occurs within seconds. And if something improves your mood by 5%, my guess is you won’t notice unless it happens within 30 minutes. So unless the effects of an intervention are immediate each time you do the thing, I suggest you stick to looking for reasonably large effects.
With more careful data tracking, you can try to detect more subtle effects as well, but this is quite tricky and time-consuming to get right (it could take 1-3 months of careful data collection, and even then, you may not be able to tell what caused what, only that certain correlations exist). So I think it’s usually not worth it unless you enjoy tracking data, or the problem you’re working to solve is serious (e.g., you get terrible migraines once per week, and you want to pinpoint the cause, or you have started to experience an unpleasant chronic condition that varies in intensity day-to-day, and you want to figure out what might be causing it to be worse on some days).
TRACKING FOR SERIOUS PROBLEMS
In cases where you are trying to track something serious, consider recording all the relevant variables you can think of every morning and evening, and even consider randomizing behaviors that you think might be a cause (e.g., flip a coin to decide whether you do or don’t eat that food that you think might be a migraine trigger). You’ll want to choose a consistent method for measuring outcomes. For instance, if you are recording migraines, you might want to rate whether you have a headache or not, and also how bad it is on a “1=mild” to “5=severe” scale.
For interventions that have effects shorter than 24 hours (i.e., you expect little or none of the effect to spill over from day-to-day), you can try alternating or randomizing which days you do the intervention to make it a bit easier to tell if they’re working. Randomizing whether or not to try something on a given day makes it dramatically easier to determine causality (since otherwise there may be confounding variables that correlate both with the outcome you’re measuring and with whether you decided to try that thing). For instance, does sleeping late actually make you feel crappy, or do you just decide to “try out” the intervention of sleeping late when you’ve been drinking the night before, and it is alcohol that makes you feel crappy? Randomizing when you choose to sleep late will pull apart the two effects, so you can tell if it’s actually sleeping late that is causing you to feel bad.
A FEW EXAMPLE EXPERIMENTS
I try to run such an experiment on myself every month or two. Some of these are flops (they don’t make my life better or even make it slightly worse for that period). But when that happens, I stop, and it’s not a big deal since I usually avoid risky experiments. On the other hand, some of the experiments succeed, which means I’ve learned something new and potentially quite beneficial. At that point, I usually try to integrate whatever succeeded into my daily life as a more permanent change.
For instance, here are a few of the experiments I’ve tried just on my own sleep to give you some examples of what self-experiments can look like:
(1) Using a night mask when I sleep at night: makes me sleep longer, but I don’t seem to feel less tired afterward, so it seems to make me slightly worse off.
(2) Using earplugs when I sleep: I get woken up less often by random noises, so it seems worth it.
(3) Alternate using a pillow and not using one: I actually find it more pleasant not to use a pillow, as it turns out.
(4) Using small pieces of black tape to cover about 80% of every electronic light in the bedroom to make them less bright: I can’t tell the difference, but since the tape is already there and looks fine, I might as well leave it.
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