Self Experimentation

A friend and I have been kicking around the idea of starting a little website where people who run self experiments (for example: consuming alcohol vs quality of sleep that night) can post their project overview/data/results.

Before we build that, though, we are going to run some tests on ourselves just to see what the process is like. So I need to pick a couple of self experiments I want to run over the next couple of weeks. Some ideas:

I’m going to look at my morning caffeine intake. I’m recording the time of my coffee consumption vs my resultant heart rate and stress data (from my garmin watch). After a week I’m going to switch to decaf in the morning and see if there is a difference.

I also want to look at the effect of lifestyle on sleep quality. The following are a list of variables I want to test (1 at a time). Once my oura ring (detailed sleep tracker) arrives, I’ll begin testing in this category.

• Dinner time
• Alcohol
• Magnesium supplement before bed
• L-theanine supplement before bed
• Wearing blue light blockers for 3 hours before bed
• Reading for 30 mins in bed before sleep
• Sleep meditation in bed

I’m most interested in improving my focus/ability to concentrate for extended periods of time. I’m not sure how I would measure the dependent variables, but I strongly believe improvement in this realm will pay massive dividends for the rest of my life.