I’ve managed to engineer a much healthier lifestyle for myself using quantified self techniques. My quality of life has improved significantly, and I went from being a C student to an A+ student and a far more effective scientist/engineer.
For one, I discovered I focus better and get more work done if I avoid gluten. It’s not placebo controlled, but my real productivity is significantly higher, as measured by hours of focused work completed per day. I feel sick with a “brain fog” and malaise when I eat gluten, and I seem to have felt that way continuously for my entire life until I experimented with removing it.
Additionally, I have been able to consistently get a much better nights sleep by analyzing data with my Zeo EEG and correlating against various behaviors. I’ve found specific habits that improve sleep and consistently stick with them. For the most part I suspected that things like maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, turning off the lights early, taking melatonin, and avoiding caffeine in the afternoon would improve my sleep but I didn’t suspect that the effect would be so strong that failing to stick to those would have massive negative effects that last for days.
Also, I’ve discovered that food reward is the main variable influencing my hunger, and by sticking to a low food reward diet I can maintain a healthy weight about 50lbs less than my previous weight effortlessly- without being hungry.
It’s hard to isolate placebo from other effects in quantified self experiments, but in some cases that may not be necessary. I want to know the real truth as much as anybody, but if a given behavior causes a measurable improvement in my productivity or quality of life that lasts, then it’s worth doing even if it’s a placebo.
I’d go so far as to say that my self-experimentation has resulted in the unusual sensation of aging in reverse: as I learn more about my own body and how to make it function better I am continuously becoming healthier and more fit than I ever have been before.
It’s a snowball effect especially since I’m a bioengineering grad student researching ways to optimize human health: as I become healthier and more able to focus and work productively, I discover more and more ways of improving my own health which result in even better focus and even more productive work. I don’t know how sustainable this trend is, but I’m going to find out.
I’d go so far as to say that my self-experimentation has resulted in the unusual sensation of aging in reverse: as I learn more about my own body and how to make it function better I am continuously becoming healthier and more fit than I ever have been before. [...] I discover more and more ways of improving my own health which result in even better focus and even more productive work. I don’t know how sustainable this trend is, but I’m going to find out.
Sounds like a material for an interesting discussion (maybe even main, if well documented) post. Please write one!
As a general remark, not just for you—I have noticed that many people underestimate how cool is what they do professionally. Probably because they are exposed to it every day, and speak every day with people fluent in that topic, they develop a bias “people already know this, it’s nothing new, nothing to be excited about”. Yet for a person unfamiliar with that topic, many seemingly trivial details are exciting (and unfortunately, the non-trivial parts are often incomprehensible).
I would like to write some more detailed articles on “hacking your own health,” but I’m still trying to figure out how to balance clarity with scientific rigor.
This information is very controversial and covers a broad range of medical topics- for each topic my post needs to have the scientific rigor and clarity of a well written journal article to convince other experts, while being comprehensible to non-experts.
The only solution I can think of is to write two articles on each narrow topic: one for the general public, and another one for other medical experts (which probably also needs to be published in a peer reviewed journal). This will be tedious and take considerable time, time that I don’t have in the near future.
Also, I’m still learning so much so fast that I am afraid to put myself out there. If I had written these articles ~2 years ago I would be embarrassed about them now- they wouldn’t have been wrong per se, but they’d have been so overly-simplified and lacking in key ideas/points that they’d seem ridiculous to the current me.
I’ve managed to engineer a much healthier lifestyle for myself using quantified self techniques. My quality of life has improved significantly, and I went from being a C student to an A+ student and a far more effective scientist/engineer.
For one, I discovered I focus better and get more work done if I avoid gluten. It’s not placebo controlled, but my real productivity is significantly higher, as measured by hours of focused work completed per day. I feel sick with a “brain fog” and malaise when I eat gluten, and I seem to have felt that way continuously for my entire life until I experimented with removing it.
Additionally, I have been able to consistently get a much better nights sleep by analyzing data with my Zeo EEG and correlating against various behaviors. I’ve found specific habits that improve sleep and consistently stick with them. For the most part I suspected that things like maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, turning off the lights early, taking melatonin, and avoiding caffeine in the afternoon would improve my sleep but I didn’t suspect that the effect would be so strong that failing to stick to those would have massive negative effects that last for days.
Also, I’ve discovered that food reward is the main variable influencing my hunger, and by sticking to a low food reward diet I can maintain a healthy weight about 50lbs less than my previous weight effortlessly- without being hungry.
It’s hard to isolate placebo from other effects in quantified self experiments, but in some cases that may not be necessary. I want to know the real truth as much as anybody, but if a given behavior causes a measurable improvement in my productivity or quality of life that lasts, then it’s worth doing even if it’s a placebo.
I’d go so far as to say that my self-experimentation has resulted in the unusual sensation of aging in reverse: as I learn more about my own body and how to make it function better I am continuously becoming healthier and more fit than I ever have been before.
It’s a snowball effect especially since I’m a bioengineering grad student researching ways to optimize human health: as I become healthier and more able to focus and work productively, I discover more and more ways of improving my own health which result in even better focus and even more productive work. I don’t know how sustainable this trend is, but I’m going to find out.
Sounds like a material for an interesting discussion (maybe even main, if well documented) post. Please write one!
As a general remark, not just for you—I have noticed that many people underestimate how cool is what they do professionally. Probably because they are exposed to it every day, and speak every day with people fluent in that topic, they develop a bias “people already know this, it’s nothing new, nothing to be excited about”. Yet for a person unfamiliar with that topic, many seemingly trivial details are exciting (and unfortunately, the non-trivial parts are often incomprehensible).
I would like to write some more detailed articles on “hacking your own health,” but I’m still trying to figure out how to balance clarity with scientific rigor.
This information is very controversial and covers a broad range of medical topics- for each topic my post needs to have the scientific rigor and clarity of a well written journal article to convince other experts, while being comprehensible to non-experts.
The only solution I can think of is to write two articles on each narrow topic: one for the general public, and another one for other medical experts (which probably also needs to be published in a peer reviewed journal). This will be tedious and take considerable time, time that I don’t have in the near future.
Also, I’m still learning so much so fast that I am afraid to put myself out there. If I had written these articles ~2 years ago I would be embarrassed about them now- they wouldn’t have been wrong per se, but they’d have been so overly-simplified and lacking in key ideas/points that they’d seem ridiculous to the current me.