PreRamble
In this first of our hopefully many personal health experiments to come we’re going to explore the idea put forth in this article Functional Reverie. I’d recommend reading that before jumping into the experiment. It’s less than a five minute read.
If you haven’t read the articles leading up to this explaining Personal Health Experiments or Tuning they can be insightful into the philosophy behind this approach.
Before we get into the details of this experiment I just want to say a simple and direct thank you. I appreciate everybody in this growing audience and all who are committed to giving this experiment a go.
Since this is the first experiment I’ve ever done in this format I’m going to ask two things of you:
Please be kind. Not just to me but to others who will be taking part in the discussions I’m hoping to generate here. Please engage in all interaction with decorum.
Please give me feedback. If you have feedback that is in the interest of improving my ability to execute I will take it seriously and do my best to act on it.
Onward.
This experiment will run for a total of (15) days. During those fifteen days there will be (3) possible (5) day blocks. That will make more sense soon.
During those 15 days I have a very short survey for you to fill out at the end of the day. Please fill it out. Collecting this information is how we can all learn together.
At the conclusion of the experiment I’ll send out another survey through the email list on Substack. Somewhere between 15 and 30 days after the conclusion there will be a follow up survey sent out. All of the surveys will take only a few minutes to fill out.
The daily survey for the experiments can be found HERE. Once you fill it out you can simply reload it the next day on a screen that look like this:
Or you can simply come back to this article and open it up again using the link above.
The Experiment Criteria
During the course of this experiment the goal is to find somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes of time for your mind to simply wander.
During this time there will be no music, podcasts, video streaming service, or YouTube. This time is not for studying, socializing, chatting, exercising, or any other activity when your mind is focused on a specific activity.
This time is for reverie. Mind wandering. Day dreaming.
This can be done in the grocery store when instead of scrolling on your phone while waiting in the long checkout line you just stand there.
It can be in your car driving to work where you’d normally listen to the radio or a podcast. Instead listen to nothing and talk to nobody.
It can be while your coffee brews before work.
Or it can be a specific time you delegate to sit in a special place and just dream.
There a few options for how you can accomplish this over the course of the (15) days:
You can pick one way to do it that works for you and do the same thing every day for the entire experiment.
You can try three different ones each for (5) days in a row.
You can split it up into (10) and (5) or whatever math you want as long as you perform that style of reverie for a minimum of (5) consecutive days.
We’ll start this experiment on March 16, 2024. We will run it until March 31 just in case some of you get behind a day. After that I’ll collate the information and see what we’ve learned. My plan is to release a summary article in April and maybe do some sort of live video on a platform TBD.
As you do these experiments please feel free to use the comments on this page to talk about what you are experiencing or to ask questions.
Please note: I’ll only be checking here once per day so if I don’t answer right away, I’m not ignoring you.
Thanks for reading (and participating!),
Rob
Robert, Wow, I wasn't on substack when you did this.... but I am going to do it anyway. What a great exercise.