Stay In The Lab

Lessons From Personal Health Experiment #1 REVERIE

Last month I released the first of hopefully many personal health experiments centered around the idea of reverie. The experiment we performed was to find a segment of time specifically for the act of reverie whether combined with another activity like cleaning the house or selecting an isolated time for the activity on its own. This was to be done in the absence of any additional sound or visual inputs like music, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. In other words, relative silence. The goal was to see the effect of engaging in the purposeful act of non-directed thought. Participants filled out surveys to report their daily findings.

Non-directed thought is basically daydreaming where you simply allow the mind to wander without any specific task orientation. Some research (Immordino-Yang) has shown that this time is especially important for the Default Mode Network of the brain and is essential for things like creativity and making moral as well as moral and ethical reflection.

This experiment was an interesting one that I learned a lot from both as a participant as well as the provider for lack of a better term. Let's take a quick look at what we found out.

Lessons Learned From The Experiment

Let's first take a look at the participant responses to the survey.

Did you find time to wander today? 96% responded yes, 4% no.

Was the time coupled with another activity or was it on its own? 58.6% reported that it was coupled 41.4% responded it was on its own. Of those the vast majority was combined with another sitting activity, most of them, driving.

The time devoted to reverie was lopsided to 62% of answers reporting 10-15 minutes (perhaps because of average commute times?), 27% reporting 15-20 minutes, 6.9% reporting less than 10 minutes, and just under 3% reporting more than 30 minutes of mind wandering time.

58% reported a definitive effect on mental state whereas only 44% reported a noticeable effect on emotional state. Common descriptive terms like calm, relaxing, and peaceful were reported. One report even stated that traffic didn't bother them. However, some participants found their thoughts random and disjointed. Others even reported falling asleep unintentionally and one description was even a feeling of anxiety.

My limited interpretation of the data I got suggested a few things to me.

First, and this will have to be compared to future experiments, it may be hard for people to engage in new behaviors like this that aren't married to found time. Of course I did not collect enough data about the participants to know what population this might be reflective of; i.e. married people with kids may have less free time than single people who engaged in the same experiment. 

Second, and related to this is another logistical consideration how can people stack this habit with something else that they're already doing. Often times when people are instructed in practices similar to this they have to find a separate special time in order to begin engaging in change. In my experience this blocks people from the consistency that leads to long term adherence.

Last, giving the brain a break from directed focus is a positive experience. Even a person found their thoughts discombobulated or a bit anxious perhaps it's better to be in touch with that reality than to do what many of us normally do, suppress that signal with noise. 

On to my own experience with this personal health experiment. I performed my time of reverie at the start of the day while I made coffee. I kept my phone off and out of the room and simply let my thoughts wander. At first, I found that because I was accustomed to having my phone available for music or podcasts, I met with some minor psychological friction. Not that I was sweating and salivating or anything but I definitely felt...weird. After a couple of days though I really began to freely enjoy that quiet time with my thoughts in the morning. I could let my mind wander off into territory I might not otherwise explore. Ideas, memories, and even future plans. I found myself writing things on my kitchen chalkboard quite a lot. I'm not sure I found this time relaxing per se but it definitely felt like clearing out the cobwebs and led to a smoother stream of thought and action as I entered the day. 

I'm speculating a bit here of course but one of the major benefits of any practice like this is just taking note of what's swimming around inside our heads at all. Sometimes it's good to get the bees out of the hive and see how the honey tastes.

Lessons Learned About Experimenting

In addition to what I learned from the experiment itself, I probably learned more about how I'd want to conduct an experiment in the future. 

First and foremost, I want to engage with you, my audience, a lot more before, during, and after. This experiment was all about getting the ball moving but I could have done a much better job communicating. I had very little lead up to this experiment and so participation was lower than it could have otherwise been. I'm taking steps to get more active here on Substack as well as on my @thecheckenginelight channel on Instagram.

Second, get better data. One piece of direct feedback I got was that the Google Form I used was janky. Agreed. The next experiment survey will be through TypeForm which has way more functionality and can be easily accessed through mobile devices. In addition my survey design needs work. No ways to identify groups of people, need better questions, ways to have daily surveys as well as beginning and ending surveys. The list goes on. That's something I'm actively learning about as well as seeking help for from people who have more experience than I do.

Last, make the process interactive. We're not doing human randomized control trials with placebos or anything. We are trying to learn about best practices in performance longevity. To that end constructing a community that's interested in learning from their own personal health experiments and sharing those lessons with each other is going to be more of a priority moving forward. 

Stay In The Lab

This was an interesting experiment both for the subject of reverie itself as well as how I can create better opportunities for others to interact with health practices. Personal experimentation is the way to keep performance longevity interesting for a lifetime. Trying things, seeing what happens, learning, and trying again is the whole game of learning. I for one am going to stay in the lab.

If you have any suggestions for future experiments or feedback on this one please post in comments below.

Thanks for reading (and experimenting),

Rob

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