Experiments, iterations and the scientific method

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/experiments-iterations-and-the-scientific-method

Today, an ordinary day. I woke up at 6am. It was still dark out. I did a quick self-check.

"Did I wake up with energy?" No not really... note to self. But it is quite early.

Rewind one day.

Yesterday I woke up to a phone call, and did a quick self test...

"Did I wake up with energy?" Yes! Like two cups of coffee and the light of a thousand suns.

"Did I have energy 5 minutes after waking up?" no.

"Did I have vivid dreams?" Yes

"are my fingers and toes cold?" Yes, damn.

(waking up next to me can be jarring and uncomfortable for a sleepy person)

Steps in the right direction.

I got up and did what has become my usual stack. Weighing out 5g creatine, 3g citrulline malate, 10-25 g of soylent v1.5, 60g protein. And to this I removed the Vitamin C and added magnesium.

Even my notes have notes. Confounding factors yesterday include:

High intensity exercise (run in the morning)
garlic (for dinner)
An Iron tablet taken to solve the cold hands/feet problem (status: null)
lots of carbs that I had as part of dinner with a friend.

experimenting in the real world is hard and experimenting on sleep is particularly slow. at the rate of 1 trial a day, that's many trials before you can confirm or deny a result.

Experiments

I recently rediscovered the Scientific method, by which I mean, I realised I wasn't applying it and I needed to figure out how to apply it to my life (haha... Not that I "Rediscovered the scientific method" and am awaiting my Nobel prize).

: By ArchonMagnus - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42164616

A few main features here. The ones that make it possible to apply these steps in real life.

There are two loops, the "run experiements" loop, and the, "make theories in preparation for experiments" loop.
The process goes on forever.
You need to have some knowledge of the world around you before you can generate hypotheses worth testing.
Hypotheses need to be run until you can confirm your models. And being able to disprove them would help.
you might need to rely on wrong-but-useful models on the way to finding the better models.

There are 7 parts to that circle. They are hard to remember. I looked for ways of combining those 7 to make it smaller and easier to remember. You can cluster and bunch but you don't do anything justice. There are just 7 parts to the method.

The first thing I took was vitamin C. I reasoned that a bottle of vitamins was cheap and C is pretty harmless. Then I bought a jar of fish oil capsules that is fatter than my leg. Then some protein powder and thanks to Julian's guide Citrulline malate. Also Creatine, Calcium, magnesium (the supermarket kind) and eventually the fancy heavy kind from a specialist store.

: okay maybe not me.

I just started taking things. Because why not. some initial success includes:

Oh crap if you don't eat any protein (dieting for weight loss) and exercise too much - everything just hurts for days and days and days. I feel great when my muscles aren't hurting all the time.
Fighting high cholesterol for more than the last 10 years - cholesterol now well within normal.
Fish oil? What is this stuff for anyways, whatever.
Protein tastes better with some Vitamin C in it. Saves the trouble of adding flavours.
I seem to be sleeping great lately.
I seem to be more assertive (likely high Testosterone, blood tests confirm)

My total sleep time went down, and I felt great.

December 24 2016

On this day I was with friends at a beach. When a particularly charismatic friend suggested "let's go into that drain pipe half way up a cliff wall". surrounded by about 9 people who all jokingly nodded and suggested it was a good idea. having just earlier that week been ranting about walking the walk not just talking the talk. I silently got up, climbed the cliff wall and wandered in. It's funny because climbing into the pipe was easy. walking to the other end, easy. coming back and getting down. easy.

Following my charismatic friend in for the second time, after climbing up the cliff wall I grabbed a branch that was no longer as strong as the first time I grabbed it. I slipped and fell 3 metres, landing on my right heel. There was a Thud! A Crunch! and the 8 or so people sitting around still proceeded to ask me if I was okay. Which is an interesting question. I was okay in that I did not die, my foot was sore, but I was okay.

I couldn't run for weeks. By my estimates this injury set me back at least 7 weeks. 6 weeks needed for a broken bone to recover, I have not been to a doctor to get that x-ray (doctor stories for another post - I actually went to a doctor twice and asked for x-rays twice and failed to convince doctors to x-ray my foot. I figured if I had x-ray confirmation that it was broken I wouldn't be able to do anything different so there wasn't much point pushing again and again).

At this point, because I stopped exercising, I stopped taking all the supplements. I also got hit with a wave of, "are all these pills and supplements even doing anything?" (12 pills, 3 powders).

That's where my good moods, high energy, reduced sleep time, energy on waking up (30sec, 5min), assertiveness, mental state (lack of critical judgement), all vanished.

I couldn't really justify taking protein because I wasn't exercising enough. But something had caused my shifts in all the good things. And I was stuck for knowing what. I could go back to taking everything for the heck of it, but I don't know if they did anything, or if general fitness and exercise made a bigger difference than all the supplements together.

I tried the shotgun method. take a handful of this or a handful of that whenever I feel like it. But what was causing the right shifts? What could I trust? Had anyone written this up before? If they did it wouldn't be very relevant because the effects inside my own body would be slightly different. I had some early luck with creatine, it seemed to reduce my sleep time and bring my energy at wake up back. But only when taken in the afternoon. Or was it only if I took it with protein, and not without protein. Or maybe it had something to do with the rest of my meals.

This guessing game was not effective. I was going to have to test this the hard way.

Iterations

Iterations... Establishing a baseline is hard. What am I like when I don't take anything? What was I like before I took anything? I never even asked, I never even tested. And what did I want to test. If you look back at the scientific method, I guess what I did was MAD SCIENCE. A misshapen process of guess work and hoping things would work. At least I took data before everything came crashing down. I had general theories that one or a few of the things that I was doing had caused the positive change. But this is the time for controlled experiments.

So I came up with what I wanted back the most:

Less hours spent asleep
Did I wake up with energy (30 seconds)?
Did I wake up with energy (5 minutes)?

And what seemed like a confounder:

Did I have weirdly vivid dreams?

Other things that seemed to affect my mood:

Did I shower today?
Did I exercise today?

And my conditions:

Eating protein
Sex
creatine
Exercise
High intensity exercise
Creatine
Citrulline malate
calorie deficit
calorie surplus
Magnesium
Vitamin C
Calcium
Garlic
Spices
Melatonin
Fish oil

One day at a time. This isn't the first time I have been hit with this problem. It's very hard to feel the very iterative core of the slow progress problem until you are doing tests one day at a time, trying to not add confounding variables.

This process, particularly on the personal internal-states self-monitoring level - they are hard. They are slow. They are elusive. Do you remember how you felt last Tuesday? Do you remember how you felt three Tuesdays ago? Me neither. Which when optimising for a good state of mind and happy state of being means that you can't keep track of it internally. You need a journal, you need to run tests.

You need to pay attention to state, you need to internally get used to where you are. Hold in your mind an idea that "this is how I am". Then you need to control the confounding variables until you are confident that "this is my baseline". Then you need to change things...

Add exercise.

Then you need to look out for changes to heart rate, and resting heart rate, and sweat, and showers and how energetic you feel, how tired you get at 10pm, how you feel when you wake up. How thirsty you are generally,

Take away exercise.

How do you feel? Does it change things? Heart rate? Is that actually something you can feel from the inside? Are you sleeping better or worse or the same?

Add exercise at intensity.

How do you feel? Is anything sore? Can you repeat that?

Add protein. But what dose? 30g, 60g, 120g.

Did the sore feeling go away? Any other changes like energy level? (at 120g my pee went green - don't worry that's just a side effect of messing with intakes).

Find the stable state, repeat until you are sure this is the stable state. 3 days, 4 days, 5 days. Did I see a partner today? Did I have sex? Did I have time to go exercise? Does this factor into things?

Add creatine.

Is there an energy level change? Can I focus more on the same task? Am I more thirsty? (Creatine causes more water retention) Any changes in sleep? Has anything new come up? Did I eat different to usual? Could that be a factor/ 3 days, 4 days, 5 days...

Add Citrulline Malate. What dose? 3g, 5g?

Days, days...

Did I have more energy? Did I notice anything different? Am I sleeping more or less? Am I awake more? Do the seasons have anything to do with it? What if I exercise? Does that help?

Get used to the stable state... days, days, days. Dinner at an indian restaraunt, weird dreams in the morning - it's probably the spices. Days to get stable again.

Had pizza for dinner. Was it the extra salt or the extra garlic? Or one of the other herbs that made a difference?

Add Soylent. But how much? 5g, 10g, 20g, 40g?

There's a bust of energy! But why would Soylent do that? What's in it? I don't have time to work that out, Too busy doing everything else. Staying up late, getting up earlier, soylent keeps me from the 3pm dip. Or was it the Citrulline?

Days, days, tests, tests.

Okay it was probably the soylent, but the citrulline helps with being awake right up until after 10pm.

My fingers and toes are cold.. I don't remember having this for more than six months. Maybe it's winter, maybe I need to supplement something else.

Add Magnesium.

BAM!

It's still dark out. Why did I wake up at 6am? I am awake naturally and not tired.

Did I wake up with energy? No but I did have energy

Did I have weird dreams? No.

I get out of bed.

Did I wake up with energy, (5mins after wake up)? YES

I can't even describe what it feels like. To be filled with energy. Like being up on two cups of coffee and extra adrenaline. What I wouldn't give to get that nagging voice in the back of my head back saying, "hey you should go exercise" like I had 6 months ago.

This is what it feels like to run experiments and iterate each day. It's been months. It's been painful. What happens when you find a condition that leaves you feeling like crap - but you need to repeat the experiment for validity?

You do science is what happens.

Meta: this took the better part of 2 hours over several sessions.