The Value of Self-Experimentation

I was proffered (Scrabble, anyone?) a link last week to a fascinating article entitled "The Value of Self-Experimentation." It's a fascinating article in and of itself, but more importantly, it contained some hopefully useful insights into my poor sleeping habits.

I knew that in a wide range of animals, including rats, a laboratory result called anticipatory activity is well established. If you feed a rat every day at the same time, it will become active about three hours earlier. If you feed it at noon, it will become active about 9 a.m. I had been eating breakfast at about 7 a.m. and waking up about 4 a.m. I had essentially found that humans were like other animals in this regard.

Not eating breakfast reduced early awakening but didn’t eliminate it. In the following years, self-experimentation taught me more about what caused it. By accident, I found that standing helped. If I stood more than eight hours in a day, I slept better that night. That wasn’t practical—after trying to stand that much for several years, I gave up—but the realization helped me make another accidental discovery 10 years later: standing on one leg to exhaustion helps. If I do this four times (left leg twice, right leg twice) during a day, even in the morning, I sleep much better that night. More recently, I’ve found that animal fat makes me sleep better.

Interesting stuff, yes? When I was doing my own experimenting I tested the effect of a number of sleeping agents (melatonin, generic sleeping pills, Nyquil) along with external elements like a humidifier, when I went to bed, when I stopped using electronic devices, and so forth and so on. After about a month of trying different combinations of all these variables I was still averaging about 3.5 hours of sleep a night, a rate that I still sustain today.

So my first step is pushing back breakfast until 10am. I figure I’ll give that two weeks and see if that has any noticeable effect on my sleep habits. And then maybe I’ll start branching out into some of his other suggestions. In the meantime, I think I'm going to start browsing the archives of Tim Ferriss' blog (he of the aforementioned article).