Use Self-Experimentation to Enhance Your Life

It can be difficult to change your life. There’s so much uncertainty and potential failure in the back of your mind. But what if you could view your life as a science experiment of sorts? You wouldn’t take the results personally. You’d just be a scientist observing the outcome. You could then judge the results and plan your next step.

The idea of self-experimentation has several benefits:

• It removes the possibility of failure. You’re not testing yourself. You’re testing the effectiveness of an idea, possibly someone else’s idea. Your ego is safe.
• You’re actively attempting to enhance your life. You have a goal and a plan to achieve it. You’re taking action.
• You judge the results and then seek to find an even better way. What could be more effective than this?

Experiment in your life and enjoy the process of discovery:

1. Choose a theory or two that you’d like to test. There’s plenty of self-help advice to be found. Find an interesting theory and test it. Or test a money-making program. Or put the program of a pickup artist to the test. Find something that interests you and has the potential to impact your life in a positive way.

• Other ideas include diets, workout programs, changing sleep patterns, dropping a bad habit or adding a new one, meditating, fasting, or anything else you can think of.
• You can use someone else’s plan or develop your own. What interests you the most? Educate yourself by actually measuring your own results.

2. Learn what you need to know. Get the necessary materials and map out your plan. Consider the reasons why you think the program will work. Also consider why it might not work. For example, imagine that you want to see what will happen if you limit yourself to 100 grams of carbohydrates per day. You decide to:

• Track your carbohydrates, body weight, blood pressure, mood, and waistline.
• You’ll stick with the diet for four weeks and take measurements before you begin and after each completed week.
• You believe that you’ll be hungry at first and tired. You expect those symptoms will disappear after the first week.
• You expect to lose 3 pounds per week and lose inches off your waist.

3. Put your hypothesis to the test. Perform the experiment on yourself. Follow your plan and see what happens. Find out if you were right or wrong in your predictions.

4. Evaluate your data and formulate a conclusion. What did you learn? Could you tweak the process to improve it? Or was it a horrible idea that deserves no further investigation?

5. Consider the next step. What do you want to do next? Do you want to continue down the same path or choose a completely different topic?

Do you have a hard time making changes in your life? Try viewing aspects of your life through the eyes of a scientist. Create a theory and test it:

• Will asking out 10 beautiful women each week guarantee a date every Saturday night? Who knows? Put it to the test and find out.
• Can you do one additional pushup each day until you’ve reached 100 pushups? Find out.
• Will wearing a sport coat to work result in receiving more respect? Wear one every day for a month and see.

There’s no reason to guess. You have yourself to experiment upon. You can find out definitively what does and doesn’t work for you. Imagine all the incredible changes you could make after a couple of years of living this way!