Beyond Accuracy: The Many Benefits of N=1 Experimentation
This post lays out the benefits of N=1 experiments beyond accuracy and effectiveness. They lower the resistance to change and lighten your cognitive load, which are crucial for your long-term success.
This is the fourth article in my series on N=1 experiments. If you’d like to read the first article on why they’re essential for taking control of your health and performance, you can find it here. The second article on designing individual N=1 experiments is here, and the third article on how to select and sequence multiple experiments is here.
In the first 3 posts in this series, I described why N=1 experimentation is the only way to discover the right health and wellness program for your life, how to build individual experiments, and how to design an experimentation program over time. Thankfully, there are 2 major benefits from N=1 experimentation beyond accuracy and effectiveness, and I’m going to share those in this article: running experiments lower the resistance to change and lightens the cognitive load compared to just “making changes” in your life.
Sticking to Experiments is Easier
Lifestyle changes take effort, and before you make the change, you don’t know there will be a benefit. Your brain hasn’t gotten the dopamine hit from seeing the benefits and associated it with this new action. If you’re like the majority of people who’ve put in meaningful effort to things that haven't worked for their health, then there can be an emotional pull not to go through the stress of trying to change, especially because you might experience ‘failure’ again. Our egos don’t like to take a hit. Together, these subconscious mental processes lead many people to fail before crossing the starting line.
Thankfully, framing a new diet, sleep habit, or other change as an experiment makes starting it easier. An experiment has a set duration and doesn’t commit you to the change forever. This lowers the “activation energy” needed to give a shot to something that may not work. In my experience, most people feel like they can try almost anything for a week or two. You aren’t committing forever, and the idea of seeing if it works relieves some of the pressure if it doesn’t. You’re not necessarily the source of failure. Maybe it was the wrong fit for your body.
This also helps on the backend. If an intervention doesn’t work, then there’s no feeling bad about discarding it. It’s not giving up. If it does work, you have the positive feedback of the benefits and the subconscious perception of success to help give you a boost to keep it going.
Beyond just that specific change, using the N=1 experiment approach helps you keep up steam and make subsequent changes. When someone tries a diet and doesn’t see results, this often takes a lot of wind out of their sails. But, again, if the diet failed, rather than you failing, it’s much easier to try a new approach when you don’t feel the sting of personal failure. With this framing, even a failed intervention is a successful experiment: you found that the particular intervention isn’t the right one for you. And it’s much easier to build off of success.
Finally, running experiments can give people a frame to help protect against peer pressure. Especially with diet, exercise, and drinking less, other people will try to derail you, even if it’s coming from a subconscious place. “Come on - do you really need to eat a salad?” “Why are you being no fun?” There are many reasons people do this. Your change makes them feel bad for not doing it. What you’re trying didn’t work for them, so they don’t believe it will work for you. And on goes the list. Thankfully, in our work with clients at Fount, we’ve found that explaining what you’re doing as an experiment tends to dampen other peoples’ need to chime in on your choices with such fervor. This is especially true if the people around you see themselves as ‘into health’ or being at the cutting edge, since experimentation is an “advanced” way to approach changing your lifestyle. And once you are seeing the results, and ideally, they are too, then it’s harder for them to argue against it.
Experiments are Less Cognitively Demanding
Many people decide to make changes to their lifestyle in a moment of inspiration, whether they’re feeling especially motivated that day, heard a particularly exciting podcast, or got bad news from their doctor. But over the next couple of weeks or months, life intervenes. Work gets busy. Your relationships take priority, and it’s easy to revert to old habits or to lose track of whether you’re seeing benefits from the changes.
Amidst the hustle of everyday life, the predetermined, structured format of experiments can be a lifesaver. By outlining up-front the change you’re making, how often you’ll take actions, how long the experiment will run, and what you’re using to measure the outcome, it lightens the cognitive load in the subsequent weeks since you’ve already made these decisions. Most successful people take on more and more in their work and personal lives, so they are constantly running near capacity, so lightening cognitive load is critical to prevent overwhelm, which is a common path to failure for health and performance changes.
The experiment framework is also extremely helpful in reducing how much focus you need on progress and goals. If you decide ahead of time to keep track of how well you’re focusing or your energy levels, you are much more likely to do it. And keeping track in real time is much more effective than trying to think back across the last two weeks. I regularly talk to clients who say they feel like the most recent interventions they’ve tried haven’t worked. But, when I ask about the goals they set at the beginning of the experiment, they’ve hit nearly all of them. Ask any coach: this is incredibly common, so it’s something we should ensure doesn’t derail our successes. Since you lay out the metrics to track success before the start of the experiment, it’s easier to take an objective look at the results, instead of how you feel about the change in a busy moment.
Finally, running experiments helps because it makes it easier to get rid of dead weight. While most of the health world is focused on recommending new interventions and new habits, one of the most effective things you can do is get rid of things that take time or energy, but aren’t serving you. By structuring your changes as experiments, you have clear metrics to say something didn’t work, so you can get rid of it and not waste your mental energy, time, or money.
Better And Easier
It’s rare that the most effective method is also the easier one. Moving from “making changes” to running experiments is one of those rare places. By investing a little time up front and leveraging the motivation in your moment of inspiration, you will make it much easier for yourself for the next weeks or months. Once you integrate the N=1 experimentation approach, I’m confident you’ll see these benefits in your own life.