From N of 1 Experiments to Experiment Journeys [N of 1, Part 3]
This post lays out insights into how to select and sequence multiple experiments to set you up for success.
This is the third article in my series on n of 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. If you’d like to read the second article on designing individual n of 1 experiments, you can find it here.
In the previous post, I discussed designing individual n of 1 experiments. Here I am going to share the best approach to a broader program of experimentation, choosing which experiments to run and in what order, so it’s as easy as possible to stay motivated, keep making progress, and be efficient with time, money, and effort. At Fount, we call this optimal approach an “Experiment Journey.”
Start with Goals
The first thing you want to do when designing a new health and performance program or building on what you’re already doing is to solidly identify, or reassess, your goals. This may seem obvious, but I’ve seen many people skip over it or hurry through it. Starting with goals is key because if you don’t really care deep down about making an improvement, you are much less likely to sustain the time or effort required for progress. Goals are also critical to effectively prioritize experiments.
When I first started coaching, one of the things that surprised me was how often people find it challenging to describe their goals. This can happen for a wide range of reasons. They may feel intimidated. They may not be used to thinking about what they want. They may not be comfortable, deep down, asking for what they want. They may think they should only list things that they think are possible, even when they may not know what’s possible. There are many reasons, but I've found a relatively straightforward process you can use with friends, family, or with yourself.
The most effective question I’ve developed to get someone to describe their goals is, “If you had a magic wand and could change anything about your mind or body, what would it be?” Some will still respond very generally, saying, “I want to be healthier” or “I’m interested in longevity,” but without fail, if I suggest, “Tell me more…” and leave a long enough pause, they will start to get specific on areas of interest… although I may have to invite them to, “Tell me more…” several times.
If someone is having a lot of trouble, I will share the top 10 areas people request help in. It’s best not to start with this until you’ve explored what is top of mind for yourself because these may not be your particular goals, but if you need help, this list can be valuable. Also, if your first response is to think, “I want all of those,” you will need to put them in order of priority because if everything is a priority, nothing is really a priority.
Top Goals (not in any order):
Energy
Focus
Mood
Stress Management
Sleep
Gut health
Longevity/Healthspan
Fertility
Fat
Muscle
Through your goal setting process, whenever you have a very high-level goal (longevity; feeling better), try to at least add one or more moderately specific goals under that, since this is the level at which things start to become actionable (improving cardiovascular fitness; feeling more focused during the day). Of course, if you can get to very specific, measurable goals (running a 7-minute mile; staying in deep focus for 2 full hours Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), that will help you track progress along the way.
Explore Your Options
The vast majority of people don’t spend all day thinking about health or performance. Between their busy job, family, and other demands, most people find it takes effort to stick to a new plan. You can’t do everything at once, and trying to do too many things amps up the likelihood of failure. To make it as easy as possible and to increase your odds of success, it’s key to start with things that matter to you more, where you are more likely to succeed, and that are easier to implement. So, to figure you where to start, begin by asking yourself these questions to understand more about your goals and the interventions and experiments you are considering:
What are my top goals? Starting with targets that matter a lot to you is important so you don’t write-off progress as trivial.
What are you most excited about or motivated by? These may not always be the same goals you rank at the top, but excitement and motivation can carry you through as you run experiments.
Are there any goals where you think you can get relatively easy wins? Our brains learn very effectively. If we’re seeing success and our brains get the attendant dopamine hit, we’re more likely to keep going and be able to tackle harder challenges.
What goal has relatively simple and easy to execute experiments you can run? The flip side of reward is stress. As stress goes up, our motivation to stick with something tends to decrease, so we are more likely to succeed with easier experiments.
Is progress on any of the goals key to success with other goals? Are any of the goals blockers for progress in others? For example, if stress is off the charts and interfering with sleep, then progress towards stress goals may be required to improve sleep. If we ignore blockers, we won’t make progress.
As you’ll find, these don’t all line up. Sometimes the most important thing in your life is a big challenge, but some middle-of-the-pack goals have easy wins. We handle this through a concept we call “Experiment Cycles.”
Designing Experiment Cycles
Now that you have better insights into your goals and the experiments you’re considering, it’s time to design your next steps. Since you can’t do everything at once, the answer is to set up groups of experiments that give you the right mix of progress and impact. I’ve found that 2-week blocks of time with 2-4 experiments per “experiment cycle” works well for most people. It’s an amount of time where you can get the data you need for most experiments (diet changes may require longer), but not so long that it feels like you can’t keep it up. 2-4 experiments, depending on the intensity of each, gives you more than one chance of success, but you won’t be overwhelmed.
Here are considerations to consider when designing each experiment cycle:
1. No more than 1 demanding lifestyle change or experiment per cycle.
Even when you’re hyper motivated to make changes in your life, it’s best to consider that you’re in a marathon, not a sprint because sticking to changes will be key over time. So, to optimize the chance that you will be able to carry out the experiment successfully and then keep the change going if it works, keep to one major change at a time. More is rarely effective. Usually, it’s good to break down even one major change further to set yourself up for success.
For example, if you want to make changes to your diet, instead of a full overhaul, especially if you’d had trouble sticking to new plans before, you might decide to experiment with eating 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight for 2 weeks, or you might run an experiment on the effect of eating a certain amount of vegetables with every meal. In the long run, doing both of these things is probably great for you to keep muscle mass and lower inflammation, but doing one well is much better than failing at two. Only you know what your bandwidth for change is, and being realistic is highly valuable.
2. Add at least 1 “cool” experiment you’re excited about.
If this is all work and no fun, you’re much less likely to stick with it. When we work with clients, we always add at least one exciting experiment per experiment cycle. What each person finds exciting is different, but whether you’re jazzed about the latest Huberman or Attia podcast and want to try what they discussed or your friend is raving about a new supplement and you really want to try it, go with that, even if it’s not for your top goal. One of my favorites to use with my executive clients is to test the 3 supplements that seem to help focus most and see what helps someone drop into deep work:
L-theanine can decrease stress levels, so if someone is hyperactivated mentally, this can be a big win.
Cocoa flavanols can decrease cortisol levels, while giving a boost in energy. If someone has stress, but also needs more energy, these can be quite beneficial.
L-tyrosine is the amino acid our bodies use to make dopamine. Increasing dopamine levels can heighten our drive and goal direction, which can increase focus.
This experiment is also great because it can give you insight into whether your focus is affected more by over-activation of your brain, under-activation, or both. Find an experiment that’s cool to you, and go with it.
3. At least 1 experiment that will be simple to carry out
A key concept from psychology that I often return to with clients is, “Confidence does not proceed action. Action proceeds confidence.” Said in another way: wins stack up, and our brains learn from success. This means it’s critical to set yourself up for some easy wins, so ensure at least one of your experiments is simple. This ensures you gain momentum to take on more challenging experiments. Supplements are usually some of the easiest experiments to run, although people may have a hard time remembering to take them mid-day. In my experience, the easiest experiment to run is a supplement experiment when the client is scheduled to take them with breakfast, dinner, or pre-bed.
4. Ideally, at least 1 that has high likelihood of success
For the same reason, pick at least one experiment where you’re likely to get a win. All completed experiments, even ones where the intervention doesn’t work, are successful, but our brains prefer to see progress towards our goals. At the end of the experiment cycle, if nothing worked, you’re more likely to drift off and not keep going into the next experiment cycle, so this is a great strategy to ensure continued progress.
By considering all 4 of these factors, you can set yourself up for the best chance of success, both for this experiment cycle and moving on into the future.
Combination Interventions
Before moving on, I want to discuss combo interventions briefly. Often, there are many interventions you can choose from to target a goal. For gut health, you might try meditation or breathwork to tamp down stress levels affecting your gut, a variety of supplements like curcumin, magnesium compounds, and quercetin, or an elimination diet, and the list goes on.
So, do you take each of these separately, or do you combine 2 or more of them? This is really a judgment call, but here are the tradeoffs to consider:
Speed: If you combine multiple interventions together into an experiment, you will see the results faster than if you waited to run all of them separately.
Effect Size: If you try one intervention at a time, even if it helps, it may not have a large enough effect to notice as easily, so running more than one intervention at a time may help build up the effects to where you can see benefits.
Offsetting Effects: Unfortunately, there is a major potential drawback as well. One or more of the interventions you try may help, but one or more may also hurt you. This can cancel out the benefits of whatever was working, so you may write it off and lose a very valuable tool. Or, if one tool really helps, but another moderately hurts you, you may keep both not knowing you’re keeping something unhelpful in your plan.
Insights: Just as you can lose a tool with this method, you can also miss insights. Not recognizing that a tool helped or hurt also can rob you of the insights that tell you what to try - or avoid - next. One way to mitigate this is to only combine tools working on the same physiological or psychological pathway. This doesn’t ensure there can’t be offsetting effects, but at least you won’t have 2 pathways working at cross purposes clouding where to go next.
So, if you have the time, it’s great to run experiments 1-by-1. You can also always try things together, find a combination that works, and then run the individual pieces separately later. Of course, that doesn’t help if offsetting effects lead to the combination with a great tool showing no benefits because it was canceled out.
Evaluation & Iteration
At the end of each cycle, the last step is to evaluate the results of each experiment. Based on the data you collected along the way, you should have a sense of whether the intervention helped in a meaningful way, hurt, or didn’t have a large effect. For interventions that helped, the experiment provides you with all the inputs you need to compare the magnitude of the benefits, the importance of the goal, and the time and resources required to keep it going to get a rough ROI for the intervention. This should give you a framework for comparing different interventions and help you decide whether to keep it or discard it. For people who like to see it in algorithmic terms, here is a notional calculation for ROI (which you wouldn’t actually put numbers into):
Beyond whether to keep the intervention, the results are also key to help guide you where to go next. Until you’ve hit the particular goal, If an intervention worked, you may consider experimenting with a bigger dose (which could be the amount of time you do breathwork or literally a larger dose of a supplement) or trying a tool that hits on the same physiological pathway, such as stress, inflammation, or hormone balance, as you now know that it is relevant to your goal. If an intervention didn’t work, you can also try a bigger dose, or you may want to try a different pathway. Then, it’s time to use the same rubric above for designing experiment cycle to take these insights and craft your next cycle.
I’ve been using this approach for years, as have our Fount clients, and I can tell you it works. Looking ahead, in the final installment in this series, I’m going to share ancillary benefits that come from running n of 1 experiments, beyond just accuracy and insight.
One thing you may feel is missing from this series on running n of 1 experiments is how to figure out which interventions to try. Over the next several months, I am going to share my framework for understanding the root of the challenges you may be facing and the top interventions for each of these underlying challenges, so stay tuned for more content soon.