You Won’t Know What Works for You Until You Test It
Self-Awareness
Most of us have probably tried something because somebody else told us it worked. We’ve copied a routine, followed advice from a book, changed the way we organise our day or listened to somebody explain what they believe everyone should be doing.
Sometimes it helps, while other times you can follow the advice almost perfectly and still wonder why you aren’t getting the same result. I think part of the problem is that we often treat suggestions as though they’re instructions, when the person giving the advice can only really tell you what worked for them, what worked for a group of people or what tends to work in certain circumstances. There still has to be a point where the advice meets you.
That’s why I think self-experimentation is an important part of understanding yourself. You try something, pay attention to what happens, give it enough time to show you something and then decide whether it actually belongs in your life. You aren’t trying to turn yourself into a scientific experiment, you’re simply becoming more involved in learning how you work.
Self-experimentation is trying one sensible change at a time, giving it enough time, and noticing how you actually respond instead of assuming somebody else’s routine will work for you.
Advice Can Give You Somewhere to Start
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with learning from other people. It’d be ridiculous to ignore everything we already know and insist on discovering every answer ourselves. Books, research, professionals, conversations and other people’s experiences can all give us useful places to begin.
The problem starts when somebody else’s starting point becomes our permanent answer without us ever checking whether it fits. A self-help book might suggest waking up early, journalling every morning or following a particular routine. Somebody online might explain that exercising first thing completely changed their mental health, while another person might tell you they stopped using their phone after a certain time and started sleeping better. All of those things could be useful suggestions, but none of them knows exactly what it feels like to live inside your day.
Your responsibilities are different, your mental health is different and your sleeping patterns, environment, personality, habits, experiences and the way you respond to things are all part of the situation as well. The advice can still be useful, it just doesn’t automatically become an instruction.
You Need to Find Out What Happens When You Do It
I think this is where self-experimentation becomes useful because it moves you away from constantly asking, “What am I supposed to do?” and towards noticing what actually happens when you try something.
You might change the time you go to bed for a while and notice what happens to your mornings. You might wake up slightly earlier or later and pay attention to when you actually begin feeling mentally alert. You may discover that you need some quiet before starting work, that exercising later suits you better than exercising first thing or that doing certain types of work at particular times feels noticeably easier. None of those observations needs to become a universal rule, because they’re information about you.
There are plenty of ordinary things you could explore:
- The time you go to sleep and wake up.
- When during the day you naturally feel most alert.
- When you prefer to exercise or move.
- What your mornings feel like with and without your phone.
- Whether a quieter or less cluttered room changes how settled you feel.
- When certain types of work or thinking feel easier.
- How different routines affect your mood over time.
- What happens when you change one repeated habit rather than your entire life.
The important part isn’t copying that list either, it’s beginning to notice which parts of your own life are worth becoming curious about.
Your Whole System Is Involved
I think we sometimes separate ourselves into pieces too quickly. We talk about the brain, the mind, mental health, the nervous system, sleep, environment and behaviour as though each one operates independently, while your actual experience involves all of them interacting. It can be easier to think about yourself as a whole.
You might wake up physically awake because your eyes are open and you’re no longer asleep, yet mentally you don’t feel properly present for another couple of hours. Somebody else might wake up and feel ready to start almost immediately. One person enjoys talking first thing in the morning, while another needs quiet before they feel like themselves.
Those differences sound small, but they become useful when you notice them because they can affect how you organise your life. If you know you rarely think clearly during the first hour after waking, that probably isn’t the ideal time to schedule something that requires your best thinking if you have a choice. The same idea can apply throughout the day, because instead of constantly trying to force yourself into somebody else’s routine, you begin learning the rhythm you actually seem to have.
Sleep Is a Good Example of Why Observation Matters
Sleep is probably one of the clearest examples because we’re surrounded by rules about how much sleep we should get, when we should go to bed and what a perfect morning should look like.
General recommendations are useful, and getting enough sleep matters for physical and mental health. That doesn’t mean everybody experiences sleep in exactly the same way, though. People differ in their sleep needs, schedules and when they naturally feel more awake, which is why simply copying somebody else’s bedtime or morning routine doesn’t guarantee you’ll feel the way they do.
Self-experimentation here doesn’t mean seeing how little sleep you can survive on. Feeling as though you can function after consistently cutting sleep isn’t necessarily evidence that your body no longer needs it. A more useful experiment might be noticing how you feel when your bedtime becomes more consistent, whether you function differently after different amounts of adequate sleep or how long it normally takes before you feel properly awake in the morning.
You might discover that the first hour of your day isn’t when you’re at your best, and that isn’t automatically something you need to fix. Sometimes knowing it allows you to stop expecting yourself to behave as though it isn’t true.
Give the Experiment Enough Time to Tell You Something
One of the problems with trying new things is that we often judge them too quickly. We change something for two days, don’t immediately feel different and decide it didn’t work.
Some things will give you a quick answer, while others need longer before you can notice a pattern. If you move your furniture around and immediately feel more comfortable in the room, that reaction is easy to notice. Changing a routine, sleeping pattern or repeated behaviour may take much longer before you understand what effect it’s actually having.
That’s why I think some experiments need weeks rather than days, and occasionally you may need longer. You’re looking for a pattern rather than one unusually good Tuesday. Your mental health naturally changes as well, which makes this even more important. You can have a bad day while following a routine that generally helps you, or an excellent day while doing something that usually makes life harder. If you judge everything from one experience, you can easily reach the wrong conclusion, while time gives you more information.
Change One Thing at a Time Where You Can
There’s another mistake that makes self-experimentation much less useful: changing everything at once.
You decide you want to feel better, so on Monday you wake up an hour earlier, change your breakfast, start exercising, remove social media, rearrange your room, begin journalling and start listening to a new podcast on the way to work. Two weeks later you feel different, but you have absolutely no idea which part made the difference. It may even be that one thing helped while another made things worse.
Changing one thing at a time gives you a better chance of noticing what actually happened. Life obviously doesn’t always allow that level of control because other things will change around you anyway, but the principle is useful. If you’re trying to understand yourself, give yourself a chance to know what you’re responding to.
You could keep it very simple:
- Choose one thing you’re curious about.
- Change it in a sensible way.
- Give it enough time.
- Notice your mood, energy, thoughts and behaviour.
- Pay attention to anything else that changed at the same time.
- Decide whether the change actually helped you.
You don’t need a spreadsheet unless you enjoy doing that, because the point is awareness rather than perfect measurement.
Your Environment Is Worth Experimenting With Too
Self-experimentation doesn’t only have to involve routines. Sometimes changing the environment around you tells you something interesting about the environment within you.
Move your room around, clear a surface that’s been cluttered for months, work somewhere different for a few days or turn the television off when you normally leave it playing in the background. Spend some time in a quieter environment and notice whether your thinking feels different.
People often talk about decluttering your space to declutter your mind. I wouldn’t treat that as a rule that applies to everyone, because some people feel perfectly comfortable in environments that another person would find distracting, and that difference is exactly why experimenting is useful.
Perhaps you discover that visual clutter makes it harder for you to settle. Maybe silence makes you uncomfortable and some background noise actually helps. You might work better near a window, feel calmer when the room is darker or realise that the place where you’ve been trying to relax doesn’t actually feel particularly relaxing. You don’t need somebody else to confirm that reaction before it becomes useful information about yourself.
Even Something as Ordinary as Eating Shows the Difference
Food is another easy example, although I think it’s important not to turn this into nutrition advice. What interests me here is simply how easily general advice becomes a personal rule.
You’ll hear that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, that you should eat as soon as you wake up or that another particular eating schedule is better. Meanwhile, you might wake up and genuinely not feel hungry for several hours.
That observation doesn’t tell you everything about nutrition, and it doesn’t mean general health guidance should be ignored, but it does tell you something about your current experience. You can notice when you naturally become hungry, how particular routines make you feel and whether the way you’re organising your day actually suits you.
If you want to make significant changes to your diet or you have a medical reason to manage what or when you eat, that’s where professional guidance matters. Self-awareness should work alongside good advice rather than replacing it. The wider point is that even ordinary things can show us how easily we assume everybody should function in the same way.
Self-Help Books Are Suggestions, Not Instructions
This is one reason I think self-help becomes much more useful when you stop treating the book as an instruction manual.
The author has an idea. Maybe they have research behind it, maybe they have years of personal experience or maybe they have a method that’s genuinely helped thousands of people. That still doesn’t mean every sentence applies equally to you.
Take the useful part and try it. If it helps, understand why it seems to help. If it doesn’t, don’t immediately assume you failed at the method, because it may be that the method never fitted your circumstances in the first place. Perhaps you need to adjust it, perhaps you need something completely different or perhaps the problem you were trying to solve wasn’t the problem you actually had.
A book can introduce you to an idea about yourself, but you still have to meet yourself afterwards.
Mental Health Makes Personal Experimentation More Complicated
Mental health is another area where I think this idea can be useful, but it needs more care.
You can pay attention to how your everyday choices relate to how you feel. You might notice whether particular environments make you more unsettled, whether certain routines give you more space mentally, whether too much time online changes your mood or whether your sleep and mental health seem to affect one another.
Those observations can help you understand your own experience, but they shouldn’t become a reason to experiment with prescribed medication, stop treatment, severely restrict food, deliberately deprive yourself of sleep or make potentially harmful changes without appropriate professional guidance. There’s a difference between learning about yourself and treating yourself as though every health problem can be solved through trial and error.
Self-awareness is useful partly because it gives you better information to work with. Sometimes that information helps you make a small change yourself, while other times it helps you explain more clearly to a professional what you’ve been noticing.
Don’t Only Notice Whether Something “Worked”
I think there’s another layer to self-experimentation that makes it more valuable. Instead of only asking whether something worked, pay attention to what it taught you.
Maybe waking earlier didn’t improve your life, but you discovered that you naturally think better later in the morning. Perhaps removing your phone from the bedroom didn’t transform your sleep, but you realised how automatically you reach for it when you feel bored. Maybe rearranging your room didn’t make you happier, but you noticed that your surroundings affect you more than you previously realised.
An experiment doesn’t have to produce the result you wanted to be useful, because sometimes the useful result is finding out that something isn’t for you. That can save you months or years of forcing yourself to maintain a habit simply because somebody else insisted it was the right thing to do.
Eventually You Start Building a Picture of Yourself
One experiment probably won’t teach you very much on its own, but over time these observations begin connecting.
You learn when you tend to think most clearly, what environments help you settle, how much structure you like, what kinds of routines make life easier and which ones make you feel restricted. You notice what happens when you spend too much time online, what helps when your mind feels crowded and which pieces of advice repeatedly fail to fit you.
None of this means you eventually discover a perfect routine that works forever. You change, your circumstances change and what helps during one period of your life may not be what you need during another. That’s why the real value isn’t finding the perfect experiment, it’s becoming somebody who notices.
The more you understand your own responses, the less dependent you become on somebody else telling you exactly how you’re supposed to live. You can still listen to advice, read the book, learn from research and try what’s helped other people, but you’re no longer handing over the final decision. You try it, notice what happens and learn something about yourself.
FAQ
What Does Self-Experimentation Mean?
Self-experimentation means deliberately trying a sensible change in your everyday life and paying attention to how you respond. It might involve changing part of your routine, environment, sleep schedule or another repeated behaviour so you can understand whether it actually works for you.
Why Doesn’t the Same Advice Work for Everyone?
General advice is usually based on principles, research, group averages or somebody else’s experience. Individuals still differ in their circumstances, mental health, preferences, routines, responsibilities and responses, so something useful for one person may need adapting for another.
How Long Should I Try Something Before Deciding Whether It Works?
It depends on what you’re changing. Some differences are noticeable quickly, while routines and repeated behaviours may need weeks or longer before a pattern becomes clear. Try not to judge something entirely from one unusually good or bad day.
Should I Change Several Things at Once?
Usually, changing one thing at a time makes it easier to understand what you’re responding to. If you change your sleep, exercise, diet, phone use and environment simultaneously, you may feel different without knowing which change actually mattered.
Can Self-Experimentation Help With Mental Health?
It can help you become more aware of how everyday routines, environments and behaviours relate to your mental health. It isn’t a replacement for professional care, and you shouldn’t experiment independently with prescribed medication, treatment or potentially harmful changes.
How Do I Know What I Should Experiment With?
Start with something you’ve already noticed or wondered about. Perhaps you feel mentally slow at a particular time of day, certain environments make it difficult to settle or a routine you copied from somebody else never seems to fit. Curiosity about your own repeated experience is usually a better starting point than changing something simply because somebody online told you to.
What If an Experiment Doesn’t Work?
That can still be useful. Finding out that something doesn’t suit you is information, and sometimes understanding why it didn’t fit teaches you more than getting the result you originally wanted.
