Mindfulness Experiment 1

I love the idea of self tracking and gathering data about myself.  My trouble was that I was having a hard time using QS to track what was most important to me- my moods and emotions.  Because self-recording these kinds of non-tangible feelings is hard!

So I decided to try a completely different route, based in mindfulness and positive psychology, to create a system to not only track my moods, but also actively intervene and assist me in controlling them favorably.  So I took a pack of placebo pills, and with my sharpie made them into “Antidotes” to the 4 negative emotions I was most interested in controlling!

You may wonder why I would even think of doing this. One of the inspirations is the placebo effect. We know that for many diseases, taking a sugar pill that you think will help you WILL alleviate your symptoms. Wearing a medical device, even if its turned off, WILL help your health. This is crazy!

Even more interesting- an Irritable Bowel Syndrome study found that when patients were given a placebo and told it was a placebo, they had an alleviation of symptoms almost equal to the actual drug.  So clearly, the power of the medical ritual has a huge impact on our psychology- making it a perfect tool with which to hack ourselves and our motivations!  So with that in mind, I made these pills:

• Focus
  for a distracted, unproductive state
• Will Power/Energy
  for facing a daunting task (lethargy/unwillingness)
• Calm
  for high stress or anger
• Happy
  for sadness

I hoped that I could use this system to not only make myself mindful of and track negative emotions, but that the ingestion ritual would give me the feeling of an emotional “power up” to combat these feelings.

The magic in the experiment came from the system I used to do it- I used Proteus Biomedical technology, so every time I took a pill, the timestamp was captured. The patch I wore on my torso not only picked up when I took pills, but also got activity levels, sleep length and quality, and heart rate. The result was a readout of whenever I felt the negative emotions I was interested in, as well as the biometric background for these feelings.

RESULTS

Here is an example of the data readouts I had during my experiment; I had summary data on a phone, and a more detailed readout available through a browser.

I also accessed a more raw form of the data for further investigation (above is an excerpt from that readout). The experiment was fairly short (the system is not yet FDA approved, so certain experimental protocols must be observed). However, even in that short time I found meaningful results. I often had significant heart rate spikes after energy or will-power pills. In fact, my bike rides to and from work were more intense after an Energy pill than without one. In more anecdotal terms, during this week my kitchen was cleaner than it ever had been!

More interestingly, though, was that I was focused on using energy pills to follow throughwith my plans- not skip workouts or chores, which kept me constantly engaged, and pushed me to reach all my goals for the day. Because of this, the other negative emotions I was hoping to avoid- sadness or stress and anger- kind of got washed out. By focusing on giving myself a “pre-emptive power up” to tackle a daunting task or stressor early on, I avoided getting to the “high stress” or “despair” level. In fact, in the entire experiment , I didn’t use a single happiness or calmness pill- only focus and willpower.

This is not a completely startling result- in fact, results like this are well documented in psychology under the guise of Bhuddist Mindfulness Meditation.  This form of mindfulness all about bringing your thoughts into the present, and maintaining of awareness of yourself and your state of mind.  It often falls under the umbrella of positive psychology, and research shows that it’s useful in treating problems as widespread as pain, stress, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and addiction.

So in the experiment I ran, I ended up artificially creating the environment of Buddhist mindfulness without the meditation, in a more QS inspired way- by constantly incentivizing being aware of my present emotions through my use of placebo pill antidotes to my negative emotions.

In the future, I plan on running longer experiments, and putting more complex applications on top of the data than just display to leverage more behavior change techniques.  Te opportunity to mine information to find correlation between biometrics and emotions is also very exciting.  I will post updates on this site, and I hope to hear your ideas and comments!