Seth’s blog

Gary Wolf, a writer for Wired, and Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired, have formed a San Francisco Bay Area Meetup group called The Quantified Self.

This is a monthly show and tell for people taking advantage of various kinds of personal tracking - geotracking, life-logging, DNA sequencing, etc. - to gain more knowledge about themselves. Come whare what you are doing, and learn from others. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Chemical Body
• Load Counts
• Personal Genome Sequencing
• Lifelogging
• Self Experimentation
• Risks/Legal Rights/DutiesBehavior monitoring
• Location tracking
• Non-invasive Probes
• Digitizing Body Info
• Sharing Health Records
• Psychological Self-Assesments
• Medical Self-Diagnostics

The first meeting, which I will eagerly attend, will be on September 10 (Wed) evening in Pacifica. Sign up for details.

I have been sleeping much better than usual. Sharp easy-to-notice improvement. After the first time this happened I made a list of 9 possible reasons (lifestyle changes that might have been responsible). I later added one I’d overlooked: standing on one foot to exhaustion a few times.

Yesterday I stood on one foot to exhaustion four times, twice in the morning and twice in the evening. It took about three minutes each time (12 minutes total). Didn’t make any of the nine other candidate changes. And I slept much better than usual. So it is beginning to look like just that one factor is responsible. The one I almost forgot but also the one that seemed most plausible after i remembered it.

I repeated the two things that remained on my list as possibilities for why I slept so well a few nights ago: 1. Looked at my face in a mirror a half-hour earlier than usual with a better sound source. 2. Stood on one foot until exhaustion (6 times). Lo and behold, I slept great. Now I’m pretty sure one of these two, or their combination, is responsible.

An unexpected twist is that I only slept 5 hours. Usually I’d still feel tired after that little sleep. But I feel like I slept 7 or 8.

I suspect the standing, not the faces, is the cause. Which would be ironic. Of the treatments I’ve studied by self-experimentation and found helpful, standing 9 or 10 hours, which greatly improved my sleep, was the most difficult. I loved what it did to my sleep. I still remember how wonderful it felt to be so well-rested the next morning. Even so I stopped doing it. As an experimental treatment, it was hard to measure how long I stood. As a lifestyle change, it was really hard to arrange so much standing. Whereas standing on one foot to exhaustion six times might be the easiest effective treatment I’ve studied (if it’s effective). Easy to measure, nothing to buy, no logistical problems.

I may try to repeat the earlier observation a few more times — as a kind of gift to myself — but now the main thing I want to do is separate the effects of the two factors, i.e., test one without the other.

Yesterday I did two of the 10 or so possible things that might have caused me to sleep really well recently: (a) looked at my face in a mirror earlier than usual with voices behind the mirror (Factor A) and (b) stood on one foot until exhaustion (twice) (Factor B). And last night I slept better than usual — not quite as great as the first time but still really well. This seems to narrow down the possibilities to:

• Factor A only
• Factor B only
• Factor A and Factor B

I have doubts about Factor A. After I figured out that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood, I tried for months to find the right “dose” (right time, right length) to improve my sleep. I didn’t find it. Whereas Factor B is merely a new version of something that has improved my sleep countless times, so much that I’ve noticed its effects when not looking for them. The effect might have been less clear last night than the first time because I only stood on one foot to exhaustion twice. The first time — I wasn’t paying attention, of course — I think I did it three or four times.

So today I did it six times. It was curiously exhausting. After I felt recovered (about an hour later), the rest of the day I felt really good, cheerful and energetic — better than after yoga. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I do something that makes me sleep better, shouldn’t it make me more tired?

A few days ago (Tuesday night) I slept unusually well, presumably because Tuesday day had been unusual in some way. I made a list of nine possible reasons.

Today I realized I’d forgotten something: 10. Stood on one foot more than usual. To pass the time while looking at my face in the mirror I had stood on one foot while stretching the other leg, pulling my foot up behind me. I was curious how long I could do this so I did a few trials with each leg where I did it until it became too painful. I lasted about 2 minutes on one leg and 2.5 minutes on the other.

This might seem trivial — and I forgot about it. But standing on one foot continuously for a relatively long time surely stressed my leg muscles much more than usual. Previous research convinced me that standing many hours improves sleep. Maybe this “extreme standing” produces the same hormonal effects in a few minutes as normal standing does in ten hours. That would be wonderful!