Category: quantified self movement

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

 

  • Are the Boston Red Sox malnourished? Paul Jaminet looks at the connection between poor health of the Boston Red Sox and the dietary advice they were given.
  • Cognitive benefits of chewing gum. “Chewing gum was associated with greater alertness and a more positive mood. Reaction times were quicker in the gum condition, and this effect became bigger as the task became more difficult.”
  • Dave Asprey and Quantified Self. “He claims to have jacked up his IQ by 40 points.”
  • “Why is this country called China in English?” I asked a Tsinghua student. “It was a source of china,” she said. She was more right than she could have known. The world’s oldest pottery has been found in China. (Via Melissa McEwen.) Given this head start, it’s no surprise that for a long time China had a monopoly on really hard pottery, called bone china or porcelain. It was the only source of this china.

Surprising Predictions From Self-Measurement

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Patrick Tucker, an editor at The Futurist, posted a request on the Quantified Self Forums for “astounding” predictions based on self-quantification. He is writing a book about using data to make predictions.

Here are examples from my self-measurement:

1. Drinking sugar water causes weight loss. The self-quantification was measuring my weight. It began when I found a new way to lose weight, which pushed me to try to explain why it worked. The explanation I came up with — a new theory of weight control — made two predictions that via self-experimentation I found to be true. That gave me faith in the theory. Then the theory suggested a really surprising conclusion, that loss of appetite during a trip to Paris was due to the sugar-sweetened soft drinks I had been drinking. If so, drinking sugar water should cause weight loss. (The nearly-universal belief is that sugar causes weight gain, of course.) I tested this prediction and it was true. More.

2. Seeing faces in the morning improves mood the next day (but not the same day). This is so surprising I’ll spell it out: Seeing faces Monday morning improves my mood on Tuesday but not Monday. For years I measured my sleep trying to reduce early awakening. Finally I figured out that not eating breakfast helped. There was no breakfast during the Stone Age; this led me to take seriously the idea that other non-Stone-Age aspects of my life were also hurting my sleep. That was one reason I decided to watch to watch a certain TV show one morning. It had no immediate effect. However, the next morning I woke up feeling great. Via self-measurement of mood, I determined it was the faces on TV that produced the effect, confirmed the effect many times, and learned what details of the situation (e.g., face size) controlled the effect. More.

3. One-legged standing improves sleep. Via self-measurement I determined that how much I stood during a day controlled how well I slept. If I stood a long time, I slept better. Ten years later I woke one day after having slept much better than usual. The previous day had been unusual in many ways. One of them was so tiny that at first I overlooked it: I had stood on one leg a few times. Just for a few minutes. Yet it turned out that it was the one-legged standing that had improved my sleep. Without the previous work on ordinary standing I would have ignored the one-legged standing — it seemed trivial.

4. Butter is healthy. I found that butter improved how fast I can do arithmetic problems. No doubt it improves brain function measured in other ways. Because the optimum nutrition for the brain will be close to the optimum nutrition for the rest of the body — at least, this is what I believe — I predict that butter will turn out to be healthy for my whole body, not just my brain.

5. Mainstream Vitamin D research is all messed up. Via self-measurement I confirmed Tara Grant’s conclusion that taking Vitamin D3 in the morning (rather than later) improved her sleep. It improved my sleep, too. When I had taken it at other times of day I had noticed nothing. Apparently the timing of Vitamin D — the time of day that you take it — matters enormously. Take it at the right time in the morning: obvious good effect. Take it late in the evening: obvious bad effect. Vitamin D researchers haven’t realized this. They have neither controlled when Vitamin D is taken (in experiments) nor measured when it is taken (in surveys). Because timing matters so much it is as if they have done their research failing to control or measure dose. If you fail to control/measure dose, whatever conclusion you reach (good/no effect/bad) depends entirely on what dose your subjects happened to take. And you have no idea what dose that is.

Beijing Quantified Self?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I recently had lunch with Richard Sprague, an engineer at Microsoft Beijing. He raised the possibility of starting a Quantified Self Meetup group in Beijing. The meetings could be held in one of Microsoft’s two brand new buildings, which are in the exact center of Zhongguancun. If you might attend, please let me know (e.g., by commenting on this post).

The Value of Moodscope

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In 2007, Jon Cousins started tracking his mood to help NHS psychiatrists decide if he was cyclothymic (a mild form of bipolar disorder). After a few months of tracking, he started sharing his scores with a friend, who expressed concern when his score was low. Jon’s mood sharply improved, apparently because of the sharing. This led him to start Moodscope, a website that makes it easy to track your mood and share the results.

I was curious about the generality of what happened to Jon — how does sharing mood ratings affect other people? In January, Jon kindly posted a short survey about this. More than 100 people replied.

Their answers surprised me. First, in a survey about sharing your mood — not about tracking your mood — most respondents did not share their mood. It is as if, in a survey about being tall, most respondents were not tall. Second, although Jon’s mood sharply rose as soon as he started sharing, this was not the usual experience. Sharing helped, some people said, but other people said sharing hurt. For example, one person said her mood was used against her in arguments. Finally, the respondents gave all sorts of persuasive reasons that rating their mood helped them. To me, at least, the value of mood rating isn’t obvious. I can list a dozen hypothetical benefits but whether they actually happen is unclear to me. I rated my mood for years and did it only to learn about the effects of morning faces. MoodPanda, another mood-rating site, gives a few brief vague unenthusiastic reasons to track your mood. And their site is all about mood rating.

In contrast, Moodscope users were clear and enthusiastic about the value of tracking. Here are some reasons they liked mood-tracking:

It is useful to look back sometimes to help you find ways of ‘keeping up’ a positive mood/outlook.

My mood range has definitely narrowed since starting mood stabilizers, so using Moodscope has given me solid evidence that the treatment is working well. I also run statistical analyses of my mood charts against variables like sleep, medication use, and alcohol consumption. The correlations were not particularly meaningful using a 9-point Likert-like scale from a standard mood chart. When I used my Moodscope scores instead, I suddenly found that some of the correlations are (ridiculously!) statistically significant, which also made me feel more certain about what I need to do and change to better manage my mental health.

I could express my miserableness in total safety, without leaning on anybody else. It has proved wonderful. My profile has risen from a score of 7 on day 1 (11 months ago) to the 90s now. Being able to track my reasons for feeling better or worse has been part of this. The patterns are visible, ditto the triggers that send me up or down.

The great benefit of Moodscope has been to confirm the advantages of my own lifestyle management for coping with bipolar disorder. It has shown that what I felt was bad for me, is indeed bad, and what I felt was good for me, is indeed good. (I know that I have to take the meds.)

It helps that I can post things about sleep hours in the comments and see the correlation to the chart.

I have found the tool immensely helpful in gaining insight into how my own behaviour and thoughts can impact upon my mental health. I have gained more control.

It helps me to gain insight into my moods, take responsibility for them and steer a calmer, more productive course through life.

It allows me not to panic when I am low as I can see that ups and downs are all part of life.

Pre-Moodscope, I would not realize i was on the way down until 10 or so days had passed, and so I had done nothing. But with Moodscope, I can see if it’s a trend and do something immediately. It means I deliberately intervene earlier.

I use my scores, and comments, to understand what triggers my low mood and take steps to stop it getting lower, in so far as I am able.

I view it as a diary of sorts, private for my own contemplation.

I want to catch myself before I make a deep plunge and stay down too long. I do use the info with my doctor. I love having something concrete to show and talk about.

It has helped me feel like there is a greater safety net there, and given me a greater awareness of when I’m slipping back into my treacle pit; I now know that any score between 20 and 30 means I am in dangerous territory and need to take some remedial action, and if I get below 20 then I’m really in a bad way.

Moodscope has helped me identify incidents in my life with my mood. For example if I have to assert myself strongly with someone, I feel exhilarated and very proud of myself for about two day then gradually my mood will lower and a week later I will feel apathetic and down. I love that it is helping me make sense of my emotions and as a result I am not judgmental of them.

I’ve found Moodscope really useful in finding out what influences my moods. I am bipolar and after 20 years on lithium I’m managing without any meds. Don’t worry, I came off it slowly, under medical supervision!

I use Moodscope as a sort of diary of how I am feeling. Looking back I can see what really pushed my mood down and oddly it’s not always the major things that you’d imagine. In my case depression is brought on more by physical health problems – I am a CFS sufferer.

I sum up their reasons like this: 1. Helps understand causality (what causes mood to be low or high?). 2. Immediate guidance (should I take action to raise it?). 3. Self-expression (similar to diary). 4. Reassurance (low moods are “part of life”). Alexandra Carmichael wrote about the value of mood-tracking and mood-sharing. Her experience did not repeat Jon’s: She found little initial benefit of sharing, but great eventual benefits (“a kind of deep, healing therapy”). This was the main benefit of tracking for her — that it allowed this sharing. Kari Sullivan also tried Moodscope. She didn’t share her mood. The benefits she list fall under the heading of Reason #1 (helps understand causality). For example, she learned “most social interaction lowers my mood,” which surprised her.

Not everyone liked tracking:

My girlfriend . . . stopped using Moodscope. In her words, “I don’t want Moodscope to remind me how terrible I’m doing.”

She has now decided to give up on taking the test as it just reinforces her feelings of general greyness and sometimes despair.

At a website devoted to collecting new ideas about health, Moodscope ranked #1 out of about 500 ideas.

When I started my self-experimentation I didn’t get anywhere for a long time (after initial success with acne). After 1990, however, I was astonished at the progress I made. One useful discovery after another — how to lose weight, sleep better, be in a better mood, and so on. Over the next 20 years, I improved my health considerably more than all the other scientists in the world put together. I came to see what was happening as a kind of catalysis. The useful information was already there; my personal science was the catalyst that turned it into something useful. (Lack of people like me was why the discoveries were so abundant — a counter-example to Tyler Cowen’s lack-of-low-hanging fruit explanation for stagnation.) Professional scientists were too restricted in what they did.

The Moodscope story is similar. Psychologists have been studying and measuring mood for a long time. The Profile of Mood States is an important result of their research. But no psychologist saw it as an agent of change. It was simply a research tool, albeit a popular one. Only when Jon Cousins started using it for his own selfish purposes did it become clear how useful it could be. He was the catalyst.

Both my story and Jon’s are examples of what I say about DIYization of science: It gets tools into the hands of a larger and more diverse group of possible innovators, who are less “stuck” — less committed to old ways of doing things — than the professionals. They are also more motivated to do something useful than the professionals, who are weighed down with other big concerns — about status, job security, money, and so on.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Thanks to Jim McGuire, Dave Lull and Peter Spero.

Ten Interesting Things I Learned From Adventures in Nutritional Therapy

Seth Roberts13 Comments

A blog called Adventures in Nutritional Therapy (started March 2011) is about what the author learned while trying to solve her health problems via nutrition and a few other things. She usually assumed her health problems were due to too much or too little of some nutrient. She puts it like this: “using mostly non-prescription, over-the-counter (OTC) supplements and treatments to address depression, brain fog, insomnia, migraines, hypothyroidism, restless legs, carpal tunnel syndrome, and a bunch of other annoyances.” In contrast to what “the American medical establishment” advises. Mostly it is nutritional self-experimentation about a wide range of health problems.

Interesting things I learned from the archives:

1. Question: Did Lance Armstrong take performance-enhancing drugs? I learned that LiveStrong (Armstrong’s site) is a content farm. Now answer that question again.

2. “If you return repeatedly to a conventional doctor with a problem they can’t solve, they will eventually suggest you need antidepressants.”

3. “When I mentioned [to Dr. CFS] the mild success I’d had with zinc, he said it was in my mind: I wanted it to work and it did. When I pointed out that 70% of the things I tried didn’t work, he changed the subject. Dr. CFS’ lack of basic reasoning skills did nothing to rebuild my confidence in the health care system.” Quite right. I have had the same experience. Most things I tried failed. When something finally worked, it could hardly be a placebo effect. This line of reasoning has been difficult for some supposedly smart people to grasp.

4. A list of things that helped her with depression. “Quit gluten” is number one.

5. Pepsi caused her to get acne. Same here.

6. 100 mg/day of iron caused terrible acne that persisted for weeks after she stopped taking the iron.

7. “ In September 2008 I started a journey that serves as a good example of the limits of the American health care system, where you can go through three months, 15 doctor visits, $7,000 in medical tests, three prescriptions and five over-the-counter medications trying to treat your abdominal pain, and after you lose ten pounds due to said pain, you are asked by the “specialists” if you have an eating disorder.” I agree. Also an example of the inability of people within the American health care system to see those limits. If they recognized that people outside their belief system might have something valuable to contribute, apparently something awful would happen.

8. Acupuncture relieved her sciatica, but not for long. “By the time I left [the acupuncturist’s office] the pain was gone, but it crept back during my 30-minute drive home.”

9. Pointing out many wrongs does not equal a right. She praises a talk by Robert Lustig about evil fructose. I am quite sure that fructose (by itself) did not cause the obesity epidemic. For one thing, I lost a lot of weight by drinking it. (Here is an advanced discussion.) In other words, being a good critic of other people’s work (as Lustig may be) doesn’t get you very far. I think it is hard for non-scientists (and even some scientists) to understand that all scientific work has dozens of “flaws”. Pointing out the flaws in this or that is little help, unless those flaws haven’t been noticed. What usually helps isn’t seeing flaws, it is seeing what can be learned.

10. A list of what caused headaches and migraines. One was MSG. Another was Vitamin D3, because it made her Vitamin B1 level too low.

She is a good writer. Mostly I found support for my beliefs: 1. Of the two aspects of self-experimentation (measure, change), change is more powerful. She does little or no self-tracking (= keeping records) as far as I could tell, yet has made a lot of progress. She has done a huge amount of trying different things. 2. Nutritional deficiencies cause a lot of problems. 3. Fermented food is overlooked. She never tries it, in spite of major digestive problems. She does try probiotics. 4. American health care is exceedingly messed-up. As she puts it, “the American medical establishment has no interest in this approach [which often helped her] and, when they do deign to discuss it, don’t know what the #%@! they’re talking about.” 5. “Over the years I’ve found accounts of personal experiences to be very helpful.” I agree. Her blog and mine are full of them.

Thanks to Alexandra Carmichael.

More Her latest post mentions me (“The fella after my own heart is Seth Roberts, who after ten years of experimenting . . . “). I was unaware of that when I wrote the above.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

  • Interview with me on Jimmy Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Locarb
  • This article about natto helped its author win a prize for best newspaper food column
  • great QS talk about self-measurement by John Sumser. “It all started when I quit smoking. Bad idea. Since I quit smoking in 2004, every quarter for 7 years it has rained shit on me.”
  • In a QS talk, I compare the Quantified Self movement and the paleo movement.
  • Chinese high-school students in America: Not what was promised. Lack of “rigor” has benefits, as I have blogged: “Dismayed by the school’s [poor] college placement record, Chen considered transferring. Instead, he began to enjoy himself. Because his courses were undemanding, he had time for friends and outside interests. He took four Advanced Placement tests on his own.“I’ve developed my personality a lot,” Chen said. “Everything turned out for the best.””
  • If you read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, a pro-vegetarian book, you may remember the big role played by some casein experiments with rats. Rats that ate a low-casein (= low animal-protein) diet were supposedly in better health than rats that ate a high-casein (= high animal-protein) diet. In this article Chris Masterjohn shows how misleading that was. “One thing is certain: low-protein diets depressed normal growth, increased the susceptibility to many toxins, killed toxin-exposed animals earlier, induced fatty liver, and increased the development of pre-cancerous lesions when fed during the initiation period of chemical carcinogenesis.”

Thanks to Janet Chang.

Cheap Safe Remedies: Oatmeal (Cholesterol) & Deep Breathing (Blood Pressure)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A friend who lives in New York City writes:

The doctor I had when I lived in San Diego believed in always trying the gentlest and simplest remedies before resorting to anything as drastic as drugs or surgery. My cholesterol was high and she suggested I try lowering it by eating oatmeal for breakfast every day, saying it didn’t work for everybody but a lot of her patients had been able to avoid going on statins that way. “But I hate oatmeal,” I whined, like a sulky child. She said perhaps I would get used to it; wouldn’t it be better than being dependent on medications for the rest of my life? So, reluctantly, I bought some Quaker Oats and gave it a try. The results were dramatic — my cholesterol numbers were “perfect” the next time I had a blood test. Dr. Yu was right about getting used to oatmeal, too — I actually like it now, and look forward to my daily bowl.

Perhaps inspired by my success with the oatmeal, I also lowered my blood pressure myself, through breathing exercises. A friend who is into alternative medicine had told me about being advised by several of her alternative-medicine practitioners to try lowering her blood pressure in that way, so when mine was high, I just googled about lowering it until I found a site that offered free demo clips of a kind of breathing exercise geared to music — you can choose whether classical or new age. As it said on the site, they don’t work for everybody, and most people have to do them for twenty minutes daily for a couple of weeks before the benefits begin showing up at all, but some lucky folks see an immediate and drastic drop in blood pressure the first time they try. I turned out to be one of the lucky ones. For months, I did the breathing exercises daily, cued to inhale and exhale by their demo tapes, and my blood pressure stayed down. Eventually i even sprang for the CD set they were selling on the site, just because I got sick of hearing those same melodies on the free demo clips over and over. Now I’ve internalized the rhythms so I don’t need any music at all to cue me, and I can do the exercises anywhere, while doing other things, and my blood pressure has remained low. I do notice that if I ever neglect the exercises, when my life gets busy and I just forget to do them, it starts creeping up again — which is good incentive to keep them up. Basically, the exercises just consist of inhaling to a slow count of 8 and exhaling to a slow count of 16, and doing that for about 20 minutes every day. My blood pressure was around 160/90 before I started the exercises. Now it’s 120/80, just as it should be.

I also find the breathing exercises very soothing, in general. When I’m upset about something like, say, being stuck on a slow bus that is crawling through traffic while I’m in danger of being late to something and am surrounded by screeching children, I find that doing those exercises enables me to be reasonably serene and philosophical instead of miserable and angry and anxious.

Notice that by measuring her blood pressure regularly my friend (a) learned how to control it and (b) collected excellent evidence that breathing exercises help. Because individuals can easily collect such evidence — my friend did so by being lazy — a good response to “where’s the double-blind randomized trial?” is Mark Frauenfelder’s: Big Brother loves you.

Van Gogh Defense Project: Rationale

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A colleague I’ll call John has decided to start tracking his mood for a long period of time (years). He explains why:

A few years ago, after a severe manic attack, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The attack was preceded by an intense period of stress, then two weeks of elevated mood, increased social activity (hanging out and meeting people), and racing thoughts (hypomania). Then I skipped a few nights of sleep, wandered down roads in the middle of the night, and eventually became psychotic, in that I could no longer distinguish between reality and imagination. I was chased by cops on several occasions, and was involuntarily committed to the mental health wing of a hospital for a month. It put a massive dent in my life.

Family, medicine, and time helped me recover. Being out of control like that was fun only for the first two weeks. Having my life turned upside down was not fun either. As I recovered I became increasingly interested in finding ways to prevent a relapse. One doctor said: You have a vulnerability. You need to protect yourself. I agreed.

Looking back on the experience, I realized there was a rise in odd behaviors two weeks before I started to skip nights of sleep and fell into psychosis. There was an even longer buildup of stress, anxiety, and fear in the months before the mania hit. During the last two weeks before the mania, my behavior was different from what is normal for me. I felt elated and had a sense of general “breakthrough”. I suddenly felt no fear and anxiety. I felt on top of the world. I was constantly taking notes because ideas and thoughts were running through my head. I scheduled meetings and social activities almost constantly throughout these two weeks and shared my experiences as my new self. As I started to sleep less and skip nights of sleep, others later told me I seemed agitated and down.

Maybe it is possible to catch these early warning signs and take counter measures before they worsen into mania or depression. This is why I have started to track my behavior starting with mood and sleep. If I can get a baseline of my behavior and know what is ‘normal’ for me, it will be easier to notice when I am outside my normal range. I can alert myself or be alerted by others around me who are monitoring me. Long-term records of mood will also help me experiment to see which things influence my mood. This may give me more control over my mood.

Mood tracking might be a good idea for anyone to do, but it may be especially helpful for people with a bipolar diagnosis. Everyone has mood variation. For bipolars, however, mood swings can be more extreme (in both directions, up and down) , have far worse consequences (psychosis on one end and suicide on the other), change more rapidly, and be more vulnerable to environmental triggers like stress. The good news is that the first changes in mood can happen hours or days before more extreme changes. This gives people a chance to take countermeasures to prevent more extreme states.

The project name refers to the fact that Van Gogh had bipolar disorder.