Everybody, in a sense, is a “personal scientist.” For example, we enthusiastically try different recipes to make foods taste more delicious. Women are extraordinary self-experimenters. Every woman can tell you how many cosmetics she has tried and what is the best for her skin. Indeed, we do variety things to ourselves hopefully to fix some ailments. Many people constantly change their behaviors such as drinking water instead of coffee, replacing meat with vegetables, and listening to music to improve their moods, let alone many unfortunate souls hopelessly try to diet, quit smoking, or abstain from alcohol. We do experiments on ourselves all the time.

In fact, many scientific discoveries were made by self experiments. 1956 Nobel Prize winner Werner Forssmann threaded a catheter to his heart through a vein in his arm to demonstrate the vascular catheterization. Barry Marshall drank Helicobacter pylori to prove that the bacteria can cause stomach ulcers. Nowadays, all insulin treated diabetic patients have to do a little experiment on themselves to figure out the best dosage and timing to inject insulin.

Recently I am also very interested in self experiments. Three months’ ago, I started to exercise without restricting my diet. Physical activities have tons of physiological benefits which I don’t need to reiterate here. But I have another motivation to do this. I am used to sitting in the chair all day long. I had tried to increase physical activities several times but all attempts had failed. This time I wanted to see how long I could carry out my plan, how much pain I could tolerate, and what kind of physical and emotional responses I had along the exercise. In particular, I wanted to know why I could not adhere to the plan. I decided to make it a scientific experiment with only one observation–myself.

To be a real experiment, however, we should deliberately manipulate our environment and record the outcome. Being physically inactive for so long, I decided to do something moderate. Since I bought a decent bicycle last year (surely for exercise), a reasonable choice was to ride the bike to work every day. It is about half an hour biking from my home to my office and the road has a biking lane. There is nothing more suitable for me than biking.

However, to choose appropriate outcomes turned out tricky. I am well learned to know that weight should not be an outcome. A month or two moderate exercises won’t change the weight. Instead, my weight may increase slightly if I did not restrict my energy intake. Heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle strength are not appropriate outcomes either because within a short period they won’t change much and I cannot measure them during the exercise anyway. Nevertheless, I found some outcomes originally seemed nonsense but were actually very useful. The first outcome is the time I spend from my home to office. It took me 35 min from my home to office the first day I rode to work. There was a lot of room to improve. Secondly, I devised a physical fitness scale. The scale includes muscle sore, difficulties in heart-beating and breathing, perspiration, and tiresome, each with a score from 1 to 5.

During the first two months, the most evident improvement was the time I spent on the road. It decreased from 35 min to 20-25 min. Most important, I shifted from the middle gear to the high gear. It increased the workload at ascending slopes. However, there was not much improvement in physical fitness scale.

It was till this month (the third month) that I started to feel the improvement in physical fitness. Although I still perspire pervasively (probably due to high temperature) and my legs are sore, I don’t feel very tired when I reach the office. Now I deliberately take a detour to ride on a long ascending slope. I still feel great.

I should congratulate myself for adhering my plan for so long and finding interest in doing exercises. After all, there is no reward for exercises except for physical fitness which is not a strong incentive anyway. Most people know that exercises help your body, but why so many people don’t want to do it? It is because physical fitness is not an immediate reward. Instead, the physical fatigue and strict plan outweigh all the benefits you can imagine. Furthermore, sitting casually is more comfortable than exercising. Then why can I do it this time?

I think the only difference between this one and last numerous infertile attempts is the self-recording. To investigate the condition in which I would most likely quit bicycling, I not only recorded my exercise outcomes but also wrote down my thoughts and feelings about each exercise. By reviewing my journal, I have noticed my ups and downs in terms of willingness to exercise, and basically rediscovered many psychological theories. The first two weeks were the most difficult period (initiation difficulties); When my legs were too sore, I would like to quit; when I stopped bicycling for several days due to adverse weather, I was reluctant to bike again; when I was in bad moods, I wanted to withdraw. These were very typical psychological phenomena during the process of changing behaviors. But by writing them down, I acknowledged these problems and somehow managed to carry out my plan. Self observation is a powerful tool to change behaviors.

Self observation, most likely in the form of journaling, has been advocated by cognitive behaviorists for years. It may seem naive and ridiculous for an adult to write a journal (or diary if you insist). In fact, I never wrote any journal before. It was a shame that I didn’t know what kind of format a journal should be. Anyway, I started haphazardly by writing down whatever occurred in my mind after each exercise. I found that my journal had revealed many of my characteristics I never thought of. It was self reflective and also self refreshing.

For example, because feelings and moods are vague and good feelings are easily forgotten after subsequent bad mood strikes, it is hard to track the effect of exercise on the mood. Having written down my feelings after each exercise, I realized that my moods varied considerably but indeed had been improved along the way.

Inspired by this, I start journaling formally. During last few weeks, I was focusing more on how to modify my psychological behaviors such as wandering thoughts, excessive internet usage, impulsive moods, and particularly the time management. I have recorded how many minutes I spent on chatting, internet surfing, working on different projects, and mindlessly idle. I have also written down my thoughts and feelings after most activities.

The self observation–my journal–has faithfully recorded my trying experience, hour by hour. It also helps me revamp my self-experiments. In fact, self-observation itself may be the best intervention to change some behaviors (self-observation effect, reactivity). For instance, by recording my activities and thoughts, I have already stopped most of my random thoughts, improved my moods, and reduced my internet usage before I applied any techniques.

Self experiment and self observation prove indispensable in my daily life. I am glad I have rediscovered this useful tool.

More to come about self observation and self directed behavior modification techniques.