n = 1
Socrates said, “Know thyself.”
That’s actually pretty dang hard to do! I remember quoting Socrates 20 years ago when I was trying to learn how to interview for a local pageant. I’m grateful for it because it began a life-long journey into figuring out who I am and how I operate. Have I succeeded in truly knowing myself? Not yet. What I have started though is a study of myself.
My well-being professor last semester had a phrase. She told us to think of our sample size as n=1. Meaning, you are the entire sample for your experiment on well-being. As we learned about each of her pillars of well-being, she encouraged us to experiment with them to investigate what works best for ourselves. In a world where well-being fads come and go, learning how to study what works best for you is a foundational skill for long-term, sustainable well-being.
Here are two key actions that can make studying yourself easier:
Listening behaviors
When we’re in accomplishment mode, we often focus only on achieving our goal. We willingly turn off our receptors for the signals within. This is because it’s often uncomfortable to grow towards our goals and we know if we give too much stock to the discomfort, we’ll just give in and give up. However, if we completely shut down listening to our signals, it can be really easy to also discredit the pain of injury and assume it is the uncomfortable growth I’ve mentioned before. Pushing past our capability to the point of injury will also hinder our ability to reach our goals. For truly sustainable goal accomplishment, we need to consistently reach for our dreams while respecting what our body is currently capable of. To do so, we’ve got to be better at listening daily.
Any behaviors that require a level of mindfulness can be a light into understanding where your own tolerance for this push and pull is. For instance, meditation, yoga, prayer, journaling, therapy, and coaching are all valuable tools that can be used to take true stock of what your body is capable of today. I’m often surprised by the places I’m pushing too hard and the places where I have potential to give more. If I wasn’t willing to sit with myself in curiosity, I would never be aware of those things.
It’s also important to keep in mind that we want to listen to ourselves without judgment. When we let shame and dissatisfaction color our answers, we will also stall our ability to move towards more accomplishment. This is why I suggest “studying” yourself like a scientist. In science, no outcome is a bad outcome because even if your experiment fails, you have learned something. Much like a scientist who looks at their study with curiosity and without judgement, we should also look at what kind of data we are getting from ourselves with simple curiosity.
However, also like a scientist, we need to make sure we are tracking our data in good ways…
Measuring what matters
It’s really easy to think that we can keep track of the stuff that matters with little effort. The problem with this notion is that we don’t realize that we fall prey to cognitive biases regularly and biases will make some things seem bigger or more important than they are. For instance, we’re far more likely to remember a painful situation than we are an easy going one because of negativity bias. Our brains literally make those experiences more memorable. So, using only our memory to try and track well-being is a faulty system.
When you are trying a new change effort, how you record what you’re doing can be the biggest key for understanding what is working for you and what isn’t. Too often, we just record outcomes (such as, I lost 2 lbs this week). Outcomes are nice, but you should also record parts of the process so you can successfully adjust your experiment as you go.
Here's how I’ve applied this to my own world recently. I want to lose 10 more lbs before graduation. However, I’ve plateaued for the last couple of months. After observing my behavior for a couple of days, I realized that my nasty habit of mindlessly snacking on visible food was creeping back in. In the past, I would have just said, “I need to stop doing that.” This time, I’ve chosen to make it more visible (which is a way of measuring things). I have 2 vases that I moved to my kitchen. One has gems in it and the other starts empty each day. Every time I pass up something that I would have snacked on before, I put a gem in the empty jar. Every time I accidentally snack on something; I place a gem on the table by the jar. At the end of the day, I tally the gems. By the end of the day, I can easily see what I was previously writing off as no big deal. This helped me understand that I had been adding hundreds of empty calories to my day through this mindless snacking habit. I had made what was previously invisible visible.
Seeing the invisible created 2 big outcomes for me. 1) I realized that having the food out on the counter or anywhere that I would walk by was the biggest indicator of my snacking habits and so I started packing away the temptation faster. This had the added benefit of a tidier kitchen. 2) Anytime I passed up a snack that I didn’t really want or need, I loved the dopamine hit of dropping a gem in to the jar. Not only that, but I lost 2 lbs in the first week of this experiment.
Notice how there is no judgment here either? It can be easy to say that I should just stop snacking. I know it’s bad for me. I should be able to just do that. However, all those “shoulds” would simply hold me back from making any real progress. It wasn’t until I let the expectation shame go that I was willing to find a real solution to what I was tackling.
Now, another thing to keep in mind is this current experiment will work for a while, but after time, my body will adapt to it. This means eventually, this approach will be less effective. This is why learning the listening behaviors will matter so much. We are not static beings. We consistently shift and change. That’s the beauty and frustration of it all. Overall, the study of ourselves can be a very rewarding life-long pursuit because who knows what we may discover along the way.
Thanks for reading with me today. I hope you take some time this week to investigate yourself with curiosity, compassion, and forward momentum.