Experiments in Self-experimentation
Vitamins, Supplements, Nootropics, Mouth Tape, Tech Cleanses, and Lucid Dreaming
I’ve been drawn to the biohacking and self-experimentation space since I heard about the guy who got a novel prize for infecting himself with H. Pylori just so he could treat it as proof of his theory of peptic ulcer formation.
First, because it’s practical. Self-experimentation isn’t externally valid. I.e., the results aren’t necessarily applicable to others. But they are, by definition, highly relevant to you! The ‘n’ equals ‘1’, but that ‘1’ is the only one that matters. Population statistics don’t apply to individuals. If an intervention does not improve something at a population level but dramatically improves it for you specifically, that is good information to know!
Second, because it’s fun. It makes the boring things interesting. Being told to avoid high fructose syrup and desserts because ‘its bad for your health’ is boring. Getting to see your blood sugar levels spike after a meal, tinker with what you eat, and track trends over time with a continuous glucose monitor is fun. Generally, it is difficult to muster up the degree of concern that is warranted for boring-but-important things (especially those with severe tail-end outcomes that creep up slowly without recognition before it is too late). With data and self-experimentation, those boring-but-important things become interesting-and-important things.
However, I’m also easily sidetracked and on a tight budget. I don't have a continuous glucose monitor. Nor do I have the EEG machine I want to buy one day. But I did some self-experimentation over the last year. Below is that list of things.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D deficits can lead to bone mineralization issues. I also has unclear associations with a bunch of other things such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and depression. As someone in the mental health care field, I am less interested in the bone stuff and more interested in the depression stuff. We get vitamin D partly through diet, but also through chemical synthesis from sunlight exposure. Last winter, I had a 3-month span where I would enter the hospital for work before sunrise and leave work after sunset. At most, I’d get about 60 seconds of sunlight a day walking across the sky bridge. At the end of this, I went to my doctor (who turned out actually to be a nurse practitioner) excitedly expressing interest in a vitamin D level. If it was ever going to be low, it would be now! After being flagged as ‘at risk for low vitamin D’ in the EHR, insurance agreed to pay for a vitamin D level.
There’s not a well-established ‘normal’ because it varies by age and other demographic factors, such as menopause. In a crude sense though, greater than 20ng/mL is normal.
I clocked in at 19ng/mL.
What I learned
I’m not at risk of vitamin D deficiency.
Omega 3.
Like Vitamin D, Omega-3 fatty acids are another supplement linked to pretty much everything. Included under ‘everything’ is cholesterol and, once again, our friend depression. Fish oils are an often used source of ‘healthy fats’. To get the amount of DHA/EPA that the studies I saw being cited used, capsules would have been pricey. Instead, I bought this bottle of fish oil. I obtained baseline cholesterol levels, seen below, which are typically covered by insurance under the category of preventative medicine. Insurance would rather pay for screenings like this and have doctors encourage exercise early on than pay for the substantial chronic financial burden of cardiovascular disease after it’s developed.
Excited to have pulled the trigger on fish oil after it being on my radar for over a year, I had my daily fish oil in a shot glass for about two weeks before leaving it in a hotel room while traveling.
What I learned
First, one of the few drawbacks of buying in concentrate/in bulk- if you lose it you lose a lot. Second, insurance put up a fight to cover the cost of this lab work. It took 12+ hours on the phone and multiple podcasts about how to understand medical billing to eventually (after 10 months!) demonstrate to my insurance that I don’t owe them $900. 80+% of people would have just paid it, and it’s ridiculous how convoluted the system is. My wife had her labs drawn from the same clinic on the same insurance just days before. In the end, they not only dropped the bill but sent me a small refund because they incorrectly billed my vitamin D lab. Shout out to my wife, who did all this work. Overall, I mostly experientially learned that health insurance is awful, and I harbor guilt for being ‘part of the system’.
Thesis (Nootropic Company)
As someone who went from never drinking coffee in medical school, to now being a coffee drinker, I’ve become substantially more interested in cosmetic psychopharmacology. If one can legally skydive, take out predatory individual loans, and risk their life in the military, one should be able to tinker with one's state of consciousness pharmacologically. Now, clearly, addiction and dependence are concerns here. But there is a wide spectrum of ‘drugs’ available between accepting the default mindstate and injecting methamphetamines into your veins recreationally. For example, caffeine. Thus, I tried Thesis - a nootropic company touting different blends of supplements to help ‘confidence’, ‘creativity’, etc. I’m doubtful of claims like this. If there were a ‘Think Better’ module in the brain, why not always have it on? Like all things in life, there are tradeoffs. But I tried them anyway because being rational isn’t always the most fun way to approach things.
I got 4 different ‘blends’, tried them each for a week, and scored them on various domains. I was blinded to what blend I was taking at the time. There was a brief washout period between blends. In addition to the Likert scales which are below, I tried writing subjective changes as well. I wrote stuff like ‘Multiple times today, I got into the flow of things, did extra dishes because I had the urge to do things thoroughly. It was wonderful.' or ‘I noticed small amounts of autopilot clicking at work’, and my favorite: ‘Still needed coffee’.
What I learned
My takeaway from this is that Likert scales are awful. I was highly intrinsically interested in the reporting of data and ‘tried’ hard to do it well. But it’s hard to operationalize things like ‘creativity’. What is a 7/10 mood? How much of it is influenced by the day as a whole versus the last 5 minutes? Remembered versus experiential self? On top of that, it is hard to separate the role of extraneous factors such as stress at work, weather, relationship strain at the time, etc. I never scored above an eight on anything - is that normal? Ultimately, this self-experiment was hogwash, but I still want to explore ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’. Lastly, maybe I need to supplement more logic into my life.
Mouth Tape
I tried mouth tape. I felt I slept much better and noticed waking up less during the note (should have tracked this as it is objective). At baseline, I could wake up 8-10 times a night easily tossing and turning. In medical school, a 5’3” Asian female told me her story of how she struggled in college and was eventually diagnosed with sleep apnea despite her being the last person based on her risk factors. A CPAP machine improved her life from falling asleep in class at Stanford to energetically going through medical school. Since then, I’ve been quasi-convinced that I have sleep apnea. Now I’m more convinced.
What I learned
I (probably) don’t have sleep apnea, but think I might.
14-day tech cleanse
The day before going on vacation for a week, my phone broke. This meant paper plane tickets instead of scanning my app, borrowing phones for GPS (and getting lost and having to talk to strangers), and other disruptions to my life. For the first time in over a decade, I would have to spend more than a day without a phone.
What I learned
It is a whole lot easier to be present in the moment when you don’t have a phone. Often, being present meant looking around and seeing how much other people reflexively reached for their phones. The classic Get On Elevator And Pull Out Phone Swipe Swipe Put Phone Back In Pocket (GOEAPOPSSPPBIP) was significantly more glaring. It’s not that I am above GOEAPOPSSPPBIPing. But it’s disheartening to watch these reflexive reaches for distraction in life’s lulling moments be so common. It reminded me of this art series. On the bright side, I read a whole book on vacation during the time I would have usually just been ‘on my phone’. Ironically, this book was on time management and avoiding distractions in life. And it is no contest, I enjoyed that book more than reading those ‘really interesting things’ on my phone.
Lucid dreaming.
Life is a controlled hallucination, where controlled means constrained by environmental stimuli. What happens when those restraining stimuli are taken away? Dreams! Strange and even impossible things regularly happen in dreams, but we usually don’t realize that we're dreaming. If you can recognize this, you can have a lucid dream. I. E. Be both the individual in the dream and the controller of what is happening. I read the first part of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming1 for a guide to start lucid dreaming and, to my surprise, had a lucid dream within a week with the assistance of a dream journal. I didn't keep the practice up because it's really hard to muster up the energy to write dreams down as I wake up (and don't want to bother the bed partner). But it was possible and opened up a strange new world. Below are two sample journal dreams. Another example is found here, where I talk about dreams at more length.
A cruise ship I kept defending. I was kinda a superhero. We were miniature. A guy had trapped us in my basement and was determining our work output mathematically. So.me rebelled and voluntarily brought information to him about the inner workings but instantly regretted it. The shop was on lock down and I'd sneak around. To get to important areas I would blink teleport and go invisible for 5 seconds. I could also charge up a power attack and magnetically attack submarine and other monsters that approached the cruise ship. One time while the ship was on lock down to prevent it's info from being stolen, rebels overtook it and reactivated a giant water slide to slide off the ship.
Josh and Felicia are playing video games and I meet them in the cafeteria. It's like college where people come and go as they want and I'm showing up to see who's there. There was a whole story here that I can't recall.
... Walking around university campus and I get lost. I try using Google maps to teleport back to the team who is in the cafeteria. The team are my co-residents and Dr. I Actually Know #1. It kinda works the first time because the time elapsed and things went dark, but I found my self still lost. I decide to just walk it. I eventually start walking and take a short cut. I end up going through thee front of the hospital doors and bombarded with patients. I get stuck doing an h and p and my coresident Mark sees me. I'm embarrassed at how slow my History and Physicals are. The whole team has to come help. Eddie is spraying me with oil and it raises my LDL. It's in a ketchup-like container and is oil that is supposed to be included in gift bags for patients as part of the intake paperwork. My eyes are closed and he's just lathering my head with it, I ask him to stop but he doesn't (he thinks it's funny not cruel). I eventually have learned helplessness. My lab report comes back as a gene sight and my ldl is in the yellow. Dr. Someone I Actually Know #2 joins the team in this lobby that were at. The packages include a bunch of cloth garbage bags filled with stuff. Instead of doing them one by one to completeness, I'm opening a bunch and stuffing but not tying it off. I have a lot almost done when the tram arrives to help. An apron get accidently tied to one of them. (note to reader - I'm confused as you are). I'm typing up a history and physical and someone comes over and notes how literally slow my typing is and says 'no wonder your slow at this'. I'm typing at a normal pace when being told this. We're lifting the gift bags up to the table and one keeps falling off(??)...
What I learned
Lucid dreaming is trainable. Although the entire dream world is simply the content of our brain (awareness?), we can learn to manipulate that content while maintaining a sense of self that identifies with only a portion of that completely fabricated world. Trippy!