March 19, 2016

An Experiment In Morning Blues

Hello friends!

If you're curious what I get up to with my time, observe! I ran this little self-study over the past couple of weeks. This post reports it using a hodgepodge style somewhere between personal notes and a scientific paper.

If you want to encourage the norm of testing everyday ideas empirically, or just do me a solid favor, please be my mini peer-review and take a moment to comment.

~*~

When I have a bad morning, the rest of the day's productivity seems to get shot and that feels bad. I set out to do something about it.

Question: What are the key factors in having a pleasant morning?

Hypothesis: Happiness will correlate with getting dressed and eating food and getting sunlight. I expect I can manage those things more easily when I'm in a good mood.

Method: For 15 mornings, I recorded when I did one of a set of things on the whiteboard. Collected "Happy, get sunlight, get dressed, get water, eat food, noise control". Looked for visual correlations. Checked straight predictive accuracy.

Results:

sorry blind people i'm lazy

Dashes in the first image mark a wholly blank day.

The second image is some summary data of the first.
Counts: True positive, false negatives, false positives, true negatives for each column.
Below that: Accuracy, precision, sensitivity (recall) for each column

Conclusions:

  • Noise control may help a bit. Nothing else looked like an especially accurate predictor of mood.
  • Eating in the morning may anti-predict feeling good.
  • Getting a drink might be a sensitive enough mood test to use as a Trigger Action for exploiting them.
Sanity checks:
(This is a new section in my notes, added to encourage me to notice whether my ideas could be wrong in a way that would have take embarrassingly little effort to find out. If you can facilitate one of these sanity checks, please let me know!)

  • Ask someone who can Real Science(tm) to calculate my result's p-values.
    • Common sense-wise, I had 5 happy mornings recorded to work with. All of my conclusions are based on, like, a difference of 1 data point.
  • Check correlations between the variables themselves.
  • Take a mood test with one of clearerthinking.org's tools at several different times before 11am. If I get a wide variance and/or the empirical-ish results differ from my overall self-report then my results are probably bogus.
  • Search google scholar for studies about morning routines and read the abstracts
  • Test whether I get carb crashes. Food does have a plausible mechanism for causing a negative effect.
  • Ask autistic tumblr how they tweak their morning routines to prevent overload.
Potential Follow-ups:

  • Try this again when I'm not sick
  • Trigger Action Plan: With a drink in my hand, free associate thoughts about stuff I need to do.
  • Practice making/importing data into R
  • Spend a week or two collecting a more representative sample of things I do in the morning, run another self-study with those.

1 comment:

  1. I hate mornings. I have to wake up in like 6 hours, so I'm even less likely to be in good shape in the morning. However, tomorrow is the first day of a new semester, full of hope and optimism--therefore, I'm nearly certain I'll have a good morning. I also have the benefit of a friendly roommate that will nudge me if my mostly asleep brain decides to mount a mutiny.
    A thought about the experiment--it's difficult to determine causation without control of the variables. A happier mental state could lead to going outside, eating, etc.
    Overall, I like the blog. I find typical self improvement stuff awfully soft-science and floofy, so it's nice to see an aggressively objective approach. Admittedly, I didn't have much time to fully digest this, perhaps you could compose lighter articles with advice based on personal evidence, then link to longer articles (here and elsewhere).

    ReplyDelete

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