10 Insights From My At Home Health Experiment

During the month of July — I decided to explore how I could analyze and assess my life to find opportunities in improving my health from keeping a detailed tracking of bio-readings and diary logging.

Below I describe the raw data I recorded and 10 key insights in causation and correlation I discovered for myself. I hope this helps provide an interesting framework for improving your own health — if you would like the raw data please email me.

Insights derived here are not quantitative in foundation rather confirmations of items I already knew — though I now have a bit of data to back up these hypotheses for myself.

Hopefully you can discover your own using the type of data I collected and methods for correlation shown below.

Raw Data

• Sleep Hours, Quality, Activity before bed

• Dreams description — simple word cloud on what I dream most about —

Remembering, company and product in specific details — interesting…

• Dietary items: I decided to focus on what I ate not calorie amount

• State of mind during day -> state of mind and rolling sum total

As the month progressed my state of mind improved consistently after the middle of the month. Awesome!

• Steps daily total

• Blood pressure

• Resting heart rate (bpm)

• Temperature

The discoveries I uncovered included two core types: causation and correlation

10 Key Insights

Causation

1. I found when I ate fast food (burgers, pizza etc.) = sleep quality was 1 order less than other night

2. With a few outliers when I slept between 7–8 hours my blood pressure was most stable at ~110–120mmHg for my systolic value.

Interesting the 7 hour mark is what was discovered from Fitbit’s mass data experiment recently available here.

Hours Slept vs. Systolic Blood Pressure (mmHg)

Correlation

3. Days that I was walked more I had a more positive outlook:

when I took >15,000 steps = state of mind was generally more positive

Steps vs. State of Mind

I only had 1 day in the month where I walked more than 22,000 steps and had a negative outlook.

4. Days I ate less tended to be days that I walked more (*more balanced intake and output perhaps?)

5. When I ate healthier the following night sleep was 1 order of magnitude higher quality then days I ate worse.

6. The days where I slept more -> the more negative my dreams were

Dream State vs. Hours Slept

7. Days that I walked more I had a higher systolic blood pressure

8. Days I slept more I had a higher blood pressure the following day

Systolic Blood Pressure (mmHg) vs. Hours Slept

9. Days I slept more I had a higher perceived quality of sleep

10. The days I ate worse the following 1 or 2 days I tended to have a more negative state of mind — I wonder if I realized this negative effect then bounced back —

what would have been the result if I skipped the eating worse part.

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