A Guide to Self-Experimentation: Optimizing Your Habits for Performance

When it comes to supplements, workout routines, and dietary choices, what works for someone else may not work for you. Discovering the impact of certain habits and behaviors through self-experimentation can help improve your overall well-being, and be the missing link to your best routine yet – here’s how to get started.

Building your experiment 

Self-experimentation can be a great way to understand your optimal habits and behaviors. You can create mini experiments with the help of the WHOOP Journal to isolate the impact that an old or new behavior might have. The first step is to identify some of the known factors that influence your mental, physical, or emotional health – for example, hydration, alcohol, expression of gratitude, supplements, or late meals. Next, you’ll want to define your dependent variable. If you were interested in knowing if hydration improves your sleep, the dependent variable would be your sleep metrics. As part of your experiment, it’s important to stick to a routine so timing stays consistent. 

Using the WHOOP Journal

In the WHOOP Journal, you can choose from 140+ behaviors or habits to monitor, but you’re more likely to get clear results when you track less than 8 behaviors at a time. After 5 yes's or 5 no's logged, you'll start to see this behavior appear in your Impacts tab. There can also be confounding factors, which are things you are not trying to manipulate but nonetheless can impact the results of the experiment. For example, if you were doing the hydration and sleep experiment, you would want to avoid alcohol or meals close to bedtime, as both would greatly influence your sleep metrics.

If you take supplements like creatine, magnesium, or AG1, you can start tracking them every day for insights into how they impact your overall health and recovery. Supplements can boost your body’s baseline health by nourishing your body, from your brain, to your gut, to your immune system, impacting things like sleep, recovery, and more. 

Understanding your results 

After a few weeks of self-experimentation, check your Impacts in the WHOOP app to see a summary of everything you logged in the WHOOP Journal and its relationship to your WHOOP data. To get there, head to your home screen, then tap plan, and swipe over to insights. If you see a notable relationship between your metrics and behaviors, it can help give you clear insights into which behaviors are driving certain WHOOP metrics.

Here are some of the Journal behaviors logged in 2023 that had the best impact on Recovery. 

Tracking your healthiest habits

Self-experimentation requires intention, awareness, and commitment to a plan. With the WHOOP Journal, discover your best routine yet. 

Curious about trying foundational nutrition and building your best routine with AG1? WHOOP members get access to an exclusive welcome kit that includes 30 free AG1 travel packs, an AG1 shaker, scoop, and canister. Discover the full offer.