Experiment with your life

Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!Ms. Frizzle

If you took high school science, you probably had to write a lab report. You had to make a hypothesis, write down the method of how you were going to test that hypothesis, what you saw, and then, at last, your conclusion. While I remember writing the lap reports to be a frustratingly precise, I can see the value in them now.

The scientific method questions what we know about the world, creates a hypothesis of what the answer might be, and then tests it. And if your hypothesis was wrong, then guess what?

It’s not a failure. It’s an opportunity to change your experiment and try again, or to learn something new.

I’ll say it again, there is no wrong answer. Whatever your result, there is something to learn from it.

Now, imagine applying that mindset to your life. You want to wake up earlier, so you try to go to bed earlier, but you can’t fall asleep. You try changing your after dinner tea to an herbal tea, then you cut out the afternoon coffee. Your mind keeps running, so you try listening to music, to a podcast, to rain sounds. Are you too warm at night? Too cold? Do you need to cut your screen time earlier or charge your phone outside of the bedroom?

You read articles and books about sleep. Why do we sleep? What helps us fall asleep?

Trial and error, and eventually, you find out what works for you.

This could be a frustrating experience(as someone who struggles with sleep, there’s nothing worse for falling asleep than trying to fall asleep and getting upset when you are still awake at 2 am), but it doesn’t have to be.

Crafting experiments for your life is about your mindset, or how you approach the issue. If you go in curious, looking to learn and observe and accepting that you might not get the solution right away, your experiment is going to go well and you are going to learn something. If you go in holding to the idea that this has to work or that doing this will get that result, you aren’t going to have a good time.

”It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”Captain Jean-Luc Picard

This 31 in January thing I’m doing, that’s an experiment. My hypothesis is that if I write a quick 500 word post every day, not only is it going to get me writing every day, but it’s going to change how I look at blogging. It’s going to take down some of the pressure of perfectionism, make the blog a little less precious. It’s going to give me a sense of my voice when I write, what I want to write about, how I want to write about it. it’s to prove to myself that I can, even after a long day at work, sit down and write for a bit.

Every few days, I jot down a few notes about how I feel. I’m also tracking the word counts so that I can see the impact of writing a little every day.

At the end of the month, I’ll release that ‘lab report’, and I’ll declare my next experiment. Who knows? Maybe I’ll enjoy this enough to keep going? We’ll just have to wait and see.