This is fascinating to me. I'm curious why you did one mediation vs two, instead of none vs one? I would hypothesize that your mind is basically rejecting the 'extra work' that feels like a chorse, instead of 'rewarding it' for not having to meditate, which would have a very opposite effect.
Alternatively, you could do meditation vs some other variable, such as chew gum or drink a glass of water (probably hard to find a control variable that is as equally difficult as meditating however - maybe a sheet of math problems or something like that?)
Before these experiments, I usually meditated once or twice a day. I specifically was curious to know how increasing my meditation time would affect me and if more was better. I did also run an analysis on historical data here, which includes periods of once daily meditation too: https://waragainstentropy.substack.com/p/6-years-of-meditation-data-reveals I'm currently running an additional experiment where I meditate 15min/day for 2 weeks, then don't meditate for 2 weeks, then repeat.
Regarding your suggestion on active controls, it's an interesting one (it would have to be a large glass of water to take 15 minutes to drink). There's some research papers that use something like listening to podcasts, exercise, or talk therapy as active controls or comparison to meditation. Personally, I'm not so much interested in knowing how meditation affects me compared to something else of a similar duration and/or difficulty; I just want to know how it affects my life as a standalone addition.
When do you take tend to meditate? When if it's a one meditation day and also when it's at two meditation day? I'm thinking sometime in the morning and sometime in the afternoon.
I usually have my first meditation session between 8 and 11AM, if I have a second session, it's sometime before 4PM. I've found meditating in the late afternoon/early evening will give me mild insomnia when trying to go to sleep.
Yes, I ran a shorter, 90 day random experiment comparing no meditation to 30 minutes of meditation per day in early 2024. The impact on sleep was very similar to the results above. Improved sleep score, time in bed, increases in duration for all sleep stages.
This is fascinating to me. I'm curious why you did one mediation vs two, instead of none vs one? I would hypothesize that your mind is basically rejecting the 'extra work' that feels like a chorse, instead of 'rewarding it' for not having to meditate, which would have a very opposite effect.
Alternatively, you could do meditation vs some other variable, such as chew gum or drink a glass of water (probably hard to find a control variable that is as equally difficult as meditating however - maybe a sheet of math problems or something like that?)
Before these experiments, I usually meditated once or twice a day. I specifically was curious to know how increasing my meditation time would affect me and if more was better. I did also run an analysis on historical data here, which includes periods of once daily meditation too: https://waragainstentropy.substack.com/p/6-years-of-meditation-data-reveals I'm currently running an additional experiment where I meditate 15min/day for 2 weeks, then don't meditate for 2 weeks, then repeat.
Regarding your suggestion on active controls, it's an interesting one (it would have to be a large glass of water to take 15 minutes to drink). There's some research papers that use something like listening to podcasts, exercise, or talk therapy as active controls or comparison to meditation. Personally, I'm not so much interested in knowing how meditation affects me compared to something else of a similar duration and/or difficulty; I just want to know how it affects my life as a standalone addition.
When do you take tend to meditate? When if it's a one meditation day and also when it's at two meditation day? I'm thinking sometime in the morning and sometime in the afternoon.
I usually have my first meditation session between 8 and 11AM, if I have a second session, it's sometime before 4PM. I've found meditating in the late afternoon/early evening will give me mild insomnia when trying to go to sleep.
Was there a day or many days which you didn't meditate and if so, what was the difference in your sleep?
Yes, I ran a shorter, 90 day random experiment comparing no meditation to 30 minutes of meditation per day in early 2024. The impact on sleep was very similar to the results above. Improved sleep score, time in bed, increases in duration for all sleep stages.