IX Coach

Coaching approaches

Personal-science coaching

Personal-science coaching treats your own life as a set of small tests: a specific guess, one thing changed at a time, a record kept, and the guess revised. It has roots in self-experimentation and n-of-1 trials. No outcome study of personal-science coaching itself appears in the sources reviewed for this page, so its evidence is at the level of a practitioner tradition.

The principles underneath

Turn a hunch into a testable guess

Roberts (2004) describes self-experiments built around specific cause-and-effect guesses, such as a morning activity affecting mood that evening. A specific guess can be checked. A general worry cannot.

Change one thing at a time

An n-of-1 design compares two conditions in one person, so the person's own periods become the comparison. Guyatt and colleagues (1986) set out randomised trials in individual patients, and Guyatt and colleagues (1990) describe how the n-of-1 randomised controlled trial was used in clinical practice.

Choose a measure you will keep recording

Choe and colleagues (2014) describe how people who track themselves collect and explore their own data. The approach asks you to pick a measure you can keep up, because a record that stops answers nothing.

Revise the guess when the record says so

Roberts (2004) reports that twelve years of self-experiments produced surprising cause-and-effect findings and suggested a new theory. The approach treats each result as a reason to revise the guess, including when the result is unwelcome.

What it is

Personal-science coaching treats your own life as a set of small experiments. You turn a hunch into a specific guess, change one thing at a time, measure it over a set period, and revise the guess depending on what the record shows.

It draws on self-experimentation, in which a person tests cause and effect on themselves, and on n-of-1 trials, in which one person's treatments are compared over time. The coach helps you keep the question clear and the record honest. It is not a clinical test, and it does not replace medical advice.

Where it comes from

Seth Roberts reported twelve years of self-experiments in 2004, and Gary Wolf helped start the quantified self movement, which treats a person's own data as a source of knowledge (Roberts, 2004; Wolf, 2010). The n-of-1 randomised trial, in which one patient is compared across treatments, was set out for clinical use by Gordon Guyatt and colleagues in 1986 and 1990 (Guyatt et al., 1986; Guyatt et al., 1990).

How a session runs

  1. You name a pattern you want to understand, such as sleep, energy, mood or focus, and the coach helps you turn it into a specific guess.
  2. Together you pick one thing to change and one thing to measure, and agree how long to try it.
  3. The coach helps you set up a simple record: what you tracked, when, and what a meaningful change would look like.
  4. You bring the record to the next session, and the coach helps you read it without over-reading a few good or bad days.
  5. You decide whether the guess held, failed or needs a clearer test, and the next guess is written down.

When it tends to fit

  • You suspect something in your routine affects how you feel, and you keep arguing with yourself about what it is.
  • You tried a change, felt better for a week, and cannot tell whether the change or something else was responsible.
  • You want to decide what to do next from your own records, rather than from the latest advice you read.

What the research shows

Evidence: Practitioner tradition — little or no outcome research

No outcome study of personal-science coaching itself appears in the sources reviewed for this page. The nearest material is the self-experimentation and n-of-1 literature. Roberts (2004) reports twelve years of self-experiments on sleep, mood, health and weight, which produced several cause-and-effect findings and a new theory of weight control. Choe and colleagues (2014) describe the practices of people who collect and explore personal data. Guyatt and colleagues (1986) report on randomised trials in individual patients, and Guyatt and colleagues (1990) describe the clinical usefulness of the n-of-1 randomised controlled trial. Kravitz and colleagues (2018) report on single-patient multi-crossover trials in chronic musculoskeletal pain delivered through a mobile device. Wolf (2010) presents the quantified self.

Where the evidence is thin: The sources here describe one person's self-experiments, small experimental designs, and the n-of-1 method in general. Self-experiments on their own cannot separate a real effect from coincidence in the way a controlled comparison can, and none of the cited work tests a coaching approach.

Sources

  1. Wolf, G. (2010). Gary Wolf: The quantified self. PsycEXTRA Dataset.
  2. Roberts, S. (2004). Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(2), 227–262.
  3. Choe, E. K., Lee, N. B., Lee, B., Pratt, W., & Kientz, J. A. (2014). Understanding quantified-selfers' practices in collecting and exploring personal data. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1143–1152).
  4. Guyatt, G., Sackett, D., Taylor, D. W., Chong, J., Roberts, R., & Pugsley, S. (1986). Determining optimal therapy — randomized trials in individual patients. New England Journal of Medicine, 314(14), 889–892.
  5. Guyatt, G., Keller, J., Jaeschke, R., Rosenbloom, D., Adachi, J. D., & Newhouse, M. T. (1990). The n-of-1 randomized controlled trial: Clinical usefulness. Our three-year experience. Annals of Internal Medicine, 112(4), 293–299.
  6. Kravitz, R. L., Schmid, C. H., Marois, M., Wilsey, B., Ward, D., Hays, R. D., Duan, N., Wang, Y., MacDonald, S., Jerant, A., Servadio, J. L., Haddad, D., & Sim, I. (2018). Effect of mobile device–supported single-patient multi-crossover trials on treatment of chronic musculoskeletal pain. JAMA Internal Medicine, 178(10).

Where it stops

Personal records cannot show cause and effect with the certainty of a controlled comparison, and a few good or bad days can mislead.

Health questions, such as sleep problems, mood that does not lift, pain, weight or any medicine, belong with a clinician. Starting or stopping a medicine, diet or supplement for a health condition is not something to test alone.

If tracking starts to cause distress, or checking the numbers becomes hard to stop, the coach should step back and the work should pause.

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