What I Learned After 9 Years of Self-Improvement Experiments

I have been running self-experiments and writing about them for nearly nine years. That is a lot of habit changes, productivity systems, financial trials, and "30 days of X" experiments.

This is the honest reflection on what I have learned. What actually worked over the long term. What was theatre. What I wish I had not wasted time on.

What actually produced lasting change

Looking back at nine years, only a small number of experiments produced changes that genuinely stuck and improved my life:

1. Sleep prioritization. Treating 7+ hours as non-negotiable changed almost everything else — energy, mood, productivity, relationships. The single highest-leverage change I have made.

2. Phone reduction. Substantially reducing phone use (especially social media) freed up roughly 6 weeks of waking life per year. The change has held for over 3 years now.

3. Regular exercise. Not heroic exercise. Just consistent movement (walking, basic strength training, occasional sport). Compounds health, energy, and mood over years.

4. Spending audit. Periodic review of subscriptions and discretionary spending. Cuts thousands of dollars per year of waste without compromising what I value.

5. Saying no more. Defaulting to skepticism on optional commitments rather than yes-default. Has improved my time, energy, and relationships.

That is essentially the list. Five changes from nine years and dozens of experiments.

What did not stick

Many more changes did not last. Some examples:

• 5 AM wake-up. Worked for 60 days, then naturally drifted back. Was not net-positive.
• Cold showers. Did them for months. Did not produce the dramatic effects promised. Stopped.
• Daily journaling. Tried multiple formats over multiple years. Never stuck despite genuine effort. Maybe not for me.
• Meditation app subscriptions. Used them for weeks at a time. Never built sustained practice.
• Various productivity systems (GTD, time blocking, the "one thing" approach). Worked temporarily, then drifted.
• Strict diets (low-carb, intermittent fasting, etc.). Worked while strict, became unsustainable.
• "Inbox zero" type commitments. Worked for months, eventually drifted.

The pattern: if a change requires sustained willpower, it probably will not stick. If it can be embedded in environment and habit, it probably will.

What I wish I had stopped doing sooner

Things I did for too long before recognizing they were not producing value:

Reading more self-help books. The first 10 self-help books I read produced almost all of the value. The next 50 mostly recombined the same ideas. I should have stopped at maybe book 15 and started actually applying things.

Following productivity influencers. Their content is largely about producing content. Most do not actually have the lives they suggest. Watching them gave me ideas but did not produce results.

Trying to optimize everything. Some areas of life genuinely benefit from optimization. Others (creative work, relationships, rest) get worse when optimized. I spent years trying to optimize things that just needed to be left alone.

Buying tools and apps for the experiments. The tool was almost never the missing piece. New planner. New app. New journal. The same person using a $0 notebook produces the same results as the same person using a $200 system.

Public commitments. Telling people about the experiments seemed motivating but actually created performance pressure that distorted the experiments themselves.

What I now believe about self-improvement

Some honest beliefs that emerged from nine years of trying:

1. Most "transformation" content is exaggerated. The dramatic before/after stories sell content but rarely match real long-term outcomes. Most changes are smaller and slower than the marketing suggests.

2. The fundamentals matter more than the optimization. Sleep, basic exercise, time outside, real food, real relationships. The fundamentals produce 80% of the available improvement. The optimization produces the last 20% and most people skip the fundamentals to chase the optimization.

3. Environment beats willpower. Sustainable change comes from changing your environment to make better behaviors easier and worse behaviors harder. Pure willpower-based change has poor sustainability.

4. The cumulative effect of small things is what matters. One dramatic change rarely transforms a life. Five small sustained changes over five years reliably do.

5. You cannot compound optimization indefinitely. At some point the returns to additional self-improvement go negative. The point of optimizing is to free up bandwidth for actually living, not to keep optimizing forever.

What I would tell my past self

If I could send a message back to me at the start of this nine-year project:

1. Run fewer experiments. The volume of experimentation was excessive. A few well-chosen experiments per year produces more learning than many shallow ones.

2. Run them longer. 30-day experiments mostly do not reveal what an experiment actually produces over time. 90-day or 180-day experiments are far more informative.

3. Stop reading new content. The amount of new self-improvement content I consumed was wildly disproportionate to the amount I actually applied. After the basic books, more reading is mostly distraction.

4. Notice when something is working. I had a tendency to keep changing things even when something was working. Sometimes the right move is to stop changing and let the working thing keep working.

5. The point is to live, not to optimize. Self-improvement is in service of having a better life, not the other way around. When the optimization starts to crowd out the actual life, you have lost the plot.

What I would still recommend

If someone wanted to do this kind of work productively without the wasted years:

1. Start with sleep. Get to 7+ hours consistently. Notice everything else improve.
2. Reduce phone use. Especially social media. Notice mood and time improve.
3. Move daily. Does not need to be exercise; just movement.
4. Audit spending periodically. Cut what you do not value. Keep what you do.
5. Default skeptical on optional commitments. Notice your energy improve.
6. Then stop optimizing. Use the bandwidth to live.

Five changes. Maybe two years to install all of them properly. Then live the resulting life rather than continuing to optimize.

The takeaway

Nine years of self-improvement experiments taught me that the actually important changes are few, simple, and require sustained installation rather than continuous optimization. The industry of self-improvement is much larger than the actual amount of improvement available.

If you are at the start of this kind of project, save yourself some years. Focus on the fundamentals. Install a few sustainable changes. Then go live.

The changes will compound over time. The optimization will not.