Stacey Packer spent months reading everything she could find to help combat her perimenopause symptoms. One expert said fasting was the answer, another said fasting was dangerous for hormone health. One said to cut carbs, another said add them. One said lift heavy weights, another said do yoga. One said hormone replacement therapy was the solution, another called it a last resort.
Having all the information in the world at our fingertips can be both a blessing and a curse. How do we know who to trust? How do we know what to test? And let’s face it, many of us aren’t reading peer-reviewed population studies. We’re learning from Instagram experts. And that can get messy.
Stacey is an Australian business strategist who is smart, capable, and suddenly feeling like a stranger in her own body. Sometimes mid-sentence with a client, she’d lose the word she was about to say. Gone. She’d wake at 3am with her heart racing for no apparent reason. Working with her GP, Stacey started small.
First, a shift in medication helped stabilise her mood. Then she did some deeper reading on intermittent fasting and decided to run her own experiment. Her hypothesis: “I’ll test 16:8 fasting for four weeks and track whether it reduces brain fog and improves my energy.”
She kept a simple journal, rating energy out of ten, brain fog as yes or no, mood in three words. Week one: energy at four out of 10, brain fog worse, mood irritable and shaky. Week two: the same. Week three: worse. By week four she was done.
“I was so tired I could barely function,” she said. So she stopped, gathered what she had learned, did more research, and found a nutrition approach built around hormones. Within two weeks she felt better. Within a month, the brain fog had lifted.
“The obvious win is that I made progress,” she said. “But what struck me most was how much agency I felt. I wasn’t a victim of perimenopause anymore. I was back in the driver’s seat.”
Why following everyone else’s evidence can make you feel like you’re failing
Most of the health and lifestyle advice we receive is built on population studies. They tell us what tends to work across large groups of people, and that’s genuinely useful as a starting point. But averages hide enormous variation.
A 2024 review published in Cell Metabolism found that factors including sleep, diet, stress, genetics, age and hormonal status drive huge differences in how individuals respond to identical interventions. Two people can follow the same plan and get completely different results. What works brilliantly for 60 per cent of people may do nothing for you, and in some cases, like Stacey’s fasting experiment, may actively make things worse.
The problem is, we don’t usually respond to that by questioning the advice. We question ourselves. We blame ourselves for not doing it right, and often revert to old habits rather than taking the learning and moving forward. That’s the pattern I want to interrupt.
Learn more in the book The Experiment Mindset by Tamsin Simounds.
Running experiments on your own life
In medicine, doctors sometimes run what’s called an N-of-1 study when they need to work out what works for one specific person rather than relying on general averages. No-of-1 means that there is one subject who the test is being run on. It’s simply a way of testing and gathering data on an individual to find out what holds true just for them.
In everyday life, the principle is the same. You take what the evidence suggests might work, and test it against your own reality to find out whether it actually does. That’s how you move from consuming information to building personal wisdom.
I tried this myself a few years ago when I went plant-based after reading Finding Ultra by Rich Roll. Now, I know it’s not shocking to hear that I followed nutrition advice from an influencer and it didn’t work. But, hear me out.
Two weeks in, I was dragging myself through gym sessions with no strength or power. I got bloodwork done and discovered I had iron-deficiency anaemia. I reintroduced meat, and within weeks felt like myself again. What worked for Rich Roll did not work for me.
But because I treated it as a live test rather than a belief system, I didn’t feel like a failure. I just had fresh data. General evidence gives you possibilities. Your own experiments give you answers.
How to run your own experiment
You do not need a degree or a lab. You just need three things:
1. A hypothesis, not a hope
Before you change anything, write down what you’re testing and what you expect to happen. Here’s the format: “I’ll test… for… to learn”. Something like: “I’ll test leaving my phone outside the bedroom for a week to learn if I sleep better.” Framing it this way changes how you pay attention. You stop just trying something and hoping that it sticks, and you start gathering data.
2. A minimum viable experiment
What’s your smallest possible test? Ask yourself what the minimum version of this change looks like before you commit to the whole thing. Start small, learn something, then decide whether to scale.
3. Reflection, not just results
After your experiment, ask three questions: What did I expect? What actually happened? What does this tell me? Information alone doesn’t build wisdom. Experience that you sit with and learn from does.
We have more access to advice about how to live and feel better than any generation before us. And most of us are still exhausted, still confused, and still blaming ourselves when something doesn’t work.
Stop asking what works in general. Start finding out what works for you. Run the experiment.
