Run Experiments on Yourself | How I Rewired My Life | #140
How do you start changing your life when you feel stuck? In this Daily Dose, resilience coach Dawn Super shares how she spent a decade running personal experiments to reverse engineer her way out of trauma, neglect, chronic illness, and difficult patterns. Learn how simple self-experiments can help you build emotional strength, reduce suffering, and create meaningful change in your life.
Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below
I just ran experiments on myself for like a decade. Not like Frankenstein. I reverse engineered myself to recover from a lifetime of neglect, trauma, and stunted social skills.
This video is for anyone who wants to make changes in their life and is looking for some ideas on how to get started.
This is the Daily Dose of Dawn at Dawn, videos designed to expand your thinking.
So why do we want to think about this? Because there’s always something going on in your life, and when you come up against something, if you have some experience with it, it’s easier to deal with.
For example, a long time ago when I first started doing this, I had a lot of diagnosed health issues and a lot of symptoms.
Back then I would have anywhere from seven to twenty symptoms going at a time. I was always tired and always in pain. And when you only have the ability to focus on about seventeen things at a time — that’s roughly the brain’s capacity — and nine or ten of them are “ouch,” that’s hard.
No sugarcoating. That’s hard. So rather than constantly taking a mental inventory of the suckage, I decided to try something different. I wondered what would happen if I only thought about a symptom while it was actually happening. And otherwise, I let myself forget I had anything wrong with me unless it was actively making noise.
This was back in 2019. The video that came out of that experiment was called What Happens If I Don’t Think About My Suffering. What happens if you don’t think about your suffering? It’s actually a really simple experiment to try for the next thirty days. When you start thinking about your suffering, say to yourself:
“No, wait. We made a deal with ourselves. We’re not thinking about that right now.” For the next thirty days, you’re simply not allowed to entertain thoughts about your suffering. That doesn’t mean denying that you are suffering. It just means you’re not going to sit and think about it all day. You’re making a deal with yourself to see what happens if you change your focus.
I’ve experienced a lot of suffering in my life. I was bullied for seven years straight as a child. Neglected by my parents. Abused by people who were supposed to love me. I live with narcolepsy, which is essentially a neurological condition that causes extreme sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is used as torture because it is torturous.
I’ve had major health issues. I was attacked by a dog. I’ve been abandoned by my own child. I know suffering on a level that most people cannot comprehend. But I also know that sitting inside of it would destroy me.
So I choose to thrive despite it all. Everyone has hard stuff. I’ve learned to live with mine in a way that makes life easier instead of harder. No pretending. No forcing. Just choosing, in a stoic way, to thrive anyway. Emotional intelligence is a muscle. You can work it.
I’ve been watching some videos by Leila Hormozi. She’s a successful business owner who shares a lot of practical advice. She once said something that stuck with me. She said people tell her they’re waiting for motivation to go to the gym. And she said, “I’ve owned gyms for years and I’m still waiting for motivation to go to the gym.” She said she makes herself go every single time. Not because she feels like it, but because it improves her life.
That’s the same idea here. You can’t ignore that you’re unhappy. But you can work the muscle of figuring out what helps. So try your own experiments.
What are you doing right now that you wish was different?
What happens if you change it?
Run the experiment.
It’s all on you, boo.
What if you started running small experiments on yourself?
That’s how I reverse engineered my way out of a lifetime of trauma, neglect, and chaos.
My book How to Be on Your Own Side is a 14-day experiment in learning how to think, respond, and treat yourself differently.
Try it and see what changes.
