Tracking Water Intake's influence on test(maths) performance

Quantified Self Project Logs
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As a high school student I have been especially nervous and sensitive to my body condition’s influence on my test performance.I often feel sleepy and a little bit unconscious taking my tests.I suspect it has something to do with my water intake quantity and frequency as I sometimes forget to drink so maybe dehydration is the main cause.However I have also learnt that antidiuretic hormone stimulates neuro activities so I am curious about how much water intake exactly has the best effect on my study.I’m gonna find it out.

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I plan to set 3 independent variables:the total quantity per day,the frequency and the proportion of water I take in before noon and after noon.The dependent variable I will be tracking will be the time I spend on a standardized maths test paper and the accuracy rate I get.

So there will be three period of my self observation.For the first week I will drink 2.5L a day.The second week 2L and the third 1.5L.For each period,from Mon to Wed 5 times a day,Thu to Sun 10 times a day-all averagely distributed in daytime.That’s the tentative plan and it will start tomorrow.

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Just a note that I’ve never seen a project tracking water and cognitive performance before - it’s a reasonable theory and interested to see the effects.

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Very neat idea. I’m also interested to see what you find. One note of caution: a while back, I tried evaluating the effect of a few interventions on cognitive performance using a timed math test. The problem I ran into was that I got better at the math test with practice and that effect was so large compared with any improvement from the intervention that I couldn’t interpret the results. To detect and hopefully avoid this effect, you might want to re-order your weeks (so that amount of water isn’t decreasing with time) and add some repeats. Maybe 2.5, 1.5, 2, 2.5L or similar?

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Hi Steven, I remember Seth Roberts reporting that the reason he used a simple arithmetic test was that the practice effect disappeared relatively quickly. Since his question was “what can I do to improve my cognition” he was looking for outliers that couldn’t be explained by practice (sudden improvements after practice effects leveled off).

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Model practice effect as wide rolling mean or simple polynomial. Subtract from results. Then “rate of practice effect” is a concern so do reorder and repeat.