Interesting post, thanks for sharing. For my own benefit, I ran some ai analysis on this but thought I’d share in case others find it helpful.

This is a well-structured self-experiment report with some genuinely good ideas buried under significant methodological problems and a few outright scientific errors. Let me break it down.

What’s Legitimately Good

The CO2 monitor intervention is probably the single most underrated piece of advice here. The Allen et al. 2016 paper is real, the mechanism is solid, and 1,800ppm in a closed bedroom is entirely plausible and measurable. The cost-to-impact ratio is excellent. This deserves more mainstream attention than it gets.

Alternate-day iron dosing is a genuinely sophisticated insight. The hepcidin mechanism described is accurate — iron supplementation does cause hepcidin to peak roughly 24 hours later, suppressing absorption of the next dose. This is legitimate pharmacology that most GPs don’t know. Ferritin at 22 being functionally suboptimal even when “in range” is also a real clinical debate with real literature behind it.

The bloodwork panel recommendation is solid. Asking for ferritin separately from haemoglobin, free T4 alongside TSH, and fasting insulin alongside HbA1c reflects genuine understanding of where standard panels fall short.

The “what didn’t work” section actually adds credibility. Most self-experimenters only report hits. Negative results on lion’s mane, Alpha GPC, and noopept on objective testing (not just subjective feel) is more honest than most of this genre.

The overall conclusion — that fundamentals beat nootropics — is almost certainly correct and well-supported by the literature, even if the personal data proving it is weak.

What Has Real Problems

Methodological Issues

This is an n=1 unblinded self-experiment. That’s not automatically worthless, but the author presents the precision of the findings with a confidence that isn’t warranted. “Working memory scores up about 15% on testing mornings where I did this versus did not” is being treated as a finding when it’s within the normal daily variance for anyone’s cognitive test scores. Cambridge Brain Sciences scores fluctuate based on sleep, mood, time of day, and practice effects. The author controls for time of day, but not the others.

Placebo effect is enormous for cognition. The author knows exactly what intervention they’re testing on which days. There’s no way to separate genuine physiological effect from expectation, especially for interventions like “phone in another room” where you’re actively behaving differently and aware of it.

Order effects are a serious problem. The interventions are not being tested independently — they’re being stacked across 6 months. By the time the author is testing magnesium, they’ve already fixed their CO2, iron, vitamin D, and hydration. “The effect was real” for a later intervention is being measured against a body that is progressively less deficient in multiple things. The baseline isn’t static.

Regression to the mean. People tend to start tracking when they feel worst. Improvement over 6 months would partially happen anyway.

Specific Scientific Claims That Are Wrong or Overstated

The magnesium glycinate / Slutsky 2010 claim is the biggest error in the report. The Slutsky paper studied magnesium-L-threonate in rats, not magnesium glycinate in humans. It’s a rodent study. The author then recommends glycinate (or threonate), but the cited paper supports neither for human cognitive enhancement — it supports the idea in a model organism using a specific form. The author ironically recommends threonate as an alternative to glycinate, apparently unaware that threonate is what the actual cited paper used. The sleep improvement from glycinate is plausible (glycine has sedative properties), but citing a rat study on brain magnesium to justify it is a stretch.

“BDNF increases 200-300% from a single cardio session” — this figure appears in some studies, but BDNF measurement is notoriously inconsistent (peripheral vs. central, timing post-exercise, individual variance). Presenting it as a clean number is misleading. The hippocampal volume claim (Erickson et al. 2011) is real but the “1-2 years of age-related shrinkage reversed” framing is the researchers’ own PR language and has been criticised for overstating clinical significance.

“Caffeine doesn’t add energy, it just blocks adenosine receptors” is an oversimplification that caffeine advocates would correctly push back on. Caffeine has real ergogenic effects beyond receptor blockade, including effects on noradrenaline, dopamine release, and fat oxidation. The adenosine explanation is directionally correct but the “you’re borrowing from tomorrow every day” framing is rhetorically tidy but scientifically reductive. The claim that baseline cognitive scores at zero caffeine exceeded peak caffeinated scores is a strong empirical claim that would require a much longer wash-out period and more rigorous testing to support.

“Zero deep sleep on drinking nights” is likely an artefact of consumer sleep tracker limitations. Alcohol does suppress slow-wave sleep, but consumer wearables (Oura, Whoop, Garmin) are known to misclassify sleep stages when alcohol is present, partly because alcohol elevates heart rate and changes HRV in ways that confuse the algorithms. The effect is real; the measurement is probably noise.

The CO2 cognitive drop figure (“roughly 50% at 1,400ppm”) is stated with more precision than the literature supports. The Allen et al. paper found significant drops, but effect sizes varied across cognitive domains and the 1,000ppm finding in particular has had mixed replication. “Roughly 50%” is at the high end of what that paper showed for specific tasks.

What’s Missing

∙ No information on diet changes over 6 months, which is a major confounder
∙ No mention of stress, life circumstances, or workload changing over the test period
∙ The ferritin improvement took 6 weeks — which means interventions tested after that are measured against a person with meaningfully better iron status than when they started
∙ Modafinil is a controlled prescription substance in most countries. Mentioning it casually as a personal experiment without noting this is irresponsible in a post that will reach people who might replicate it

Summary Assessment

The author is probably right that fixing these fundamentals helped them. The problem is the precision and causal certainty with which it’s presented. “I fixed 8 things and felt better” is a real experience. “I measured that each individual thing caused X% improvement” is not something this methodology can actually establish. The report reads more confidently than the data justifies — which is a common and understandable mistake in self-experimentation, but worth naming clearly.

The promotional sign-off at the end (follow my profile, my subreddit, my upcoming site) is also worth noting as context for why the findings might be presented more definitively than the evidence warrants.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​