Steve Pavlina wrote about a self-help technique called the thirty-day trial. To perform the technique, you commit 30 days of some new habit, such as quitting smoking or writing in a journal. The idea is that it’s psychologically easier to commit to something for 30 days than to make a permanent change, but after the 30 days you break addiction to old habits and have the perspective of whether to continue on with the new habit, go back, or go a completely different direction.
For activities like journaling or quitting smoking, this technique might work. After all, psychologist Jeremy Dean announced that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. (This has been treated with some due skepticism, which it should.) However, if you try a 30 day quit-smoking trial and it doesn’t work, try again. And if that doesn’t work, try it again. Until you succeed.
However, for activities such as a new diet, treatments, or any sort of healthcare advice, the 30 day trial should not be used.
For cases where one might try a 30 day trial just to see if it feels better, such as an elimination diet, confirmation bias is likely to be at play. This is especially true in the case of an elimination diet, where one eliminates some aspect of a diet, like dairy or gluten, and see if some kinds of symptoms, such as bloating or fatigue, go away. In such trials, the results may be due to the eliminated item in question, placebo/nocebo effect, or some third confounded eliminated item. For instance, bloating from gluten-containing foods probably comes from medium-length carbohydrates called FODMAPs. Just because you feel better for 30 days after discontinuing gluten-containing foods doesn’t mean that gluten is the culprit. In fact, it probably isn’t, as determined by a well-designed clinical trial. Likewise, eliminating milk from a diet isn’t likely to do too much unless lactose intolerance is the culprit, and there are tests for that.
Returning to Pavlina’s advice, he recommends a 30 day trial over the results of a clinical trial. This is sloppy and irresponsible advice. First, it is very unlikely that an individual will have access to screening assays, animal models, or the millions of dollars needed to discover and develop a drug. That is, unless said individual is up for trying millions of compounds, many potentially toxic and will probably tragically shorten the trial. Instead, a pharmaceutical should be used under the supervision of a doctor, who should be aware of the totality of literature (ideally consisting of randomized controlled trials if possible and a systematic review) and can navigate the benefits and possible adverse effects. A 30-day trial of a pharmaceutical or medical device may be completely inappropriate to realize benefits or assess risks. Here is the primary case where the plural of anecdote is not data.
The bottom line is that the 30 day trial is one of several ways (and perhaps not the best one) to change habits that you know from independent confirmation need to be done, like quitting smoking. It’s a terrible way to adjust a diet or determine if a course of treatment is the right one. Treatments should be based on science and under the supervision of a physician who can objectively determine whether a treatment is working correctly.
