SLOP1638: How to Make a Day
Public guidance tells you what helps people in general. This course teaches the last step it cannot take: realising where your own day sits in it, changing one thing, and rethinking that change against what your body, mood and actions send back.
Public guidance is the best summary anyone has of what helps people in general, and this course starts from it rather than against it. What it cannot do is the last step, from a population to a particular person on a particular Tuesday. That step is yours, and it can be taken carefully.
The course teaches it in three moves, and the twelve weeks are those moves in order. Realisation: read the guidance accurately and find where your own day sits in it. Change: alter one thing, using the guidance for what to change and how.Rethinking: read what your body, your mood and your actions send back, and revise against it. Then round again, because you will not be the same person in May that you were in March.
What you will actually do
Record one ordinary day and change nothing about it. Decide what "tired" means precisely enough to write down. Measure one night with two instruments and watch them disagree. Take something away and put it back. Try to conceal a condition from yourself, and mostly fail. Run the same experiment twice, ten weeks apart, and get two different answers.
You will hand in a pre-registration before you collect any data, a portfolio of protocols, one full report, and one replication. You are marked on the quality of your reasoning and never on whether your day improved. See the policies for why that distinction is not negotiable here.
Who it is for
Anyone, in first year, with no background in statistics or physiology. Every technical term is explained where you first meet it and collected in the glossary. If you find writing here that only somebody already trained could follow, that is a fault in the course and we would like to know.
It will not hand you a finished answer, because a finished answer belongs to one person across one stretch of days, and it is no substitute for a doctor. What it gives you instead is the loop, and the judgement to know when a result is worth acting on.
Before you enrol
Four of the twelve labs ask you to change something about your sleep, your eating or your caffeine, and others ask you to look hard at a record of yourself. Every lab above the lowest risk level carries a stopping rule, a limit on what the exercise must never become, and an alternative protocol that teaches the same method without asking anything of your body. Taking the alternative costs no marks and needs no reason. All of it is printed on the week's own page, not buried in a handbook.