You don’t do cold showers in the morning?
You don’t do infrared light therapy?
You don’t have a self-cooling bed?
You don’t meditate for 30 minutes after waking up, followed by sunning your genitals?
What are you even doing?!
Let me start off by saying that I love having a routine. I also love finding things that I can change or adjust in my routine that will help increase my mental or physical performance.
But this time I want to talk about why taking this too far will hurt you much more than it will benefit you.
In the rest of the text, I won’t be making a distinction between biohacking tools like infrared light panels or self-cooling beds, and popular biohacking/self-optimization habits like cold showers, specific time of waking up, deep breathing exercises, etc. Personally, when it comes to trying out new things and including something into my routine, I always give priority to zero-cost things rather than tools or products. However, the point that I will be trying to make is about the biohacking/self-optimization community as a whole, and the flaws in their "philosophy."
I remember when I first started doing cold showers in the winter of 2014. At that point in my life, it was, besides reading and physical training, the most life-changing habit I adopted.
And literally every single shower I took for the next 3 years was a cold shower. Then, I came across a scientific explanation of why, if you want to maximize muscle growth, you shouldn’t be doing any kind of cold exposure right after your training. So I changed that post-workout shower into a warm shower. Every other shower remains a cold shower to this day.
In 2014 and for a couple of years after that, I was enthusiastic about sharing the benefits I’ve experienced from cold showers with anyone who would be interested in them.
Today, however, when I see people talking about cold showers online, I usually roll my eyes and skip to the next piece of content, and if someone mentions them in person, I'm careful about whether I’m going to engage in the conversation.
What changed? Back then, there was still no cult, or no religion, around cold showers or any other habit of that sort. There were only online articles and videos talking about the benefits of adopting those unusual habits.
Now, it’s not a matter of why you should give cold showers a try. Now, it’s "You are not doing cold showers, bro?!"
(So even though I’ve been doing them for more than 8 years, I regularly say that I’ve never tried them.)
But cold showers are just one example. All biohacking tips have gone through this same journey, from advice on how to improve your day to a cult of "if you don't do this, you won't be able to function properly."
And it’s the same for all biohacking products and tools.
Before, it was: "If you have your basics of a healthy lifestyle on point, and you have some extra money, there is this thing that could increase your mental or physical performance by 1%."
Now, it’s: "If you don’t buy this (often ridiculously overpriced) thing, you will never be able to perform at your best."
But this is not the worst thing about all of those habits/hacks/products/tools.
You are always free to ignore how overhyped the community is around them and how dishonest the people making money from them are.
Biohacking Superstition
What I would like to warn people about is the relationship they develop with any of these things they implement in their routine and with their routine as a whole.
Let’s be real, most of the time you will experience more benefits from the placebo effect than from the thing itself. And I personally believe that there is nothing wrong with that. The placebo effect is still an effect. And when it’s strong and valuable enough for me, I am willing to invest both my time and money into a placebo effect.
However, the problem arises when, partly because of the actual benefits and partly because of the placebo effect, people develop a kind of superstition around their routine.
If, for some reason, they are not able to follow their routine to the smallest detail, there is this negative placebo effect where they feel like their day is messed up and they cannot perform their mental and physical tasks at a high level.
Just spend some time hanging around the online biohacking community and you will see people saying how their day is messed up when they don’t do their morning cold shower, their deep breathing exercises, or when they go on a trip with their family and they don’t bring one of their biohacking tools. They cannot fall asleep in a room that is not completely dark, completely quiet, and not set to the temperature that they are used to (they actually read that that’s the best temperature for sleeping).
When your high performance and productivity depend on so many different factors being on point, you have achieved the opposite of what your initial goal was.
Instead of using all of those things to boost your performance in different areas of your life, you become dependent on them.
And unless you live in your own little isolated bubble, I'm sure you've realized by now that you cannot have the perfect conditions for your routine every single day.
There are days when you need to go out there and perform the tasks in front of you, no matter how messed up your routine is that day.
So I would say we should focus a bit less on becoming highly-optimized cyborgs and a little bit more on becoming resilient, adaptable, human beings.
To illustrate the points I've tried to make so far, I would like to share a story from personal experience.
Biohacking’s Worst Lie
One particular part of the biohacking community that I especially have a "problem" with is the cult of optimized sleep.
I don’t underestimate the importance of quality sleep. Just like with cold showers, I started experimenting with different ways of improving my sleep way before there was a cult created around it.
And I would recommend everyone to try those things like eliminating their caffeine consumption from the second half of their day, limiting or eliminating screen usage 1 hour before going to sleep, etc.
But one thing that has been bothering me was the insistence on how important your room temperature is, and that if your room and even your bed are not cool enough, you won’t have quality sleep and therefore won’t be able to function properly the next day.
This has been bothering me because I am aware that there are people out there who don’t have an AC or even a fan in their room, let alone a hi-tech bed or a mattress that regulates your body temperature. And those people still wake up in the morning and go to work.
I like to believe that I am a man of the people, and I have an issue with exaggerating the benefits of things that a lot of people cannot afford.
However, I didn’t expect I would find myself, at least for a while, in the situation of those that I empathize with, and put one of these optimized sleep claims to the test.
This might sound disgusting, but let me get straight into it:
For 3 and a half months at the beginning of this year, I was woken up by my own sweat almost every single night. That’s how cool my room was. And I somehow still managed to perform all of my mental and physical tasks at a fairly high level.
When I left my home country in January this year, my first destination was a country with a tropical climate. That wasn't a surprise, I knew where I was going. What I didn't know was that there would be multiple hours of power cuts every day. You could call it the perfect place for optimized sleep.
(You should understand from previous essays why I'm not saying the names of the places.)
During my time there, I changed 3 places. None of my rooms had AC, just fans. And that would be enough for me if those fans could work when you needed them to.
The power cut schedule was chaotic (if it could even be called a schedule), so I had the chance to experiment with a couple of different versions of optimized sleep.
Some nights, the power went out as I was about to go to bed, so I would fall asleep while sweating.
Other nights, the fan was still working as I fell asleep. But then the power would go out in the middle of the night, and I would wake up about 30 minutes later in a pool of my own sweat. Then I would take a short break from my optimized sleep to take a shower and change my sheets before going back to sleep and sweating some more.
And, some mornings, the timing of the power cut was perfect. After 6-7 hours of sleeping with a working fan, I would wake up just as I was starting to sweat, before the sheets got soaked.
Even though I had the chance to try out these different types of optimized sleep, how my day looked hasn’t changed:
Every morning I would write. Then I would read and do some research for new writing ideas.
I would work out every single day. And I am pretty sure my workouts were more intense than the workouts of most of the folks with temperature-regulating beds. Besides my main workout, I would do a 90 minute bike ride couple of times a week.
Then I would work on the programs for my online clients.
Then I would read and write some more.
And then I would go to bed and play a game called "When will I start sweating tonight?"
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think what I was doing was impressive in any way.
After all, I had two things working in my favor:
I wasn’t superstitious about my sleep. I resisted the tempting call of the biohacking cult during those times when I could afford to obsess over my sleep and eventually become dependent on the "perfect" conditions.
The second thing was that I knew that these new, sub-optimal conditions wouldn’t last forever.
However, who I find impressive are my neighbors from the second place I stayed at.
It was far away from the beach, so you wouldn’t get any benefits from the ocean breeze acting as a natural AC. Also, most of my neighbors were living in shacks, not houses. As I would pass them by, sometimes I couldn’t help but peek inside. Most of them didn’t even have a fan. So I guess power cuts didn’t affect them as much as they affected me.
Somehow, these people managed to defy the laws of biohacking.
Somehow, these people woke up every morning and got to work.
Sure, none of them were high-performing entrepreneurs, building million-dollar businesses. But there is no doubt they worked as hard as they could to make their family’s life better.
And maybe I’m highly subjective, but somehow they looked and felt more human than the average biohacker.
Take from that what you will.
Thank you for reading.
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And that is why I follow you, no nonsense human thoughts & observations. Reality on a daily basis can be hard to get along with occasionally but I like the way you simplify things. Get busy living as the saying goes! And do it however you want not how the latest trendies want you to. X
Great post again! It's about "institualization" of daily actions that are not yet branded ;-)