Category: Biohacking

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Biohacking Travel

Day 1042 and Oh Dip

For the last three days I’ve been experiencing a significant dip in energy and function in the later afternoon around 4pm.

Not only am I fatigued, but I seem to have some sort of either allergic response or potentially common cold symptoms. It’s a little unclear as I don’t have consistent symptoms nor do I have a fever.

Some of it is probably jet lag as I returned home to Montana after a month in Europe over the weekend. I haven’t quite recovered my sleep deficit as I am pushing very hard on my workload as well.

I tried doing a bit of polyphasic sleeping today to see if it might help abate the intensity of the dip. The idea behind polyphasic sleep is to get your required 7-8 hours not in one monophasic chunk at night but across your own natural energetic ebbs and flows.

I did a packed morning of work and meetings and then slept between the hours of 3-5pm. I do feel better having been asleep during the dip but I could feel the symptoms rising while in the light sleep mode. I wasn’t able to fall into deep or REM sleep.

Whatever is happening I clearly need more rest. My attempts at diagnosis of any other symptoms and their proximal causes are unlikely to matter if I’m not getting adequate rest. In which case, I’ll try to sleep more at night and add in some naps till it passes.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1041 and Short Notice

I’m extremely frustrated right now. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I won’t get into the details, but it’s mostly because I was overstimulated by a very long workday after what was a very productive week.

I didn’t think it would matter if I was a little fucked up today from overexertion yesterday as I didn’t have any major obligations.

Except I got invited to mid-morning to something tonight. I wasn’t obligated to go but really wanted to do so as the guest of honor may end up having a significant impact on my life. And I’ve had an interest in it which I’d expressed months ago.

Now I had strong interest in attending as it won’t be a repeatable opportunity. So I wanted to push myself to go. I did my best through the afternoon to rest and prepare myself. But ultimately my body just couldn’t do it.

I cascaded into a migraine from the smell of my husband’s cologne. All my efforts to try to be restorative with the few hours of my afternoon were gone through a single small instance of environmental stressor. An obvious sign that I shouldn’t be going anywhere if something small could set off symptoms.

Now I’d like to say that I could have made it if I’d slept more. Maybe if I’d not worked so many hours yesterday. But I feel good about the things I prioritized yesterday.

But I am so fucking angry that I couldn’t have been given a little bit more notice as I would have found a way to make it. Literally even one day would have been enough so I could prioritize sleep.

It’s obviously no one’s fault. I’m simply furious that in an effort to budget my energy and physical capacity for what was my priority yesterday, I couldn’t find any remaining capacity today.

I guess the lesson is that if you want me to show up please let me know at least twenty four hours in advance. Or even just the night before.

Categories
Biohacking Startups

Day 1039 and Can’t Wait for Monday

Maybe this is my second wind finally kicking in but I cannot wait to start my week tomorrow.

I am pleased that this is how I feel at 5pm Mountain Time. I woke up at 3am thanks to my comical jet lag from having been on GMT +8 for several weeks. I don’t recommend flying a transcontinental flight the day before daylight savings incidentally. I proceeded to feel like absolute shit all day.

But as the Sunday scaries kick in for the rest of the timeline, I am absolutely pumped for my work week. My workload is just super exciting.

The Network State conference left me pumped. The mutuals I spent time with in Amsterdam for other engagements also got me pumped. A founder I’ve been working with for almost a year is hitting his first visible traction moment and I am pumped to strategize with him. Another builder friend is interested in pursuing some funding and asked me to weigh in. The communications work I do for founders has led me to a particularly interesting challenge I want to help them solve.

I am just overall really excited for my work. I can only hope my body is up for it. I will have to carefully manage rest and recovery as this workload is worth the annoyance of treating my body with utmost care.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1034 and Green Light

When I travel I do my best to maintain a steady routine for my health. I find it much easier to manage stressors to my physical body, and my autonomic nervous system, if I get adequate sleep, nutrition, and restorative activities.

I’m the sort of person who travels with an organizer of supplements & vitamins, multiple biomarker trackers (my Apple Watch & Whoop) and helpful devices (Apollo Neuro Band, percussion massager, noise canceling headphones) to keep myself “in the green” no matter how much stress I throw at myself.

My Whoop strain tracking as I traversed 4 countries in 4 days. I traveled between Finland, Estonia, Denmark and the Netherlands.

And I put myself under some fairly significant strain over the last week as I traveled by boat and airplane through four countries in four days. As you can see from my Whoop data traveling induces more strain than rest days or work days.

I spent all day at a conference yesterday which involved a fair amount of time on my feet and socializing. But it doesn’t compare to the strain of taking a ferry to Helsinki and walking for five miles sightseeing in the cold.

I was careful today to rest after the conference so I’d be able to make use of the remainder of my time in Amsterdam. And my biomarkers seem to agree. My Welltory saw my heart rate variability fully in the green this afternoon.

Balanced stress, energy & health on Welltory say all systems are go for me.
Categories
Biohacking Finance

Day 1009 and Non-Reactivity

I’ve been working on my Q3 investor update all day. I am a little behind my own artificial deadline for it as I believe it’s good to get it out in the first week of the new quarter. I am chasing down a bigger theme in my market insights section that is being refined as I rework my own narrative understanding in real time.

I feel that there is a collective disagreement on consensus reality. We’ve got multiple worldviews that are being hotly contested. Epistemic status humble as the kids say. And so I am doing what I can to get outside the presumed worldview of my own geography and nation and see if a more global perspective is helpful.

But being able to see any of these different vantage points and narratives will require me to be accepting of other competing or adjacent narratives. The presumption is that I can control my own reactions. My body has to be open. So I am here with my Apollo Neuro band sending sound waves to my body while I listen to Endel’s chill program on my noise canceling headphones. I plan to do a Non-Sleep Deep Rest mediation after I’m finished.

I can only give my best performance when I’m sure my body is in a non-reactive place. Parasympathetic is sometimes called “rest and digest” versus its more active sympathetic nervous system partner “fight or flight.” We must assess our world and the many competing perceptions from a place of non-reactivity. It is the only way through the fog of the moment. Never let the stress of the moment distract you.

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Biohacking Medical

Day 1003 and Externalizing

My body gave me a bit of a surprise on the road. I keep a close eye on my inflammation as it’s the first trigger in my autoimmune condition. Generally it manifests internally as swelling in my spine or joints. But it didn’t always. My inflammation used to manifest externally on my skin.

I woke up today in Tallinn without my typical spinal pain but covered in red welts. If I had to guess, some change in climate, pollution, or weather was the culprit. Stress is stress and you can’t always predict how it manifests. I’m so used my body being in pain I’d forgotten that sometimes symptoms can just as easily manifest on the outside as the inside.

It takes an entirely separate set of medications to manage inflammation on my skin as it does to manage inflammation my joints and spinal column which is a bit of a pain in the ass. I am much more eager to treat it. Maybe it’s easier tolerate being in pain than being red and itchy. You’d think it would be the other way around.

Given that my body feels a bit stressed I’ll keep this short today. Hopefully the manifestations of inflammation calm themselves down and I won’t be dealing with either tomorrow.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 974 and Flare

As most casual observers of this daily log have probably noticed, one of my main interests is biohacking. It was a hobby in the time of my life I mislabel as “before chronic illness.” It’s not accurate so much as recency bias. I’ve been into biohacking my whole life because I’ve had to manage an unruly body.

I had the best health of my life between 24 and 34. I am rounding the end of my 39th year as I write today. I didn’t think of myself as being chronically ill for that decade.

Probably why I think of my life as having a “before” illness is more that I’ve been in the worst flare of my life for the last five years. It came crashing down with a one two punch of being a startup founder & getting pumped full of hormones for fertility treatments at 33. I was on bedrest and chemotherapy drugs by the time I was 34.

So I have to remind myself there is no time before chronic illness. There was remission. I had long years of robust health interspersed with autoimmune diseases that flared and were contained.

Diagnosis has been a lifelong battle which started with inflammatory skin conditions and horrendous allergies and ended up with the inflammation going inside my spine and joints. Ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis is what codes with insurance.

Looking at my health records, I had my first issues at 7 when I entered school, then after puberty as teenager around 15 & 16. I had to drop out of high school and ran a giant let of standardized tests to claw myself to university.

I was hale for college and my first startup but flared so badly after the acquisition of my first company I was put on an experimental immune reboot protocol. Ask me about being put on cyclosporin without an organ transplant.

My most recent, worst and longest flare was in the five year battle after doing IVF and egg freezing in my early thirties. I’ve only really felt like I was able to work my preferred hours this past year. So perhaps that flare is finished. I don’t want to tempt it. Though I yearn to live harder & faster and bigger.

Writing it all out in a timeline makes it seem like the pattern is introducing change and stress into my routines but also there are two big incidents involving hormones. Being put on birth control as a teenager and then whatever the opposite of birth control might be with IVF. Maybe no more synthetic hormone control for me.

Managing your health isn’t easy for anyone. It’s particularly challenging for me. And if the current post pandemic climate is any indication a lot more people are grappling with poorer health. I wish I could offer more help other than saying it’s not easy but flares can be contained. Sometimes with a lot of pharmaceutical intervention. Sometimes with better habits. Sometimes with time. And sometimes it’s just a crap shoot.

Categories
Biohacking Medical Startups

Day 971 and Patients Rights With Artificial Intelligence

If you are working in artificial intelligence or medicine I’d like to pleased my case to you. Id just like to pass along a note.

The current “responsible” safety stance is that we should not have AI agents dispense healthcare advice as if they had the knowledge of a doctor. I think this is safetyism and rob’s sick people of their own agency

I have very complicated healthcare needs and have experienced the range of how human doctors fail. The failure case is almost always in the presumption that you will fall within a median result.

Now for most people this is obviously true. They are more likely to be the average case. And we should all be concerned that people without basic numerate skills may misinterpret a risk. Whether it’s our collective responsibility to set limits to project regular people is not a solved problem.

But for the complex informed patient knows they are not average? The real outliers. Giving them access to more granular data let’s them accelerate their own care.

It’s a persistent issue of paternalism in medicine to assume the doctor knows best and the presumption that the patient is either stupid, lying, or hysterical is the norm. It’s also somewhat gendered in my experience.

I now regularly work with my doctors using an LLM precisely so we can avoid these failure cases where I am treated as an average statistic in a guessing game. I’m a patient not a customer after all. I decided my best interest.

A strict regulatory framework constricts access without solving any of the wider issues of access to care for those outside of norms. Artificial intelligence has the capacity to save lives and improve quality of life for countless difficult patients. It’s a social good and probably a financial one too.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 965 and Bounce Back

I had a really shitty day yesterday. I was attuned to the haunted corners in myself and others. I was in an astonishing amount of pain. I got into a fight with a family member over a misunderstanding.

I found myself in a state of reactivity. It’s a huge challenge to manage nervous system regulation for me when I tip from the pain scale from my typical 4-5 to the impossible ignore 7-8 range.

I have become quite used to living with pain that would be distracting for others. I monitor biometrics like my heart rate variability to keep track of how stressed my body is from the pain.

I’ve found it important to learn how to bounce back from unexpected pain. It’s important to stop stress and reactivity in its tracks. If you let stress hijack your nervous system you can do yourself a lot of damage.

I took care of myself last night. I did what I needed to get my nervous system under control and the pain manageable. And it worked.

I turned myself around today. I lifted weights, I meditated, I took my supplements, and I tackled my work load with pleasure. I can feel the fatigue sweeping back in as the day winds up. But I can rest easy knowing I set myself up to bounce back again tomorrow. Budget for the body you have and not the fantasy one which you don’t have.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 953 and Sugar

If you’ve been following me for a while chances are good that you’ve seen me discuss my biohacking.

I’ve got an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis. It’s a form of arthritis in the spine. When it flares the inflammation can be so painful that basic tasks like walking or standing can be out of the question. It’s impacted my daily life in strange and sometimes sadly poignant ways.

Now thanks to the wonders of modern biologic injectables like interleukin inhibitors (my lucky number is IL-17h), non steroidal anti-inflammatories, the occasional round of chemotherapy workhorse methotrexate, and the ultimate big boss inflammation killer known as prednisone I lead a pretty normal life.

I am however always looking for new ways to improve my situation. You name a modality of healing and I’ve surely done it.

I’m regularly throwing myself at new pharmaceuticals, new workouts, new devices, and new routines. I track it all obsessively. If you want a 10 day water fast buddy call me.

This kind of thinking means I am prone to optimism and the occasional “one weird cure” line of thinking. The hope that springs eternal is the fantasy what ails can fixed with a gluten free diet (nope) or the du nude Goop wellmania cure which costs $500.

One of my biggest “I’ll be cured” fantasies is that the extra body fat I gained from multiple rounds of steroids and hormone treatments is actually the cause of my health problems and not one of its symptoms.

Notice they I don’t say biggest fears. My biometrics don’t really suggest that adipose tissue is my root issue. Being fat is a core problem for many people but for me it’s a symptom. I don’t want to disclose said biometrics as I fear insurance companies and pharmacies might decide to dig.

In pursuit of a cure for this symptom, I’ve been way ahead of the GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide. My Novo Nordisk and Eli Lily stockholdings are up 100%. I had success on Ozempic but went off it as the side effects got to be too much for me after nine months when I reached a healthy body weight.

But I recently I paid out of pocket to try Mounjaro as I’ve not happy with where I am currently at for excess adipose tissue. It’s supposed to be less brutal on the stomach. It’s got a duel mechanism as a GLP-1 and GIP receptor have lead to excellent clinical trial results.

I’d say about three weeks in those results for me are not forthcoming. I’ve been in a perpetual state of low grade anxiety that seems to be from hypoglycemia. I’ve been sluggish, cranky, moody and my mind unfocused and hazy.

As it turns out the glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide receptor (GIP receptor) primarily affects the body’s physiological response to food intake and blood sugar regulation. So I’ve got low blood sugar.

Luckily throwing fruit at the problem helps the symptoms. I have not lost so much as an ounce though. I think I’d rather go back to Ozempic which at least took weight off. I’d rather have a fucked up stomach than a fucked up mind. Maybe other people need to eat less sugar. I guess I don’t have that problem.