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.

Categories
Medical

Day 1008 and Pesky Hormones

I’m enjoying a double header of hormones today. I’m in my luteal premenstrual phase which always leaves me tired and emotional. But I am also just letting go of the last bits of adrenaline and cortisol from my travels last week.

As the last bits of stress hormones drain away and my cyclical hormones flow in all I can feel is the weight of the world. I’m sure this dramatic phrasing is merely a function of the pounding hormonal migraine that always accompanies this time of my cycle.

If this all sounds a little foreign to you, Alisa Vitti’s life’s work has been to help women understand their hormonal cycles impact. I’m always looking for ways to hack my physical performance and health so I’ve been especially focused on pesky stress hormones.

Hopefully a little bit of salmon, some greens, and more rest will get me through it. And by next week I’ll be well on my way to peak creativity and energy. The lull will pass soon.

Categories
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
Travel

Day 1002 and Airport Lounges

I’m on my way to the Baltics and Nordic countries for the next few weeks. I’m doing a tour to see what Tallinn and Helsinki have to offer as two of the more interesting and established startup hubs in Europe. If you are based in Northern Europe hit me up!

I’ve come to accept lounger trips and more time on the road as the new “work from home” has become “work from your point of maximum leverage.” I do find that even with the glamor of being on the road, there is something about flying that makes me feel as if my body and soul have briefly stretched their bonds.

Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

William Gibson – Pattern Recognition

It’s 8am in Zurich and my soul doesn’t feel as if it’s caught up with my body. I’m in an airport lounge drinking my third espresso. Both my Whoop and my Apple Watch are sure I only got three hours of sleep.

I had a regional flight that got me to Chicago from Bozeman first thing Thursday morning. The Polaris lounge was quite good at O’Hare if you were wondering. I had some very decent seafood linguini.

Leaving behind Montana

But my Chicago to Zurich flight was that odd 8 hour “overnight” that goes from 2pm Central to midnight. That translates into 6am landing in Switzerland local. The only way you get any sleep is by forcing the issue with pharmaceuticals.

I guess Ambien and Melatonin can only do so much against a regular circadian rhythm. I’ve had three espressos in the lounge here and I’m really debating an another. I was greeted with a magnificent full moon over the river in Zurich. My phone didn’t do it justice.

A full moon over the water as the lights of the metropolis shine on before sunrise in Zurich

My final legal of the journey doesn’t begin until 10am. So I just just need stay alert enough to make the final flight, keep an eye on my bags, and drag myself to my Airbnb in Tallinn. Adjusting from there will take the time they it taken

Categories
Medical

Day 985 and Know So Little

Every time I have have cause to interact with any medical speciality I find myself blown away by just how little we know.

I’ve been going back to doctors to understand what my options are for living with an autoimmune condition and having children. And the truth is we just don’t know much.

I made a life altering decision several years ago by letting a medical decision be framed to me like a consumer product. We opted to freeze eggs and embryos and it turned our entire lives inside out. It triggered an autoimmune response in me that I’ll live with forever.

Somehow in the intervening half decade years we’ve learned precious little about women’s health and fertility. And we are advocating for somehow knowing even less.

Because that’s what we’ve done by letting the government into our health decisions. Don’t kid yourself into thinking when we involve government and bureaucrats we somehow improve our knowledge and safety. At it’s most friendly, when the government shows up it’s about ass covering. At it’s most hostile it’s about control.

We argue about ethics, safety and life as if we even have a shared ideal of any of those concepts. Whose life? My life? My unknown children? I’m not convinced we ever cared about women’s health as an independent variable. We treat fertility as a sideshow and hormones as some variable over which we pretend to have control. And yet every time I try to assess my own risks I find out that we known just about nothing. There are no good answers. And it’s all poorly understood risks.

Categories
Medical

Day 982 and Not Small Men

I’ve been working on getting a deeper understanding of my hormone profile and where I can better support my cycle.

I’ve been surprised by just how little we seem to know about women’s health and the baselines that are considered ideal. Between the battles over health education in school (abstinence only) and the eagerness with which we put my millennial generation on birth control as teenagers, we’ve got both an under-informed and potentially over medicated population. Which wasn’t the case for our mother’s generation who went on birth control much later in life if at all.

A tweet from last week

I’ve had my fair share of fucked up fertility experiences and yet I’ve only just in the last few years learned to understand how my follicular phase impacts me so differently from my luteal phase. If you don’t know what that means either well it’s probably time.

The phases a woman’s cycle

I generally feel most energetic, pain free, and happy during my follicular phase. Despite knowing this I couldn’t tell you what an ideal FSH hormone level would be. I don’t know what balance of estrogen I should have at any given phase. I have no clue what my LH should be during my luteal stage either.

It strikes me that these levels should be taught along with implications for what it means and how to work with them just as we know our ideal blood pressure rage and resting heart rates. It’s some of the most crucial and basic self knowledge about our bodies.

When I think of how many other crucial biometrics I’ve got memorized (I track my SED rate and CRP quarterly for inflammation) it seems odd that something so crucial as one’s hormones wouldn’t be known, tracked and improved. I watch my heart rate variability like my recovery depends on it because it does. So do most serious biohackers.

Knowing more about own health is part of being a responsible adult. And I’m sad that we do so little to educate women on basic rhythms. I can’t tell if it’s a lack of interest from women or a dismissal from the medical profession. Women aren’t just small men.

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
Community Emotional Work Media

Day 960 and Summer Frailty

Rounding the bend into a thousand posts is teaching me some lessons in humility and frailty. I am reaching to get words word as my mind is slow.

I am not reacting to something in an average way and it’s been a struggle to keep going over the laser week or two. I’ve put one foot in front of the other but I can see that I only slept for a couple hours last night. Ironic to be considering averages when one’s own responses are so slowed.

I am just trying to get through August. If my standards are simply to plod through then any achievement like throwing a successful policy night or recording a podcast for Wealth Actually on early stage venture capital count for something.

Much of my struggle is probably just some better living through chemistry problems. A new addition to the biohacking routine went awry. I’m struggling with the heat wave and the air quality of summer in the mountain west. The long days of bright lights slowly unspooling my sanity as I wait for cooler less cruel months to come. Just breathe in and out and try to eat and sleep.