I wasn’t trying to rewrite the rules of health. I was just trying to get out of bed.
A few years ago, a kind of exhaustion I’d never known hit—not fatigue from a long day, but a deep, bone-heavy depletion that left me unable to think clearly or engage with the world. My memory felt fogged, my energy spent before noon, and my ability to write, create, or even have a real conversation seemed far out of reach. A doctor offered medication to mask the symptoms, and I said no—not from distrust, but because it felt wrong to smother a warning light without learning why it was flashing.
That refusal changed everything. I began hunting, not for a quick fix, but for a foundation: raw materials the body needed to heal itself. What I found wasn’t one thing, but a convergence—the unexpected marriage of high-tech interventions like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and ancient practices like breathwork and loving-kindness meditation. This is how a health crisis became my introduction to biohacking, not the Silicon Valley variety with gadgets and supplements at every turn, but a grounded return to both modern science and time-tested human tools.
In what follows, I’ll walk through how hyperbaric oxygen therapy, NAD+ infusions, PEMF, and mindfulness practices like Sky Breath Meditation each played a pivotal role in my recovery—and why the future of health won’t be tech vs. tradition, but tech and tradition, working together.
Source: How to Biohack Your Brain — Psychology Today
What Biohacking Really Means (And Why I Had Been Doing It for Years)
The first time I heard the word "biohacking," it conjured images of bearded Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in black tanks sipping NAD+ infusions or stepping into expensive-looking hyperbaric chambers while monitoring biometrics on their smartwatches. That’s one version of it, and it’s mostly real—there are genuinely fascinating devices and protocols out there.
But that wasn’t where my own story began. I had spent years researching and practicing holistic mental health at Stanford and Yale, long before the term entered the popular lexicon. I was learning what biohacking actually means: not hacking against biology, but working with it. Not forcing the body into submission through external gadgets, but offering it better tools so its own repair systems can do what they evolved to do.
Think of biohacking like this: your cells are already built to regenerate, detoxify, and adapt. They just need the right raw materials—oxygen, energy molecules, electrical signals—and a calm nervous system to respond. So you can either throw technology at every symptom until something sticks, or you can ask: what would support this system to do its own job, well?
The science confirms it. A 2024 systematic review in Frontiers in Neurology called hyperbaric oxygen therapy an "emerging neuromodulatory technique"—meaning it changes how the brain functions by improving oxygen delivery and reducing neuroinflammation, not by overriding anything.
Likewise, meditation and breathwork aren’t fluffy wellness add-ons. They’re neuromodulatory tools themselves—tools that shift the autonomic balance toward parasympathetic dominance, reduce systemic inflammation, and even improve cardiovascular health over time.
Biohacking isn’t about adding more complexity. It’s about removing the barriers that keep your body from working as it was designed to.
Source: How to Biohack Your Brain — Psychology Today
The Modern Toolkit: Oxygen, Cells, and Electromagnetism
When I finally found myself in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, I had no idea what to expect. Not the sleek Silicon Valley version—with LED screens and custom programming—but a clinical setting where I’d lie still for an hour as atmospheric pressure increased, pushing extra oxygen into my bloodstream.
Here’s what happened: my energy returned. Not gradually, but within a few sessions. Then came something even more surprising—my cognitive clarity bounced back. The fog lifted enough for me to write again, not just draft emails but structure longer thoughts and follow them through. I ended up writing my second book, SOVEREIGN, in just six months.
It wasn’t placebo. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Neurology described hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) as an emerging neuromodulatory technique with proven effects on cognition, memory, and focus. Patients ranging from stroke survivors to veterans with traumatic brain injury have reported dramatic improvements—same chamber, same physics, different conditions. Why? Because every cell, especially neurons, depends on oxygen to function.
But HBOT was only half the equation. I also tried IV infusions of NAD+ and Niagen, both designed to support mitochondrial energy production. Mitochondria—the tiny power plants inside every cell—decline with age, stress, and chronic illness. Boosting NAD+ helps keep those engines running.
Then came PEMF: pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. This one sounds almost sci-fi, but the data is real. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports showed PEMF accelerates blood vessel formation by tuning up mitochondrial energy metabolism in endothelial cells. Another 2025 systematic review confirmed its benefits for chronic low back pain—improving both pain scores and physical function.
The common thread across all three? They don’t force the body to do anything new. They make it easier for the body to do what it already does—just better.
Source: How to Biohack Your Brain — Psychology Today
Ancient Biohacking: Breath, Compassion, and Connection
You don’t need a hyperbaric chamber or an IV line to support your cells. Sometimes, you just need to breathe.
Around the same time I was exploring HBOT and PEMF, a friend introduced me to Sky Breath Meditation. On paper, it’s simple: a specific pattern of rhythmic breathing meant to shift the autonomic nervous system. In practice? It felt like hitting a reset button on my entire physiology.
The research backs this up. Our team at Yale found that breathwork like Sky Breath Meditation not only reduces symptoms of PTSD in veterans, but helps college students manage acute stress and prevent mental health crises before they escalate. That’s not just subjective relief—EEG studies show measurable shifts in brainwave patterns, and cortisol levels drop consistently across trials.
Then there’s loving-kindness meditation, or metta. At first, the idea felt a little new-agey—wishing well-being toward strangers and even people I found difficult. But the science surprised me: regular practice significantly increases positive emotion, social connection, and resilience to chronic pain. One study found it even reduces inflammation markers at the cellular level.
Why does compassion—something often treated as moral or spiritual—have such tangible effects? Because loneliness and chronic stress have identical pathways. They ramp up inflammation, suppress immunity, and erode telomeres—those protective caps on our DNA that determine cellular aging. Compassion, conversely, activates the vagus nerve and calms the fight-or-flight response.
I began integrating brief breathwork sessions into my morning routine, sometimes 10 minutes of Sky Breath before breakfast. On days I skipped it, the difference was striking: brain fog returned faster, energy dipped earlier, and irritability crept in. It wasn’t magic—it was regulation.
The ancient traditions—meditation, breathwork, yoga—are not relics of the past. They’re sophisticated behavioral technologies honed over millennia and refined only recently by modern neuroscience.
Source: How to Biohack Your Brain — Psychology Today
The Future Is Already Here: Convergence, Not Choice
This is where things get interesting—not with a binary choice between old and new, but with convergence.
When Dave Asprey’s biohacking conference first launched, the lineups included everything from hydrogen breath tests to ozone chambers and beds that combined red light, sound frequencies, and PEMF. At the time, it felt like pure spectacle—people lining up at 7 a.m., hoping for a miracle.
But standing there, I realized something important: personalization is the key. Not every modality works for everyone—and that’s precisely why we need both high-tech tools and ancient ones.
Think of your body like an orchestra. Modern biohacking gives you instruments—oxygen tanks, PEMF coils, NAD+ infusions—that tune up the physiology. Ancient practices like meditation and breathwork are the conductor, calming the nervous system and ensuring every instrument plays in sync.
Without regulation (the conductor), you get noise—overstimulation, anxiety, inflammation. Without instruments (the tech), you miss out on the raw power to rebuild, especially when systems are badly depleted.
Personalization means matching the right tool to the right person, at the right time. A veteran with traumatic brain injury may need HBOT first to restore baseline oxygenation, then breathwork to calm hyperarousal. Someone with burnout may need compassion practices first to restore emotional reserves, then gentle cellular support.
The most powerful health strategies won’t come from a single device or technique, but from strategic combinations—layered like a well-designed construction project. Foundation first (breath and regulation), then structure (cellular support), then finish work (cognitive and emotional refinement).
And who helps coordinate this? Increasingly, artificial intelligence. AI systems can ingest your biometrics—heart rate variability, sleep architecture, glucose trends—and suggest combinations of breathwork duration, light therapy intensity, or PEMF frequency tailored to your unique biology.
None of this replaces human intuition. But it does mean we no longer need to guess blindly or follow generic protocols.
Source: How to Biohack Your Brain — Psychology Today
One Year Later: How My Body Feels Now
I’m not claiming to be cured. That word feels too final for something this dynamic.
What I can say is that I now have tools. Tools to raise my baseline energy, tools to recalibrate when stress spikes, and tools to lean into joy even when the world feels heavy.
Some days that’s five minutes of Sky Breath before I check my email. Other days it’s stepping into a hyperbaric chamber after months away—feeling the pressure shift, and remembering how light my mind felt the last time I did this.
I no longer wait for crisis to signal something’s wrong. Instead, I check in—body, breath, emotions—and adjust accordingly. It’s not about optimization as a performance metric, but as an act of respect for the only body I’ll ever have.
The future of health isn’t some distant vision. It’s already here—in breath, oxygen, electromagnetic fields, and love, offered freely to ourselves and others. All we need is the willingness to try more than one thing at a time, to trust that ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science can walk hand-in-hand.
And if you’re reading this because you’re on the edge of your own health crisis—the kind that makes getting out of bed feel impossible—please know this: healing isn’t about finding the one right thing. It’s about stacking up enough right supports that your body can finally remember how to heal itself.
That’s what biohacking, done right, really is: support, not substitution.