“Smart drugs” and cold therapy: How I’m biohacking my body to be smarter and healthier

I’ve always worked hard. Throughout most of my 23-year career, putting in the hours and jet-setting around the world, it’s seemed like I’ve had unlimited energy and stamina. I aim to live life to the fullest. But things kicked into a higher gear in late 2015 when I quit my well-paid executive job at a software company to pursue a career as a futurist. Until then, thinking about the future and running conferences had been a side project, so I spent the next year building up my new career by writing articles, making media appearances, speaking here and there, and planning my events, Future Camp and Dark Futures, in Vancouver. By 2017 my career caught fire: 60-plus keynote speeches meant lots of global travel and spending countless hours in hotels, taxis and speaking venues, with zero balance in my life at all. I became a workaholic with no time for exercise, friends, a relationship or even to focus on myself. “Make hay while the sun shines,” is the old adage, but they forget to tell you that even farmers manage to get some sleep. I was caught in a vicious cycle of work, travel, burn out, recover — week in and week out. But I kept pushing myself forward because that’s what I had always done. Then, one day, my hectic lifestyle finally took its toll on my body. On a dark evening in December, I was due to meet a friend but started feeling unwell, so I decided to head into my local pharmacy. I strapped myself into a blood pressure machine and the numbers seemed alarmingly high. When I called 811, a local health hotline, to make sense of it, they told me to head to the closest hospital. The work schedule and resulting burnout had brought […]

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