Is biohacking dangerous? —
when longevity becomes a religion.

A managing director in his early forties came to me with a folder. Inside: fourteen months of sleep data, HRV curves, three blood panels, a supplement list with twenty-three entries. His question was not what else he could do. His question was why he felt worse than he had two years earlier.

We went through the list. Cold plunge at six. Eating window from noon to eight. Blue light filter from six in the evening. No alcohol. No dinner outside the house, because that would break the window. On paper this was an exemplary protocol. In daily life it was a cage.

The problem was not any single measure. Each one on its own was defensible, and I recommend some of them myself. The problem was the sum — and above all what had been dropped to make room for it.

Where biohacking tips over

Biohacking is, at first, nothing other than the attempt to influence bodily processes deliberately. Sleep, nutrition, load, recovery. I have been working that way for more than twenty years, it was just called training management back then.

So the question is not whether to turn these dials. The question is how far — and what for.

Whoever measures in order to understand gains information. Whoever measures in order to produce a better number every day has lost sight of the purpose. The transition is gradual, and it is rarely crossed consciously. Nobody decides one morning to become fanatical. It creeps in over months, one rule at a time.

Longevity is the topic of the hour right now. Sleep optimisation, blood values, supplement stacks, cold plunges, time-restricted eating. I know all of it, I have worked with it for years and consider much of it useful. But I also see what happens when it tips over.

The three points where it turns dangerous

In practice, the question is biohacking dangerous almost always comes down to the same three patterns.

1. When the measurement itself becomes the stressor

In 2017, sleep researchers led by Kelly Baron described a phenomenon they were seeing more and more often in clinic: patients whose sleep got worse because they were fixated on their tracker data. They called it orthosomnia — the perfectionist pursuit of ideal sleep.

The mechanism is unspectacular, which is exactly why it works so well. Heightened self-monitoring leads to rumination in bed. Rumination raises tension. Tension is the direct opponent of falling asleep. The tracker then records a poor night, which deepens the worry the following evening. A closed loop.

I have to admit I went through this myself. There was a phase when I analysed my sleep data so thoroughly that I regularly got to bed too late because of it. The irony only struck me a few weeks in.

A tracker is a measuring instrument. It is not a report card. If a number in the morning determines how you feel for the day, the device is working against you. More on what actually matters for sleep is in my article on sleep quality.

2. When one person's protocol becomes everyone's template

The best-known longevity protocols come from individuals who have organised their entire lives around them. Bryan Johnson's Blueprint is the most prominent example: a meticulously documented programme with a medical team, permanent diagnostics and a budget in the seven-figure range.

My objection is not a personal one, it is methodological. A protocol developed on a single person and tested on that same person is not a study. There is no control group, no blinding, no second person on whom you could show which part actually works. With more than a hundred simultaneous measures, there is no way to say which of them contributes anything and which is merely expensive.

Then there is context. Someone with a full-time team, predictable days and unlimited means lives under conditions that have nothing in common with a managing director who has two children and travels for work. What works there does not have to work here. Usually it does not.

3. When supplements replace diagnostics

The twenty-three entries in that folder were not the result of diagnostics. They were the result of podcasts. For each one individually there was a rationale that sounded reasonable. For the combination there was none.

That is the real risk: not the single product, but the stack. Interactions go unnoticed because nobody reviews the whole. Overdoses do not stand out because no baseline exists. And an actual deficiency gets missed, because surely you are already taking so much.

The order matters, and it is almost always reversed. It should be: measure first, supplement specifically, then measure again. Anyone who cannot name a measured value for half of their products is no longer optimising — they are collecting. How risky that can get I have set out in a separate article on dietary supplements.

What the protocols overlook

And now for the point that appears in almost no longevity protocol — even though the evidence for it is better than for most supplements.

A meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues evaluated 148 studies with 308,849 participants. The result: people with strong social relationships had a fifty per cent higher likelihood of survival. The authors rate the effect as comparable to well-established risk factors for mortality.

Read that again in the light of the folder. The dinner with friends that gets cancelled because it breaks the eating window. The glass of wine at the family celebration that stays untouched. The Sunday kept clear for the protocol.

These are not lapses to be trained away. This is a dial that works in the same order of magnitude as the ones currently being turned so eagerly. Anyone who sacrifices it for the protocol is not trading convenience for health. They are trading a well-documented factor for a less well-documented one.

It backfires. Not immediately. But it backfires.

Optimisation instead of maximisation

What actually holds is not a protocol. It is a ratio.

Social life, recovery, movement and work have to stand in a proportion to each other that fits you — not some biohacker on YouTube. That ratio looks different for everyone. This is not an excuse, it is the entire point.

The difference between the two mindsets is concrete:

Maximisation asks: how much is possible? It knows only one direction, which is more. Every measure gets added on top, none is removed. The yardstick is the number.

Optimisation asks: what is enough for the whole system to hold? It works with target ranges instead of personal bests, and it takes things back out again. The yardstick is how resilient you are in six months.

Physiologically this is not a matter of taste. The body needs stimulus and adaptation. The joint consensus statement of the European College of Sport Science and the American College of Sports Medicine on overtraining describes exactly this: successful training must involve overload, but must avoid the combination of excessive overload and inadequate recovery. Whoever only sets stimuli builds nothing up. They break down.

This does not apply to training alone. A shortened eating window is a stressor. A cold plunge is a stressor. A full working day is a stressor. The body does not keep separate accounts for the good ones and the bad ones. It adds them up.

How to tell it has tipped over

I hear the following signs in conversations again and again. Individually they are unremarkable. In combination they are unambiguous.

If two or more of these apply, the answer to the opening question is yes in your case. Not because a method is harmful, but because the ratio no longer holds.

The way out is unspectacular: leave things out. Not everything, just what you cannot give a reason for. Then rebuild — with diagnostics as the starting point instead of a recommendation from the internet. That is exactly the frame I work in with clients: blood panel, load, sleep and daily life as one connected system rather than separate checklists.

Optimisation yes. Maximisation no.