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A few weeks ago I was at dinner with friends. Someone was mid-story and they could barely get the words out because they were laughing too hard, and the whole table went with them. No one was checking their phones or wearables, and no one brought up a biohacking protocol. I felt my ab muscles get sore from laughing, and I remember thinking, clear as anything: this is the wellness. Right here. This is the thing none of us can buy.
I’ve written extensively on how wellness got heavy, how self-care quietly turned into self-surveillance and how our obsessing over protocols is making us unwell. We’ve optimized ourselves out of “well.”
Let me clarify one thing first, because I don’t want to be misread: I love biohacking. I use wearables, red light and PEMF therapy. I sauna, I cold-plunge in whatever’s cold — a shower, the pool or the occasional fancy plunge tub at a wellness studio or spa.
I track metrics quite a bit, but I use the data as a tool. I don’t live by it or swear by it. I’m not telling you to throw your Oura ring into the ocean. I’m telling you it belongs second. Foundations first, gadgets after, and most of us have that backwards.
Here’s what backwards looks like. There’s a clinical term now, orthosomnia, for the anxiety of chasing a perfect sleep score, where people sleep worse because the tracker told them to worry. Doctors are seeing wearable-induced health anxiety, where normal minute-to-minute shifts in heart rate suddenly look like emergencies. None of that is the ring’s fault. It’s ours. We let a device outrank the body it was supposed to be listening to.
I learned this the hard way, and it cost me years of injuries and fatigue. In my triathlon and Ironman days, I followed training plans so precisely that I treated exhaustion as evidence I was doing it right. Dead legs meant discipline. A skipped meal on a low-carb streak meant willpower.
My body was sending clear signals — rest, eat more, back off — and I overrode every one of them, because the plan on paper didn’t have a box for “listen to your body.” My Garmin told a beautiful story: splits dropping, volume climbing, every workout logged and green. The data showed progress, although I was reaching for a pre-workout drink before every workout and relying on caffeine gels to get through them.
I nailed my training plans and raced fairly well, so you could say I was “optimized.” In hindsight, that’s not true. I was the most depleted I’ve ever been — training through injuries, limiting my carbs and adding a Pilates class as an “extra” third workout. That’s the trap: I trusted the plan over the body running it.
So before any device earns a place in my routine, I lock in these seven foundations. They’re free, they’re mostly analog, and they work. Here’s what I do now.
1. Protect your sleep before anything else
Sleep is the original performance enhancer, and no supplement stack makes up for missing it. Seven to eight hours fuels the decision-making, emotional regulation and patience that running a company quietly demands. Skip it, and you show up jet-lagged to your work, your family and your health. I treat bedtime like a standing meeting with my future self, and the fastest way to sleep better is to stop grading it every morning. An observation is fine, but the answer to “how did I sleep?” should come from how you feel, not from a score.
After a long day and late swim practice, my son Andrew sits in his car in the driveway for a few minutes before he comes inside — engine off, just decompressing in the quiet. No one taught him that. When I asked him why, he said, “It lets my body downshift before I walk in the door and get right to showering, eating and finishing homework at 9 pm.” He reads before bed every single night. His phone and computer stay downstairs.
Like many of us, Andrew can’t control his schedule, but he can control his transitions. Most of us have to relearn what he does on instinct: you can’t sprint straight from a screen into sleep and expect your body to cooperate.
2. Hydrate before you caffeinate
The least glamorous item on this list and one of the highest-returning is water. Most of us wake up mildly dehydrated and reach straight for coffee, which only deepens the deficit.
Drink water first, and if you train early, add electrolytes. I’ve written before about swapping the second coffee for water and electrolytes, and the difference in afternoon energy and focus is almost embarrassing for how simple it is. Listen to your body and do what works for you. But get the water right before you reach for anything with a label on it.
3. Take a real phone-free day
Think back to the last Saturday when your phone stayed in a drawer. If you can’t remember one, that’s the point. We call it “being unreachable,” like it’s a liability. It isn’t. It’s the deload week your nervous system has been begging for. We already know the cost of the other direction: the CDC reports that heavy screen use tracks with worse mental well-being, especially in kids. A phone-free day isn’t deprivation. It’s the most underrated recovery tool you own.
I haven’t pulled off a full one yet. I’ve had the phone-free hours. Skiing, where I don’t dare pull off my gloves to dig it out of my pocket. Dinners where it stays in my bag. And every time, the same thing happens: somewhere in there, something loosens. I’m present with my kids and my husband in a way I hadn’t been all week, giving them full attention, not glancing down mid-sentence. If a few hours can do that, I want to know what an entire day does.
Here’s what I’ve learned: don’t count on willpower. Put the day somewhere your phone cannot follow you. I’m booking mine. I challenge you to do the same.
4. Belly laugh with your people
This one has hard science, and we ignore it because it feels too obvious to count. Researchers at Oxford found that 15 minutes of real laughter with others raises your pain threshold by about 10% — a proxy for a flood of endorphins, the same chemistry that lets humans bond in groups instead of one at a time. That table I mentioned at the start? My abs hurt the next morning. Nobody logged it, nobody scored it, and it did more for me than most of what I paid for that month.
I made a case in my last piece that raised eyebrows: going out with friends and having one glass of wine — with the discipline to stop there — can beat staying home alone refreshing your metrics. The wine is optional. The laughing is not.
5. Get outside. An ocean beats a cold plunge
I love a hard hike with friends on a trail that demands your attention. And if you’re lucky enough to live near an ocean, get in it, play in the waves like a kid. The research on “blue spaces” is remarkably consistent: being near and in water is linked to lower stress and better mental health, and the effect is stronger when you’re moving and with people.
I love a cold plunge too — though give me 50 degrees, not the 40s, and yes, hello endorphins. Cold plunging is an invigorating tool, but the evidence is thinner than the marketing suggests. The ocean gives you the cold and the nature and the play and the friends, all at once, for free. A wave is a whole-food cold plunge.
I live minutes from the Pacific, and my best recovery costs nothing and takes no reservation. I don’t own a fancy plunge tub. Instead, I take a cold shower, jump in the pool or throw some ice in the bathtub. But when I want the real thing, I grab a friend and we go get pummeled by the waves like a couple of ten-year-olds. We come out cold, laughing, a little salt-blind and completely reset. No tub I could buy would beat that.
6. Sweat together
One of my favorite reframes comes from pro volleyball player turned entrepreneur and podcaster Gabby Reece, who aptly calls her sauna The Truth Barrel. The premise is perfect: put people in a 200-degree box — half-naked, sweating, a little uncomfortable — and the truth just comes out. You are too exposed to perform in the sauna, and that’s exactly the point. Vulnerability is connection, and connection is the wellness. Frequent sauna use is also linked to lower cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in long-running Finnish studies. But the medicine is the friend across from you, not the temperature.
I’ve had more honest conversations in a sauna than almost anywhere else. There’s something about being sweaty, red-faced and stripped of the usual armor that makes the small talk fall away fast. People also aren’t reaching for a phone and only a few minutes in, someone always says the real thing they’ve been circling for weeks, and the rest of us just nod, because the heat already burned off the pretense. Far from a biohack, the sauna conversations turn into friendships with the volume turned up.
7. Just eat the raspberries
Walk any grocery aisle, and everything is shouting the same thing: More protein! More fiber! It’s been called protein maxxing, or “proteinification” and forecasters are already calling its peak. Here’s the part nobody prints on the label: when you fortify a simple whole food like plain yogurt with isolated protein powder, you reclassify it from minimally processed to ultra-processed. The “healthier” version is, by definition, more manufactured.
Meanwhile, the new Federal Dietary Guidelines point us right back to whole, minimally processed food. Two experts I trust, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon and Cynthia Thurlow, come at nutrition from different angles but agree on the fundamentals: prioritize protein, and be ruthless about quality. So before the protein cookie: how about a cup of raspberries and blueberries? A bowl of real applesauce? The food that doesn’t need a marketing claim is usually the one telling the truth.
My own swap: instead of the protein bar, I reach for cottage cheese with something that adds texture and staying power — lupini beans, a handful of nuts, a couple of hard-boiled eggs.
I have a name for the bite-sized version of all this. I call them “joy snacks,” and they are small, intentional hits of life sprinkled through the day. A walking meeting. A real lunch with my kids. Ten minutes of pickleball. They’re free, they take seconds, and they protect the one asset most of us are actually running on: energy.
None of this is anti-biohacking. I take creatine, I’m experimenting with hydrogen water and I’ll be in the sauna tomorrow. But I’ll get there having slept, hydrated, eaten real food, moved my body, and laughed with someone I love — and then the fancy stuff gets to do its job. We know this instinctively in business: the flashiest software will not save a company that skipped its fundamentals. Why would our bodies work any differently?
As I turned 50 this month, I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been and almost none of it came from a device. It came from getting the order right.
This week, subtract one thing you bought and add one thing that’s free. Put the phone in a drawer for a day. Call the friend who makes you laugh until you can’t breathe. Find the water. Eat the berries. Then notice how you feel without checking anything to confirm it.
That’s the wellness no one can sell you. And it’s been free the whole time.
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