Latest / Calm By Lane / Your Body Is Not a Biohacking Project

Transcript

Your Body Is Not a Biohacking Project · Calm By Lane

0:00
Lane Kennedy: Welcome.
0:01
Lane Kennedy: Hi, friend.
0:02
Lane Kennedy: Welcome to Calm by Lane: Meditation for Life.
0:05
Lane Kennedy: I'm Laine Kennedy, and I will be your guide and host.
0:09
Lane Kennedy: This is my short-form show about meditation, the nervous system.
0:14
Lane Kennedy: I can't believe I'm saying that, the nervous system, right?
0:17
Lane Kennedy: Stress, breath, body, and what it actually means to live in a regulated body, a regulated life.
0:25
Lane Kennedy: And I hear this word all the time now.
0:28
Lane Kennedy: "I'm unregulated.
0:29
Lane Kennedy: My nervous system."
0:31
Lane Kennedy: it's part of the lexicon of our TV shows.
0:36
Lane Kennedy: It's all over social media.
0:38
Lane Kennedy: It's wild to y- I don't know, just see it.
0:44
Lane Kennedy: Again, joke is on me.
0:47
Lane Kennedy: So today I'm gonna talk about biohacking, and I need to back up a little bit Before I start, because I don't want this to sound like I'm standing on the sidelines criticizing a world I don't understand, because believe
1:03
Lane Kennedy: you me, I was there in the biohacking world.
1:09
Lane Kennedy: And this too is something that's ugh, it's all over the place, all in the social feeds, YouTube.
1:18
Lane Kennedy: Yeah, biohacker.
1:20
Lane Kennedy: So I was an original.
1:21
Lane Kennedy: I'm an OG biohacker.
1:23
Lane Kennedy: I was doing this stuff e- even before Dave Asprey, and I had this conversation with him when I first started his coaching program.
1:33
Lane Kennedy: I said, "You know, I started, like, investigating, uh, my hormones with Suzanne Somers."
1:39
Lane Kennedy: And he was like, "Oh my God, you're like the first female biohacker."
1:44
Lane Kennedy: Not that I would take credit of being the first female biohacker, but I've definitely been playing with my biochemistry for a long time and knew a lot about it, more than the average bird, when most people had no
2:03
Lane Kennedy: idea what the word biohacking meant.
2:06
Lane Kennedy: And I'll also share that I love data.
2:08
Lane Kennedy: I love experimenting.
2:10
Lane Kennedy: I love all the supplements, the testing, the possibility that if we can understand our biology well enough, then we can change how we feel and how we function.
2:22
Lane Kennedy: And so when I tell you that I think we've gone too far with some of this, I'm including myself in this conversation, like for real.
2:32
Lane Kennedy: So before we get into this, today a quick word from our sponsor.
2:36
Lane Kennedy: Yes, the sponsor of the show, which is yours truly.
2:40
Lane Kennedy: Calm by Lane Meditation for Life is supported by the Calm by Lane Practice Library.
2:46
Lane Kennedy: It's my private, completely ad-free audio library of longer guided meditations, breathwork, somatic practices, all the good stuff, and all the things that I teach about stress management I've been teaching for years.
3:01
Lane Kennedy: It's in a membership format.
3:03
Lane Kennedy: It's a private feed, goes directly into your podcast app.
3:08
Lane Kennedy: So it's really simple to use.
3:09
Lane Kennedy: You can find out everything that you need over at lanekennedy.com.
3:15
Lane Kennedy: Practice with me.
3:17
Lane Kennedy: Okay, so let's get back into this biohacking stuff.
3:22
Lane Kennedy: So I was a really early adopter of this world, and I have to say Dave Asprey like Dave, like blah, blah.
3:34
Lane Kennedy: That's for another conversation.
3:35
Lane Kennedy: Anyways, I'm grateful for him because he pushed it out to the forefront.
3:41
Lane Kennedy: Which is, which is great.
3:42
Lane Kennedy: And a lot of people needed to do that at the time.
3:45
Lane Kennedy: So what I really wanna get into is what happens if we start measuring everything, and what happens when we change things, and what happens when we start looking at our sleep really deeply.
4:04
Lane Kennedy: What happens to cognition when we change food and light and supplements, when we change the way that we breathe that we change the way that we exercise or recover?
4:15
Lane Kennedy: And granted, I found this incredibly fascinating because I love the science.
4:22
Lane Kennedy: I love unraveling the biochemistry of the body, and when I got into DNA, I was like, "Oh, now it makes so much more sense."
4:31
Lane Kennedy: And I eventually became the functional DNA nutritionist, and data became really important part of my professional work.
4:40
Lane Kennedy: It, it just, it I love it.
4:43
Lane Kennedy: I believe in the laboratory testing, and all of that can be really useful.
4:49
Lane Kennedy: Biomarkers, useful.
4:51
Lane Kennedy: Nutrition matters.
4:54
Lane Kennedy: Sleep matters.
4:56
Lane Kennedy: And I believe there are things we can do that genuinely change our physiology.
5:04
Lane Kennedy: I'm not You know, like all that's good.
5:09
Lane Kennedy: Okay?
5:11
Lane Kennedy: But, or I like to say and now, I don't like the word but I'm gonna use it anyways.
5:16
Lane Kennedy: And here we go.
5:17
Lane Kennedy: And there's also something incredibly, ugh, seductive about biohacking from the beginning.
5:26
Lane Kennedy: The idea that I, that me or you could figure something out, right?
5:31
Lane Kennedy: If I could collect enough information and identify enough variables and make the correct adjustments, perhaps I could get this body, this machine, to operate in exactly the way that I want it to be better, to sleep better, to
5:47
Lane Kennedy: have better cognition, to have a better body, to have better performance to reverse my aging, to be better at everything.
5:56
Lane Kennedy: So the language...
5:59
Lane Kennedy: Here it is.
6:00
Lane Kennedy: Here's the word.
6:01
Lane Kennedy: The language, this word optimization.
6:05
Lane Kennedy: And for somebody like me, who's super curious and disciplined and very willing to experiment on myself, this was...
6:15
Lane Kennedy: Biohacking was like catnip.
6:16
Lane Kennedy: It was like, "Oh, give me more.
6:18
Lane Kennedy: Let me rub all up in it."
6:20
Lane Kennedy: So I'm that person.
6:22
Lane Kennedy: I track things.
6:23
Lane Kennedy: When my son was born, I tracked everything like religion.
6:27
Lane Kennedy: I tested things.
6:28
Lane Kennedy: I tried things.
6:30
Lane Kennedy: I learned all about my genetics.
6:31
Lane Kennedy: I studied my nutrition.
6:33
Lane Kennedy: I paid attention to my exercise recovery.
6:36
Lane Kennedy: I experimented with fasting and supplements.
6:39
Lane Kennedy: I...
6:40
Lane Kennedy: Come on if it was out there, I was doing it.
6:44
Lane Kennedy: L- literally anything that people would throw out there, I would say, "Yes, I'll try it."
6:50
Lane Kennedy: And then I collapsed, right?
6:54
Lane Kennedy: And that's what I talked about a little bit in the last episode.
6:58
Lane Kennedy: And this is where I think we're seeing this more and more in the world right now, where people are starting to break.
7:06
Lane Kennedy: And I think it's for several reasons, but I'm bringing up the biohacking for a very particular reason.
7:13
Lane Kennedy: And so suddenly, when my body that I had spent years learning how to measure and understand and influence was doing something that I couldn't control, 'cause I developed dysautonomia, which is again, the breakdown of the autonomic nervous system,
7:30
Lane Kennedy: my capacity changed dramatically, right?
7:33
Lane Kennedy: E- exercise changed.
7:35
Lane Kennedy: M- my standing up changed, walking changed, my heart rate.
7:40
Lane Kennedy: Like everything became super unpredictable.
7:43
Lane Kennedy: Things that had previously happened quietly in the background of my physiology suddenly was like right in, like front of my face.
7:51
Lane Kennedy: So you would think that someone with my background would've been perfectly equipped for this situation.
7:57
Lane Kennedy: And in some ways- Yes.
8:03
Lane Kennedy: And when my doctor said, "You're looking at 18 months of recovery," I was like, "No, not me.
8:05
Lane Kennedy: I'm gonna do this in a year, nine months."
8:08
Lane Kennedy: like I, I've known how to research.
8:11
Lane Kennedy: I knew how to ask the right questions, and I understand the physiology of going upstream to look at the problem, and I wasn't intimidated by the data.
8:24
Lane Kennedy: I could look at information and try to understand patterns, 'cause that's what I do with DNA and my clients.
8:29
Lane Kennedy: I look at the patterns.
8:30
Lane Kennedy: And so the biohacker in me, I wanted to solve it Okay?
8:36
Lane Kennedy: That's a hard stop.
8:37
Lane Kennedy: I wanted to fix it.
8:40
Lane Kennedy: But I thought there had to be some lever or some protocol.
8:44
Lane Kennedy: There had to be something I wasn't seeing, and maybe I needed another test, a supplement, breathing, sleep.
8:54
Lane Kennedy: I need to push through.
8:57
Lane Kennedy: Maybe it was the inflammation.
8:59
Lane Kennedy: Maybe it was hormonal, viral.
9:01
Lane Kennedy: This is the mindset that I have been or that has been serving me for many decades, right?
9:11
Lane Kennedy: But now, I've begun to see it as this shadow, like this dark side And this is what I'm bringing up today is like, when does curiosity become vigilance?
9:25
Lane Kennedy: And when does paying attention to your body become watching your body?
9:30
Lane Kennedy: When does taking care of yourself become managing yourself all day long?
9:34
Lane Kennedy: Because when something has actually gone wrong physically, monitoring can be necessary, and I'm not suggesting otherwise.
9:43
Lane Kennedy: I had legitimate physiological reasons to pay attention to certain things But there's a difference between collecting information that's helpful And information that you're now tethered to.
9:57
Lane Kennedy: So I bring this up because sometimes we have to look at things differently.
10:04
Lane Kennedy: So I started noticing how easy it was to wake up and immediately begin to evaluate myself.
10:10
Lane Kennedy: And now with AI, crazy.
10:13
Lane Kennedy: Like every morning waking up and asking AI Oh, I slept like this, and this is my heart rate."
10:19
Lane Kennedy: Like tracking this.
10:22
Lane Kennedy: How does my body feel?
10:23
Lane Kennedy: Like asking AI What are my next steps?
10:26
Lane Kennedy: What's my heart rate doing?
10:27
Lane Kennedy: What's my energy?"
10:29
Lane Kennedy: So this hypervigilance, th- this I can't...
10:36
Lane Kennedy: It's just wow, this is danger.
10:40
Lane Kennedy: And this is where I started noticing something that was beginning to change.
10:44
Lane Kennedy: I started wondering whether this relentless pursuit of optimization and trying to fix myself was becoming its own form of dysregulation.
10:54
Lane Kennedy: This 30 years of tracking myself.
11:01
Lane Kennedy: Could this be a part of the issue, right?
11:03
Lane Kennedy: And in the biohacking world, we talk endlessly about what are you tracking?
11:09
Lane Kennedy: And what's your HRV?
11:11
Lane Kennedy: Oh, God, the HRV conversation alone is just a nightmare.
11:15
Lane Kennedy: And how are you exercising and what's your recovery like?
11:19
Lane Kennedy: And are you using tape on your mouth?
11:22
Lane Kennedy: Like all the things.
11:25
Lane Kennedy: And are you taking urolithin A and are you using that peptide?
11:30
Lane Kennedy: And there's something absurd about this whole...
11:36
Lane Kennedy: all this language.
11:37
Lane Kennedy: And it's too much, okay?
11:40
Lane Kennedy: I'm just saying it's...
11:41
Lane Kennedy: it begins to stress the nervous system out.
11:43
Lane Kennedy: This is what I'm understanding is it becomes a part of the dysregulation, and I know this because I can see it in my own body.
11:51
Lane Kennedy: I can, I can- I can look at the last 14 months of my life and go, "Oh my God, I turned this into a project."
11:58
Lane Kennedy: I turned this...
12:00
Lane Kennedy: So give me a medication and my Apple Watch and an exercise program, and I will optimize it.
12:08
Lane Kennedy: I'll build a protocol, and it's too much.
12:14
Lane Kennedy: And I know that my collapse has forced me to confront something I don't think the original biohacker in me fully understood, and that is that my body isn't a machine that owes me any predictable output simply because I
12:36
Lane Kennedy: supply the correct inputs.
12:40
Lane Kennedy: My body is going to change.
12:42
Lane Kennedy: It's going to age.
12:44
Lane Kennedy: It is unique.
12:46
Lane Kennedy: It will become ill when there is a virus, and it will recover.
12:51
Lane Kennedy: The natural state of my body is to be in homeostasis and to heal.
12:57
Lane Kennedy: Okay?
12:58
Lane Kennedy: So that's for you, too.
13:00
Lane Kennedy: The natural state of your body is homeostasis and to live in a healed, whole state On a daily basis, bodies respond to grief, joy, hormones, relationships, environment, movement, fear, food, love.
13:18
Lane Kennedy: Sometimes we know exactly why something changed, and sometimes we don't.
13:26
Lane Kennedy: And this is what I keep learning so deeply is that human physiology is extraordinarily complex, and we try to make it simple.
13:34
Lane Kennedy: We try to simplify it.
13:36
Lane Kennedy: Yet the complexity doesn't always lend itself to I...
13:43
Lane Kennedy: control.
13:44
Lane Kennedy: I can't control it.
13:46
Lane Kennedy: And so when I'm trying to biohack something or trying to fix or change, th- my physiology is like, "Nah, not gonna do that."
13:55
Lane Kennedy: So this has fundamentally changed the way that I think about health, this experience that I've had to endure.
14:05
Lane Kennedy: A, a lot of it has been me banging my head on the ground going, "Oh my God, another day."
14:12
Lane Kennedy: And there was a time when health was very connected to performance for me.
14:20
Lane Kennedy: How strong am I?
14:21
Lane Kennedy: How fit am I?
14:22
Lane Kennedy: What's my lean body m- like, how much fat do I have on my body?
14:27
Lane Kennedy: What does my body look like?
14:28
Lane Kennedy: How productive can I be?
14:31
Lane Kennedy: How can I recover quickly?
14:32
Lane Kennedy: What can I improve?
14:33
Lane Kennedy: Like all of this did not help me and is probably not helping you either.
14:41
Lane Kennedy: And now I think about capacity And this is gonna sound just wild.
14:49
Lane Kennedy: A lot of times I question, can I participate in life today?
14:54
Lane Kennedy: Can I walk somewhere beautiful and actually see where I am instead of looking at my watch?
14:59
Lane Kennedy: Can I sit across from someone and just listen to what they're saying?
15:04
Lane Kennedy: Can I move my body because movement feels good, and I want to feel it in my body?
15:10
Lane Kennedy: Can I trust my body enough to just be?
15:15
Lane Kennedy: My, my sense of self has changed So there have been many times in the past 14 months where I haven't been able to eat, or I've only been able to eat potato chips, or I've only been able to
15:29
Lane Kennedy: drink water.
15:30
Lane Kennedy: And so I've had to trust.
15:34
Lane Kennedy: I've had to gain trust.
15:35
Lane Kennedy: My body has had to gain trust in myself again.
15:39
Lane Kennedy: And it's been a lot of letting go of the optimization.
15:46
Lane Kennedy: So going back 14, 15 months ago, I was optimizing everything.
15:51
Lane Kennedy: I was on peptide stacks.
15:52
Lane Kennedy: I was on healing agents and I've had to let go of all of it.
16:00
Lane Kennedy: All of it And I have friends in the biohacking space, in the optimization space that reach out to me and they're like, "Okay, how you doing now?"
16:07
Lane Kennedy: And I'm like, "I can't talk to you 'cause I'm not doing great," and they're like, "Oh, you just need some TA-1 or you need Epitalon or have you tried this?"
16:19
Lane Kennedy: And it's like, "No I don't."
16:23
Lane Kennedy: I'm just doing me, and I'm doing meditation, and I'm allowing the body to rest And meditation used to fit into this optimization world.
16:39
Lane Kennedy: I used to wake up and meditate for an hour in the morning and then another half hour in the afternoon.
16:44
Lane Kennedy: It was like a part of my schedule And now I look at meditation as it's its own I don't know, peaceful place for me.
16:57
Lane Kennedy: And I, it doesn't look anything like an hour in the morning anymore.
17:01
Lane Kennedy: It looks like movement.
17:02
Lane Kennedy: It looks like fascial movement in the morning.
17:05
Lane Kennedy: It looks like breathwork sometimes.
17:07
Lane Kennedy: It looks like going into my red light sauna for five minutes, when before I'd go in for 30 minutes and be dying.
17:17
Lane Kennedy: Like Sometimes it's just noticing that I'm breathing Sometimes meditation is just feeling a sensation without immediately interpreting it I can notice a thought without needing to solve it.
17:34
Lane Kennedy: I can be tired without making fatigue a big problem or something that I have to fix.
17:41
Lane Kennedy: I just sit inside my body without turning the experience into another experiment So it's much harder to just be Aware I become very aware.
17:56
Lane Kennedy: And aware- awareness says, "This is what's happening."
18:01
Lane Kennedy: Surveillance says, "What does this mean?
18:04
Lane Kennedy: Is this okay?
18:05
Lane Kennedy: And what should I do about it?"
18:08
Lane Kennedy: Awareness leaves the room.
18:11
Lane Kennedy: Surveillance demands an answer.
18:15
Lane Kennedy: It's really important.
18:16
Lane Kennedy: I want you to understand that.
18:18
Lane Kennedy: When I'm teaching, I invite my students into this broad, open state of awareness.
18:28
Lane Kennedy: It's a yummy place.
18:30
Lane Kennedy: Surveillance wants me to be trapped, and it's demanding, and it's small Yeah.
18:38
Lane Kennedy: I really believe deeply in understanding our individual biology, and I haven't suddenly become somebody who thinks we should throw out the wearables.
18:47
Lane Kennedy: I still wear my Apple Watch, and I don't think we should live entirely by intuition Right?
18:56
Lane Kennedy: We need medical doctors and practitioners and a- all the help that we can get to live in this human body, to experience this life to our fullest.
19:11
Lane Kennedy: What has changed is I don't let this data define me Yeah, what's changed is that I've just taken a lot of space from that the biomarkers and the biohacking, trying to find more joy in life.
19:34
Lane Kennedy: And I invite you to find joy in your life One thing that I wanna share that might be particularly important is that we talk so much about self-awareness and body awareness and I talk about interoception, that we can
19:47
Lane Kennedy: forget that human beings also need the freedom to turn out, turn our attention outward, right?
19:57
Lane Kennedy: All of this internal, like trying to figure out everything.
20:01
Lane Kennedy: No, look out There's a whole world happening outside our bodies, and regulation doesn't happen only when we're deliberately doing nervous system exercises.
20:13
Lane Kennedy: It happens through relationships, movement, play, nature, purpose, safety, belonging, listening to music, in ordinary moments of just being alive.
20:28
Lane Kennedy: Sometimes the practice is noticing yourself, and sometimes the practice is forgetting yourself.
20:34
Lane Kennedy: And maybe that's where I've landed after all these years of biohacking.
20:40
Lane Kennedy: In this last year and bit is that I don't regret any of it, right?
20:46
Lane Kennedy: That curiosity made me who I am.
20:48
Lane Kennedy: I've taught so much.
20:53
Lane Kennedy: And I get...
20:53
Lane Kennedy: I share it with my clients.
20:55
Lane Kennedy: It taught me an enormous amount about physiology and nutrition in my own body, and I still believe we should be curious about ourselves.
21:01
Lane Kennedy: I still believe we can influence our health in meaningful ways.
21:05
Lane Kennedy: I just don't believe we are meant to spend our entire lives trying to perfect ourselves or trying to optimize ourselves.
21:13
Lane Kennedy: Ugh.
21:14
Lane Kennedy: I think you can calm down and slow down So before I leave you, I do wanna mention that this episode is free, and it's supported by the Calm by Lane Practice Library, and it's a membership ad-free.
21:32
Lane Kennedy: You can find out more information over at lanekennedy.com, practice with me.
21:39
Lane Kennedy: And your membership supports this free show and the meditation practices that, that are on this show to support you.
21:48
Lane Kennedy: So I hope you'll join me over there.
21:51
Lane Kennedy: So for today, I want you to notice something.
21:55
Lane Kennedy: Just notice.
21:56
Lane Kennedy: You don't have to change it or track it.
21:58
Lane Kennedy: You don't have to put it in an app.
22:00
Lane Kennedy: Just notice how many times during one day you evaluate your body.
22:06
Lane Kennedy: And when I s-- when I talk about evaluating your body, it's how did I sleep last night?
22:12
Lane Kennedy: Oh, how do I look?
22:13
Lane Kennedy: How much did I eat?
22:14
Lane Kennedy: How many steps did I take?
22:15
Lane Kennedy: Did I drink enough water?
22:17
Lane Kennedy: Did I meditate long?"
22:18
Lane Kennedy: Like, all of that is evaluating the body.
22:21
Lane Kennedy: Okay?
22:22
Lane Kennedy: All of those questions.
22:25
Lane Kennedy: So think about that, and then ask yourself this question: What would happen if for just a few minutes I stopped trying to improve my body and simply lived inside it?
22:38
Lane Kennedy: Because your body is not your next biohacking project.
22:41
Lane Kennedy: It's not an optimization problem.
22:44
Lane Kennedy: It's not a dashboard.
22:46
Lane Kennedy: It's simply where your life is happening Right now.
22:51
Lane Kennedy: Take a breath with me here.
22:52
Lane Kennedy: Inhale And let it go.
22:55
Lane Kennedy: Know that you're on the path of finding yourself.
23:01
Lane Kennedy: I'm with you 100%.
23:03
Lane Kennedy: Thanks for listening and being with me.
23:05
Lane Kennedy: I'm Lane Kennedy, and this is Calm by Lane Meditation for Life.
23:09
Lane Kennedy: I'll be with you again next time.
23:12
Lane Kennedy: Take good care