Let's Talk About "Optimizing the Body"
Today I feel compelled to talk about the “optimizing the body” and “biohacking” movements so prevalent in our culture today, and how they relate to embodiment.
First, I have a confession to make. I’ve always been drawn to paradox, most commonly defined as a person, idea, or entity that contains seemingly contradictory features.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
(I’m wondering whether Zelda Fitzgerald, a brilliant writer and thinker in her own right, is the one who actually said this and whether he took the credit for it, as happened more than once. This occurred with tragic outcome for the incredibly talented French sculptor Camille Claudel, who inspired—and likely helped create much of—the work and career of Auguste Rodin. I first learned of her story in the 1998 film Camille Claudel, which broke my heart and continues to do so years later.)
Back to paradox, which applies to the body, embodiment, and many of the attitudes we have about them. My mind has the tendency to construct full truths (read: rules) from the information it encounters, and all things body-related are no exceptions. Paradox is an antidote to this. It’s good medicine: It provides space for the notion that arriving at a concrete understanding about the body is not a finite point but rather, an evolving process.
Here's a central paradox I’ve been engaging with thanks to modern western society’s attitude toward the body. First: Your body is endowed with value- is whole and complete- just as it is in this moment. And also: There are things you can do to support and even to change your body. (I’d add, in relation to the mind, brain, and larger social body.)
I'm ambivalent about the "optimize your health" initiatives so popular today. On the one hand, they offer valuable tools and insights. And a large part of their allure comes from the fact that people are suffering in our bodies: inflammation. Chronic pain. Dopamine depletion and malaise. Anxiety and depression.
On the other hand, the drive to optimize performance often involves pushing our bodies and persistent attempts to extract better performance from them. The optimizing and biohacking movements treat the body not as the subject of experience, but the object of it. They overlook the body as an organ of perception.
In January of 2023, Bloomberg published a feature on a 45-year-old multimillionaire software developer trying to turn back the clock on his body’s aging process. Bryan Johnson has a team of thirty doctors devoted to monitoring his body, he estimates that he’ll spend $2M on hacking aging this year. Johnson implies that he’s doing all this for altruistic purposes, to prove to us all that “decay is not inevitable.” It goes without saying that this kind of optimization isn’t for those with modest means. It gives the vibe of Elon Musk, who in the face of global climate destruction resolutely aims to “colonize Mars.”
These movements confine themselves to treating individual bodies in isolation. They ignore the social determinants of health. They omit our larger social body and the way it intersects with and affects, even shapes, our personal bodies, a field which you can think of as social embodiment.
Body Optimization and the Social Determinants of Health
In a Masterclass earlier today on gut wisdom and the enteric nervous system, I addressed this through a scientific study. A group of researchers examined the direct links between racial discrimination, visceral (gut) sensitivity, and mood disorders (anxiety and depression) in people living in the Los Angeles area. The study used MRI scans to provide an innovative look at changes in large neural networks. They then related these brain changes to alterations in the gut microbiome of people who have experienced racial discrimination. And they further connected these microbial changes to levels of inflammation and shifts in mood.
Want to learn about Masterclasses and body practices when they happen? You can find those on my personal email list here. This is where I share practices, PDFs, and educational and practice opportunities.
They found striking results: For Black and Latinx individuals, brain network changes matched psychological coping patterns. Both the neural changes and psychological stress were associated with increased systemic inflammation. Black participants had nine bacterial species that differed due to discrimination. Differences were greater in groups that experienced high levels of discrimination.
In Black participants, high discrimination was associated with elevated levels of prostaglandin-endoperoxidase synthase 1 (PTGS1), a major driver of inflammation. In LatinX participants, high discrimination was associated with elevated interferon-inducing proteian 35 and interleukin 1-B; the latter is implicated in both inflammation and autoimmune issues. In white participants, discrimination (with respect, of course, only to age and gender, since white people do not suffer racial discrimination) was associated with a reduction in interferon regulatory factor, which mediates inflammation levels.
The researchers stated, “Our findings provide a preliminary framework for understanding how discrimination is perceived and processed in the brain and relates to inflammation, the gut microbiome, and psychological distress.” (My take: Inflammation can also begin in the gut and affect the brain.)
The researchers concluded that social inequality is a “whole body experience.” Gut health and the resilience of the enteric nervous system, it seems, is acutely responsive to the social environment.
How Culture Feels About Our Bodies
Recently, in a side discussion on Instagram, the ever-wise physical therapist, yoga teacher and therapist, mindful mom, and socially conscious entrepreneur Katherine Hartsell had this to say on one of my posts:
“It’s all about attuning, understanding, and honoring our forms and functions rather than optimizing them. It’s sneaky how quickly “healthy” habits become power over (including over oneself) rather than giving power back to our natural rhythms and the humanity inside and all around us.”
Kathy’s right; it is sneaky. The optimal performance and bio-hacking movements are so strong in our culture at the moment. At their worst, they objectify the body—which is to say, it makes the body, and our experience of interoception, into "powerful tool” to be “wielded” (note the allusion to weaponry) in what is, essentially, a war against the body. Often, I wonder if they serve as a reactive coping mechanism in the face of our current trajectory of destruction. (My friend Kris Manjapra refers to this as a death cult, which feels like an apt term.)
When the latest scientific research is disseminated by someone well-known on social media, it gets filtered through the culture’s lens and refracts right onto our bodies and our self-to-body relationship.
I love (and love to play with) scientific research as a counterpoint to epistemic wisdom. So I frequently find myself pulled into this without realizing it. I look up the latest “neutraceutical," thinking it might help my immune system. I start to wish for the home cold plunge tank (only $6,000 before add-ons!) picture in the feed of the latest “icefluencer.” I get seduced by the possibility of getting my brain to think better or focus longer, or by implementing a clever nutritional or behavior protocol. What makes this so challenging is that the content has healing potential, even if the essence (the energy around it) of the message can cause a mild yet powerful harm.
I live in this culture. For me, it will always be an active practice to catch this as it happens, to redirect my attention to the tone of my approach to my body and to the quality of my self-to-body relationship. Sometimes a practice that begins as a relationship-building one can get appropriated into an “optimization” one. Recently when this happens, I’ve been able to register a subtle change in the “hues” of my embodied experience. There occurs a subtle deadening effect, a loss of body trust and belonging.
From my perspective, one of the most beautiful qualities of deepening our self-to-body and self-to-other relationships is that when we make any kind of change, we’re virtually guaranteed not to “get it right.” It’s taken me a while to begin to understand that learning to relate to my body in a healthy way involves a “call and response.” The body calls; we respond. We call; our bodies respond. We don’t always interpret one another accurately. And that’s actually the point: It’s a practice, not a series of checked boxes. Not getting it ”right” ushers in the prospect of a drawing closer, a tender and deepening intimacy.
Where To Go From Here (Without Trying to “Go” Anywhere)
In today’s Masterclass, we looked together at the social determinants of gut health and the factors that contribute to intestinal permeability, a boundary issue in the lining of the gut. Researchers relate this permeability to inflammation, including brain disorders like Alzheimer’s.
These social determinants of gut health and intestinal permeability include:
toxic environmental chemicals or additives like pesticides, radon, GMOs, water toxins, plastics, and trichloroethylene, a substance used in dry cleaning and other solvents that has been shown to contribute causally to Parkinson’s Disease
environmental issues like a steep decline in soil microbial diversity (which, in turn, relates to climate injustice and architectural racism)
the widespread use of antibiotics, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), and antacids by the medical profession
epigenetic and cultural trauma, and forces such as patriarchy, white supremacy, gender and sexual identity discrimination, ableism, agism, racism, and other forms of historical trauma that hurt everyone; these influences create traumatic stress, and force us to “ingest” and metabolize trauma on a daily basis
Final Reflections
In many ways, it moves and reassures me to have a body that registers the impact of ongoing cultural trauma. In their speeches last week, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson (The Two Justins) referred to the Tennessee Legislature as “this body.”
It makes sense that it hits me right in the gut when the police murder yet another unarmed Black, Brown, or Indigenous person. Or that I taste acid when we have another mass shooting in the U.S. and the Tennessee legislature, or congress, or someone like Ron DeSantis removes yet another barrier to owning assault weapons and offers “thoughts and prayers.” I want to register that hollowed-out, stomach-dropping feeling when the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, or a right-wing federal judge in Texas issues an injunction that calls for a repeal of the FDA approval (and nationwide ban on) the abortion medication mifepristone. I want to feel a punch to the gut at anti-trans legislation, and at a recent Kansas GOP bill that aims to authorize genital inspections of schoolchildren.
To me, biohacking and optimizing performance feel like those politicians’ thoughts and prayers. I’m putting my energy into the body’s power, presence, and awareness. And ultimately, on the connections my body has with every other living body and the suffering we share together not just in our guts, but in our tissue, our cells, our awareness.
We live in difficult times: school shootings, domestic terrorism, sexual assault and harassment, the attack on abortion rights, systemic racism and prejudice, police violence and mass incarceration, the separation and abuse of undocumented families and their children, historical and present-day genocide, climate change, and more. These social and political conflicts are fought on the battleground of the body. They target not just the body’s physicality but its power, presence, and awareness, and the damage trickles through to every aspect of our lives.
Given the choice, I want to register the ways in which I shrink in response to these abuses of power, to resonate with the pain of others. I want what’s happening in the world around us to ring like a gong in my body, to summon outrage and care and compassionate, impassioned action.
As I continue to offer emerging research and tools for change in this column, I wanted you to know more about the spirit in which I offer this research and these tools, and the focus (embodiment and our self-to-body relationship) I aim to center.
Sources:
A group of researchers examined the direct links between racial discrimination: Dong, T. S., Gee, G. C., Beltran-Sanchez, H., Wang, M., Osadchiy, V., Kilpatrick, L. A., Chen, Z., Subramanyam, V., Zhang, Y., Guo, Y., Labus, J. S., Naliboff, B., Cole, S., Zhang, X., Mayer, E. A., & Gupta, A. (2022). How Discrimination Gets Under the Skin: Biological Determinants of Discrimination Associated With Dysregulation of the Brain-Gut Microbiome System and Psychological Symptoms. Biological Psychiatry, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2022.10.011
In January of 2023, Bloomberg published a feature on a 45-year-old multimillionaire: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/21/the-truth-about-gwyneth-paltrows-diet-it-is-as-strange-as-youd-expect
trichloroethylene, a substance used in dry cleaning and other solvents: Dorsey, E. R., Zafar, M., Lettenberger, S. E., Pawlik, M. E., Kinel, D., Frissen, M., Schneider, R. B., Kieburtz, K., Tanner, C. M., De Miranda, B. R., Goldman, S. M., & Bloem, B. R. (2023). Trichloroethylene: An Invisible Cause of Parkinson’s Disease? Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, 13(2), 203–218. https://doi.org/10.3233/JPD-225047
a right-wing federal judge in Texas issues an injunction that calls for a nationwide ban on the abortion medication: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/10/1169033855/abortion-pill-mifepristone-ruling
recent Kansas GOP bill that authorizes genital inspections of schoolchildren: https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-republicans-pass-bill-genital-examinations-schoolchildren-students-transgender-1792954