I set up this blog as a biohacking blog. Why? Frankly, I AM ambivalent about the term.
On the downside, it implies ruthless, somewhat masculine self-optimization. Mostly using expensive gadgets to track exactly what your body does so that you can head off its undesirable reactions to the way your analytical mind has decided your life should be run in a culture that celebrates personal override. That’s a win-win-win for the economic system we created: you consume by buying stuff to make yourself a better worker bee. And since half that stuff doesn’t even work you buy more stuff.
So, what gives? On the upside there is a lot of new (old) scientific understanding that trickles down ever so slowly -if at all- into generalized healthcare that is absolutely worth writing about. There are hacks and behaviors that do work. And there is also the pure and simple fact that next to optimization, biohacking is an invitation to experimentation and curiosity. You can find an article about my approach here.
The operating system nobody installed on purpose
Modern life runs on a particular mental model. You didn’t choose it consciously, it arrived through school, parents, the general atmosphere of being a person in the 21st century who is expected to ‚amount to something‘. The model goes roughly like this: your time and energy are resources. They should be directed toward goals. Things that produce outcomes are legitimate. Things that don’t are, at best, recovery, which is a necessary overhead of keeping the productive machine running. Under this model, rest is permitted. Vacation is permitted. Yoga, massage, a long bath are all permitted, because they restore capacity. They make you better at the things that actually matter.
Play, pure curiosity, doing something entirely for the spark of it, these sit in uncomfortable territory. Not forbidden exactly. But they carry a faint charge of self-indulgence. They need justifying. I needed to decompress. I deserved a break. It turned out to be useful in the end because… Notice that last one. We reach for usefulness almost reflexively, even when defending joy.
This is the duty trap: the internalized belief that your existence needs to be legitimized by what you produce or contribute. That pleasure, unless it cashes out in some demonstrable way, is wasteful, soft and something you can have when you’ve earned it (this last bit is particularly insidious). There is always an invisible ledger running and everything gets entered into it.
The ledger that never closes
I lived inside this model for a long time. And I genuinely didn’t really notice. It felt like responsibility. It felt, honestly, like virtue. Now I still live in it because I cannot and don’t know if I want to shake it completely because I am scared that as a drop-out I won’t be treated kindly and also I do feel responsibility for my husband and my kids. To uphold ‘normalcy’ and thus not do anything radical. But I do notice.
The problem with just chilling
When this operating system starts to fail through burnout, illness, or the particular exhaustion of trying to hold too many things together at once, the prescribed response is recovery. Sleep more. Stress less. Try mindfulness. Book a massage. Downregulate. I’ve been there. These things help and I am not arguing against them. But I want to point at something they don’t reach. Restoration works on the assumption that you are a depleted system that needs refilling. Rest empties the stress bucket. Sleep consolidates and repairs. Relaxation guides the nervous system from activated back toward neutral. Neutral, however, is not the same as alive. Doesn’t that sound just mindnumbingly dull: nothing but fighting or running away and then relaxing and recharging?
Neutral is not the same as alive
I like to bake sweet things. These are naturally frivolous because nobody needs cake. I notice when I make a cake I get multiple pleasure hits. The planning is fun: thinking about flavors, textures, methods. Then the making where the plan goes to die is tested against reality, and then I get a social reward when it gets eaten and enjoyed. The height of compliments is you should turn it into a business. It comes from genuine admiration (and I love getting compliments, keep them coming people) but: this is the duty trap trying to recruit the spark. To make it useful and give it a reason beyond itself. But the moment the cake becomes a business it enters the ledger and something essential about it dies. Do you know what I enjoy about the art of cake making? That it gets eaten and disappears like a sand castle. The point of a sand castle is not to still be here tomorrow. The transience is part of its value. What’s the point? I argue if there is any it is the pleasure along the way.
We like to talk about the nervous system states of activation and relaxation a lot as if they were the only ones we should be interested in but research suggests that that is not the case. So what’s actually happening when we lose that? Why does the duty trap crowd it out so effectively? It helps to look briefly at what the nervous system is actually doing.
The incomplete picture
When we talk about the nervous system in this way we usually mean the autonomic nervous system (ANS): the sympathetic branch that mobilizes energy under pressure and the parasympathetic branch that allows the body to settle again once the threat has passed. This system regulates things like heart rate, breathing, digestion, and blood flow. In other words, it acts as a kind of resource allocator, constantly deciding where energy should go in the moment. This system reacts much faster than conscious thought. Which is good because you’d probably prefer your tiger response to be climbing up a tree rather than thinking: ‘Beautiful stripes!’ but also annoying when a strongly worded email triggers in you exactly this reflex and leaves you sitting wide-eyed and with a pounding heart at your desk. That’s why stepping away from the desk (you could climb a tree if you wanted to) and metabolizing the hormones sometimes helps more than trying to out-think a system that has already decided a tiger is involved.
Much of what we call stress management is essentially about navigating this regulatory loop: activation and recovery, fight/flight and rest/digest. And many of the practices that are recommended to us: sleep, relaxation, meditation, yoga, long walks, genuinely help the body move back toward equilibrium after it has been wound up.
But this picture is pitifully incomplete. The autonomic nervous system describes how the body allocates energy. It does not explain what motivates us to use that energy in the first place. For that we have to look a little deeper into the brain.
Older than language
The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp spent decades mapping what he called the primary emotional systems of mammals. These are NOT sophisticated human feelings constructed by language and reflection. They are ancient subcortical circuits shared across many mammals, sitting deep in the brain and generating basic motivational states directly. Among them are systems he called SEEKING and PLAY.
SEEKING drives curiosity and exploration, the forward-leaning impulse that makes animals investigate their surroundings and pursue possibilities. PLAY is something slightly different: spontaneous interaction that exists not to achieve a specific outcome but simply to engage with the world and with others. They are what a mammalian nervous system does when it is neither fighting for survival nor merely repairing itself afterwards, but actively engaging with the environment because doing this is inherently rewarding.
Rats that laugh
In his studies Panksepp discovered that rats laugh when they are tickled. What’s that you say? Another round of anthropomorphising animals? Tickling was Panksepp’s most famous and most charming experimental method, and it did produce the same 50kHz vocalizations reliably. But they appeared in other play contexts too: rough and tumble play between rats, anticipation of play, social interaction with preferred play partners. Importantly the rats would actively seek out the tickling. They would follow the experimenter’s hand around the cage. They would return to spaces where they had previously been tickled. Which rules out the possibility that it was just a reflexive response to stimulation. It had the hallmarks of something genuinely sought and enjoyed. The 50kHz chirp is distinct from other rat sounds. They also produce 22kHz calls which are associated with negative states like fear, pain, and distress. The two are quite different acoustically and behaviorally. So Panksepp wasn’t just observing arousal. He was observing something that looked specifically like positive affect or even enjoyment. He also showed that young rats deprived of play opportunities would play more intensively when finally given access, a rebound effect that mirrors what you see with other biological drives like sleep and hunger. Which again suggests this is a genuine need, not a preference. And the 50kHz vocalizations were suppressed by anxiolytic drugs in some conditions and by fear in others, further evidence that they’re part of a specific emotional circuit rather than just general activation.
Rats of all animals. Much maligned and often found in unsavory places. But just consider what they would have to say about us and then decide who is the unsavory species.
Panksepp’s affective neuroscience has been influential but also debated, particularly of course around the question of how animal emotional states map onto human experience. But what I take away from it is that only looking at the two states of the ANS is strangely blinkered when playfulness is a fundamental mammalian drive and not something that humanity invented. Of course it isn’t, because we’re doing our best to ignore it and it’s not going away.
The states nobody talks about
When we only focus on downregulating our nervous system the implication is that we are taking a temporary break from what’s important so that we can get back to it as soon as possible. Tragically getting back to it often means exposing us to constant low-level anxiety. Panksepp showed that FEAR and PLAY are mutually inhibitory. You don’t need full-blown terror for this to work. A persistent low hum of not-enough is sufficient. ‘Duty’ and ‘responsibility’ become the tigers chasing us. What we sacrifice is actually a large chunk of what makes it worth being alive for.
But you don’t need to have read Panksepp to know the state I’m talking about: not stressed, not relaxed, but fully present. A child absorbed in building something with no plan. An adult who loses track of time cooking something complicated. Someone who picks up an instrument they haven’t played in years and is suddenly, briefly, entirely in the moment. The particular quality of attention that arrives when you are doing exactly what you feel like doing, with no outcome in mind and no clock running. Stuart Brown, who spent decades studying play in adults, defines it precisely by this quality: it is autotelic, meaning it is its own reward and needs no justification beyond itself. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow: complete absorption where self-consciousness drops away and time distorts. This is neither activation nor restoration but pure engagement. Naturally we found a way to make it useful.
Coming back to cake and the simple pleasure of creation for creation’s sake. I think this is the point where I used to get it totally and absolutely wrong: I always deferred my happiness to later. “Living in the moment” sounded hollow to me because well…the moment is usually lacking in fireworks. Specialness. It wasn’t set up to be a peak. So if the moment is worthless then it makes sense to use this -not so great- moment to make some distant moment all the better. Right?! Well no. These days I see happiness like the area under the life graph. Where do you get the bigger area? When you let the moment to moment have meaning (not too many fireworks of course but also substantial day to day enjoyment)? Or when you work towards some distant goal (assuming you even achieve it or are around to see the end effect). And when you are past the hump…such a painful anticlimax.
The experiment
This is where I ask you to do something, which I’m aware is slightly ironic given that the whole argument is against instrumentalizing everything. So I’ll keep it light. This week: choose one thing you genuinely want to do that has no productivity goal attached to it. Not relaxation in the deliberate, restorative sense. Something with more spark than that. Something that makes you a little curious or a little excited before you’ve had time to wonder whether it’s a good use of your time.
Start a sourdough (and promise that you are not about to start a micro bakery or ever go to the supermarket to buy bread ever again). Cook something over an open fire. Pick up a pencil and draw something badly. Play a board game with actual attention. Lie in the grass and watch what happens in it. Learn three chords. Make something elaborate that nobody asked for. Go outside- and if you’re brave do it commando in the rain. The only rule is that the moment you start thinking about what it might produce, you notice that thought, set it aside, and come back to the thing itself.
The only argument you need
Here is the logic that removed most of my resistance to this (and this is absolutely a crutch in case you find it too hard to give yourself permission): If something useful emerges from it like a new idea, an unexpected connection, or a skill then that’s a bonus. If nothing useful emerges, you still experienced something genuine. You fed a system that most of us have been starving for years. You were, briefly, alive without needing to perform it. There is no downside.
The duty trap wants you to believe that time spent without purpose is time lost. But the PLAY system doesn’t run on purpose. It runs on genuine curiosity and the willingness to follow it without demanding that it go somewhere. Feed it and it doesn’t just feel better in the moment; it changes the baseline. It makes the rest of life less grey.
Duty alone does not create a full life. Responsibility without play becomes, eventually, a kind of slow disappearance. You remain functional while something essential goes quiet. Rediscovering play is not self-indulgence. It is not irresponsibility. It may, in fact, be one of the simplest and most overlooked biological interventions available to us. I know arguing for the usefulness of doing useless things is marginally insane. But I will end with Nietzsche: “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
PS: If you read until the end and recognized yourself you might have the same core issue that this article has been circling: it is really hard to give yourself permission to just exist. And…I’m not fully there. When I’m not there I zoom out pale blue dot style. And I look at our planet in my mind and think isn’t it funny how seriously we all take ourselves. And it allows me to loosen my grip. Not even to do anything differently, just to loosen my grip. Because the weight of the universe doesn’t rest on my shoulders after all. I am a witness to it. A self observing manifestation of it.