By Chloe Davies
Bryan Johnson – the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur behind Project Blueprint – is famous for spending around USD$2 million dollars a year to try and ‘defeat death’.
He recently announced that he has an autoimmune disease. Specifically, he was diagnosed with Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG), a chronic condition where the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its own parietal cells in the stomach.
Prior to his diagnosis, Johnson’s mission to reverse biological ageing led him to explore a range of health measures ranging from the typical to the obscure.
He is famously known for taking a cocktail over 100 pills a day (a protocol devised by his personal medical team) and in one of his more bizarre experiments, Johnson was infused with his teenage son’s youthful plasma whilst Johnson’s own plasma was injected into his father.
So, if Bryan Johnson, with all his millions, access to infinite resources, and perfectly optimised data cannot outrun illness, it begs the question: what other factors are at play?
Most of us understand that our health is impacted by what we eat and drink, how we sleep and move.
What most of us don’t realise (although we may have a sense) is that so-called ‘background’ factors — our emotions, relationships, and past traumas, our current internal conflicts, our capacity for joy and play, whether we are pursuing our deepest desires or hiding dark secrets — also shape our physical wellbeing.
The totality of our lives shapes our wellbeing. All the inputs – big and small – have an impact.
It seems like an obvious truth, yet the implications of this can feel elusive to us.
In his book When the Body Says No, Physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté explicitly connects autoimmune disease to emotional suppression.
In a recent interview he stated that:
“Autoimmune is rising in our society, and particularly amongst women. When I look at people in my practice who developed auto-immune diseases, it is always related to stress and individual coping styles. Our emotional apparatus is very much connected to our immune system – when our emotions are turned against us, our immune system can as well. There’s lots of evidence for that”.
Maté is not the only one who draws such conclusions.
In his seminal work, psychiatrist, researcher, and leading authority on post-traumatic stress, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk details how the physiological stress of a traumatised, constantly alarmed nervous system physically breaks down the body over time, resulting in autoimmune dysfunction.
Van der Kolk points out that: “attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases.”
Finally, Dr. Lissa Rankin—an integrative medicine physician and New York Times bestselling author who specialises in the nervous system—notes this exact same pattern, tracking how illness flourishes when a patient lives in a state of chronic psychological distress, loneliness, or unfulfilled desires.
In her book, Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself, she states:
“When the mind is filled with fear, anxiety, depression, or loneliness, the amygdala fires a stress response, flooding the body with cortisol and epinephrine, which weakens the immune system and makes the body vulnerable to disease. Only when the mind is at peace can the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms function properly”.
While Bryan Johnson focuses entirely on the physical inputs (nutrients, sleep cycles, injections), these doctors argue that you cannot truly heal if you are fundamentally at war with yourself internally.
This isn’t to say that just because you have emotional imbalances or conflicts that you will get sick. Of course not. It’s to say that these are factors of which many of us don’t consider and should.
Perhaps Johnson, with all his wonderful discoveries has revealed the best one of all: No, you cannot ‘biohack’ your way out of life. There is no diet, no supplement, no health protocol, or trend that can outdo chronic past or present conflicts, traumas or emotional stress that leaves its residue in the body and psyche.
Because our emotions cannot be quantified on a spreadsheet or measured by standard tests, we often dismiss them or struggle to attune to them, yet they demand further investigation and resolution.
Our internal worlds, a rich tapestry of emotional nuances, are worth our attention and the future of healthcare is undoubtedly headed in this direction.
Ultimately, we can thank Bryan Johnson for leading us to this conclusion: Bio hacking can only take us so far.
There is much more life to be lived.
Chloe Davies is an English teacher and freelance writer in Melbourne’s west.
