In spring 2025 I had a set of results in front of me that I'd spent fifteen years working towards. They were the best numbers I'd ever seen. Looking at them, the question I'd been avoiding for about a decade finally caught up with me: does any of this make me happy?
Is biohacking worth it? For me, yes. I feel much better than I did at forty, and I have no intention of stopping. On its own, though, it hadn't made me happier. Underneath a well-maintained body, some things hadn't moved at all.
The best numbers of my life
The first result came by accident. I was at a conference in London and the people running a stand more or less forced me into a biological age test. "You claim to be a biohacker focused on healthy aging," they said, "so let us measure it." I pricked my finger on the spot and the sample went off to a laboratory. I must admit, waiting for the result was scary.
My glycan age came back at twenty-one, the lowest result that test gives. Before anyone gets too impressed, it means that one part of my immune system, on that day, was functioning at the level of an average twenty-year-old. I'm sixty-two.
Then came a full-body check at a clinic in the Netherlands. On a maximal bike test I reached three hundred watts, which put my cardiovascular fitness above almost every sixty-year-old they had tested. I was proud of those numbers, and I still am.
The wall
What the numbers couldn't show was the same trigger, the same reaction and the same wall, year after year.
Some of what your nervous system responds to isn't in the present. Patterns you picked up early keep running because back then they kept you safe. A child who learnt that an argument meant something frightening was coming can grow up treating every argument as dangerous. You can keep calming yourself down each time it shows up, for the rest of your life. Or you can go looking for what's setting it off.
There's research behind this, with limits. In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda asked thousands of ordinary adults about difficult experiences in childhood and looked at their health later on. More adverse experiences went with worse physical and mental health. People were reporting their own memories, and a link isn't the same as a cause. None of it is destiny.
The thing I learnt slowly and expensively is that insight isn't integration. I could describe my own pattern fluently for years and carry on as usual.
A giraffe, a lion and an elephant
In October 2019 I spent a week in a very dark room at the Biocybernaut Institute, with EEG sensors on my head, learning to produce alpha brainwaves. What caught my attention on the sign-up page was that it would raise my IQ and my EQ. In the first hour of the first day, they started talking about trauma. I sat there thinking, I don't have traumas. Maybe four or five. If we get through them in the first session, I can go home on Tuesday.
That was my first mistake.
You write a list of the people you haven't forgiven. You drop into alpha, hold one person there with every grievance you've got, then ask a jury you've made up whether you've forgiven them. Mine was a giraffe, a lion and an elephant. I've never worked out why it included a giraffe. If the answer is no, you start again.
My list was far longer than I expected. Second on it was a conference chairman who cut me off twenty minutes into a thirty-minute talk, around 1990. I'd spent months on that presentation. I was furious, I hated that man, and then I forgot about him for three decades. And there he was.
It was a small thing, which is why it surprised me. I don't suddenly think well of everyone on that list. What changed is that it stopped bothering me, and I hadn't even known it was bothering me. I felt more relaxed in my body, and I started reacting to people more openly and more like myself.
I also took part in a supervised psilocybin retreat. Two weeks afterwards I was more present and in less of a hurry. I used to get stressed at five to ten because I was late for my own bedtime. Now a Netflix episode runs over and I've worked out that it won't kill me. I'm not claiming the medicine did that, and I'm not recommending it. It's part of my story, and this post gives you no protocol. Psilocybin has real clinical evidence behind it, but for depression and end-of-life distress, not for longevity. Some conditions and medications make it unsafe, and its legal status varies between countries.
What I can't prove
There's no trial showing that this kind of inner work extends life, and no biomarker that improves because you forgave someone. Nobody has shown that a week of alpha training moves your biological age, and I wouldn't believe them if they claimed it.
What I can tell you is that the wall moved, and it hadn't moved in fifteen years of doing everything else correctly. Take that as one person's story.
What I call Biohacking 3.0
This is where my thinking on biohacking has ended up, in my TEDx talk and in the framework I built with Dr Mark Atkinson. Looking after the body is where it starts. It also has to work together with the mind, or you hit the same wall in very good health.
If you've become the person who only talks about heart rate variability at dinner parties, and you turn down invitations that clash with your protocol, you've taken it too far. I do all this so that I can go for a walk, travel without needing a week to recover, and sit at dinner with people I love and be properly there. Biohacking was never the point.
Three questions to ask yourself today
When you need to change your state, can you? If the honest answer is no, start there, with something simple that calms you down on purpose.
Do you react in ways you later regret, and find you can't stop? Then the work is noticing the reaction before it takes over.
Is it the same trigger, the same reaction, the same wall, for years? That tells you where the deeper work is. I'd do that with a person trained in this area.
If difficult memories come up, or you're struggling with your mood, don't take this on alone. Talk to your doctor or a qualified therapist.
The mind chapter of my book, More Good Years, goes through all three levels. Find out more. If you want to go deeper with structured education, there's the Syntony Institute.
Eduard de Wilde has tracked and tested his own biology since 2008. He founded NoordCode and Livehelfi, co-founded the Syntony Institute, and wrote More Good Years. He isn't a doctor, and he sells some of the products discussed in this field. This article is for information and isn't medical advice.
