Bandaids for Bullet Wounds: State Changing to Survive Your Own Life?
By Michael Blevins
The Rise and Fall of the Optimizer
It’s 5:00 AM, the alarm rings, and the protocol begins. A twenty-minute non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) session to prime the brain. Maybe it’s a three-minute plunge into 39-degree water to spike dopamine and norepinephrine. A sludge of designer mushrooms and adaptogens for cognitive spikes. Then, the breathwork—4-7-8 counts to forcibly down-regulate the nervous system before a commute spent voice-to-text gratitude journaling into a phone.
This person is fully ready to take on the stresses of an ambitious life. On paper, this looks like the routine of a high-performer, someone who “has their shit together”. It looks like "wellness,” but it acts as a blindfold—preventing us from seeing the very environment that necessitates the intervention.
For a growing number of people, this isn't optimization; it’s survival. It is a sophisticated form of functional anesthesia, an ability to ignore the larger problem by using “patchwork” interventions instead of addressing the foundational cause of physiological, emotional, and psychological dysregulation. We have become experts at chemically and physically altering our state to endure lives that are misaligned with who we are. We are not regulating our nervous systems to thrive; we are regulating them to numb ourselves against environments, jobs, and relationships that are slowly killing us.
The logic seems sound: I feel stressed, therefore I must reduce the stress.
When you are in a toxic relationship or a job that acts as "golden handcuffs," your body enters a state of sympathetic overdrive. This isn’t about the acute issues we face everyday, it is about the spaces that we should expect safety and consistency that lead to chronic loading. Your heart rate variability drops; your cortisol chronically spikes until the mechanism breaks, leaving you in the flatlined state we call "chronic fatigue." You feel the urge to flee or fight. But instead of fleeing from relationships or fighting against the corporate suffocation, you freeze. You inhale deeply through the nose and release a physiological sigh like Huberman suggests, and you continue typing away at that report that’s due tomorrow.
You deploy the tools. You use cold therapy to force a parasympathetic rebound. You use holotropic breathing as an emotional pressure valve. You even attend weekend retreats, ingesting copious amounts of psychedelics and call it “healing”. You feel better. You feel "reset." But these are not surgical interventions; they are habits of pacification.
The danger lies in that relief. Because you feel better, you stay. The state change technique effectively raises your threshold for abuse, but you never remove the abuser—in fact, you enable it. By tolerating the intolerable for one more day, one more week, one more year, you are not fixing the problem, you are biohacking your way into captivity.
The Wellness Industrial Complex
To make matters worse, the "System" knows this. The corporate machine is fully aware of the dynamic. They do not have an interest in your genuine well-being; they have a vested interest in your output. Their corporate wellness programs are not designed to improve your life; they are designed to stop their churn rates. You are not special, you are a statistic. They offer meditation apps, sound baths, and "resilience training" to help you tolerate the overwork without burning out. They are effectively subsidizing your anesthesia to keep the machinery running.
The absurdity of this reached a peak recently when I was asked by an HR manager if microdosing their employees would help alleviate the team's collective anxiety. Pause and consider the weight of that question. The corporate solution was not to assess the workload or the culture. It wasn't to question the unrealistic expectation of perpetual profit in a failing economy. Instead of fixing the cause of the breakdown, they sought to chemically mask it. They didn't want a cure; they wanted a more potent mute button.
The Warning Light
Your body—much like your vehicle—has indicators when problems are on the rise. A check engine light isn’t telling you to stop, but it is telling you that perpetual progress is in serious question without attention. State change techniques are meant for us to develop a greater sensitivity and control over our nervous system, but hustle culture and a society hell-bent on leveraging humans as four-limbed batteries for profit now endorse these practices as black tape over your check engine light.
You feel immediate relief because the warning signal has vanished. You can keep driving, but the problem remains. You have simply removed your ability to see the danger.
We treat anxiety, burnout, and nervous system dysregulation as "noise" or defects. We think, “My nervous system is acting up, I need to silence it.” But your nervous system is almost never "acting up." It is reacting accurately to the environment. It is signaling a critical failure in purpose and sustainability. It is begging for a life you don’t need to mask or “recover” from.
That anxiety you feel every time you pull into the office parking lot? That is not a defect; it’s feedback. That is your dashboard screaming that the environment is unsafe. The exhaustion you feel after every conversation with your partner? That is smoke. And where there is smoke, your house is on fire.
From Anesthesia to Awareness
This doesn't mean we should throw out the baby with the ice bath. It means we need to change the intent behind their use.
State change practices are not meant to be escapes; they are meant to be microscopes. We don’t teach them for comfort but for clarity. If you need to meditate for an hour just to keep from screaming at your spouse, the meditation isn't the solution—it's the coping mechanism for a problem you aren't facing. If you need to take a deep breath every time you interact with a coworker, that isn’t mastery of your system, that’s ignorance of the bigger picture. You aren’t enlightened; you’re enslaved.
These tools should be used to discover what supports our existence, and what is extracting from it.
The ultimate biohack isn't a supplement or a sauna. It’s environmental design. It is building an intentional life that doesn't require constant, heavy-duty maintenance just to remain functional. Meditating is easy. Leaving a secure job with a steady paycheck because it crushes your soul is hard. Taking an ice bath is easy, and that’s why it can’t replace ending a marriage that looks perfect on Instagram but feels hollow.
We use these interventions to stop the bleeding, but only so we can see what’s causing the wound. There are times when we need to dive into our ambition and ignore the signals of safety, but we need to know how to get back. We need to know what normal is. Normal is work that wakes you up but doesn’t keep you up. Normal is looking forward to embracing your friends and your spouse.
Normal is using these interventions to live a better life, not just to survive the one you have.
