Could Kindness Be The Ultimate Biohack? A Conversation With Dr. David Hamilton
Exploring the connection of Mind, Heart, and Body
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Once upon a time I was a biohacker.
I measured my biomarkers every quarter, performed targeted supplement protocols, tracked my HRV, sauna’d, plunged, and even sunned my balls in front of red light each morning to increase my testosterone.
I guess I experienced some benefit from all these activities, but it all kind of became less interesting once I began understanding and focusing on my consciousness.
I started to realize and experience first hand that the information in my consciousness is what created and drove the functioning of the body.
It’s not to say that the physical stuff wasn’t important, but it just felt less primary relative to the ways in which my subconscious emotions, beliefs, consciousness patterns, and the concepts I held in mind impacted my experience.
The truth is both the physical and consciousness inputs matter.
It just feels like we live in a society that puts far more emphasis on the nutrition we feed ourselves a few times a day, relative to the information we’re constantly feeding ourselves - much of which is subconscious.
Today’s guest David Hamilton is someone that hopes to change that.
David was once a biologist developing drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. He became fascinated by the placebo effect and the mind’s power to influence the body. Eventually, his conviction and interest in the mind-body connection became so strong that he decided he needed to leave the pharma industry.
Since then he has been studying the mind-body connection and has written 11 books on the topic. One of the things I appreciate about David is his passion for exploring just how powerful the mind truly is for creating our experience.
In today’s conversation, we discuss the immense amount of research that undeniably demonstrates how consciousness impacts our bodies. What I loved about this conversation was the vast number of studies David cited, many of which I hadn’t heard of.
For example, there was a group of researchers who tracked how well a wound could heal over an hour time period. Without telling the participants they sped up the clock in the room to create the illusion that an hour had past when in reality it had only been 40 minutes.
The expectation that an hour had past actually caused the wound to heal faster. There ended up being no difference in healing relative to the groups who were there for an hour vs. 40 minutes, thinking they’d be there for an hour.
This episode is full of crazy studies that defy our current model of the way health works.
David’s recent focus has been on how kindness impacts our bodies. What he’s learned is that love and kindness can actually slow down the aging process more so than many other longevity attempts you probably see being hawked on the internet.
Could kindness be the ultimate biohack?
You may just have to listen to this conversation to find out.
Other interesting points from our conversation:
How visualization can enhance performance and improve physical health by shaping brain circuits and triggering the production of natural healing mechanisms
The inner workings of the placebo and nocebo effect
How acts of kindness produce kindness hormones that have physiological benefits, such as neutralizing free radicals in the skin and promoting skin health
How practicing kindness can also have anti-aging effects on our telomeres as well as lower blood pressure, stimulate the anti-inflammatory response, and promote healing
Why imagination is a powerful tool that can shape our reality and open us up to extraordinary experiences
I love the ideas that David shares because they point to the deep truth that we have the power within to heal ourselves. In a world that constantly promotes that we must rely on outside parties to heal, I find this to be quite refreshing.
It’s not to say that other people can’t help us, more so that we have more power and agency than the consensus narrative would have us believe.
I hope you enjoy this conversation!
-Scott
If you liked reading or listening to this, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
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Episode Transcript
Show notes:
00:00 - Curiosity around the Mind-Body Connection
09:07 - Visualization and Alternative Approaches to Healing
25:13 - Cultivating Genuine Kindness
32:42 - The Power of Kindness: Don't Judge Others
41:54 - Imagination and the Shaping of Reality
I’ve been flirting with the idea that the biohacking you describe at the beginning of this intro—the plunges and saunas and stuff—can sometimes be the Western New Age version of the first limbs of Ashtanga Yoga (yamas niyamas asanas and pranayama) or the early steps of the Eightfold Path (Right Action) or Sila (morality). These are the steps that focus on watching what you eat, what you say, how you express sexually, whether you are behaving in alignment with your values..:
Biohacking is like an ethical precept about the way to purify your material body so you can detoxify the container that social programming and inevitably imperfect upbringing pollutes.
Then, as you say, you shift to focusing on Consciousness Evolution (see what I did there?), which is represented as meditative practices in both Yoga and Buddhism, but can also be any of the other wonderfully woo stuff that is explored in this publication.
It’s like we need to build up prana in stages, starting with the gross and getting more subtle (or starting with dense vibration and getting higher, in other words.)
Kindness as a biohack fits into this perfectly! Thanks for expanding/validating my thinking. Theres a reason Right Speech was taught by Buddha and yogis attempt to embody Satya and Aparigaha—truthfulness and generosity, as I understand them.
This is already super long, but as a final thought: in the monastic cultures that those eastern traditions evolved in, you’d be REQUIRED to go through all the purification stuff before developing a sitting practice. That western householders skip to the end or reduce spirituality to meditation reduces these practices efficacy.
I absolutely believe that our thoughts impact our physical and mental health. I’ve experienced people who’ve talked themselves into poor health and people whose disposition has kept them healthier.
I’m also talking more about the needs I’m hearing about in the workplace. We’re demanding two ends of the spectrum: artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence. The further we travel towards AI, the further we’re going to need to travel in the other direction to balance it out with EI