By Bijou Allard

This article and accompanying media was submitted by an independent student. If you are interested in having your work featured in The Panther, reach out to pantheropinions@chapman.edu. 

In recent years, I’ve been on a journey to become less neurotic. Yet, as I strive for more peace, the world around me seems to grow increasingly high-strung, especially in its obsession with cultivating the perfect lifestyle. Social media is flooded with content on the “optimal morning routine” and how to organize your day for maximum productivity. What shocks me most is how references to psychological and neuroscientific research legitimize this relentless pursuit of lifestyle perfection. While it’s exciting to see my field gain popularity, I’m concerned that scientific research is being exploited to fuel our collective neurosis and perpetuate the myth of a perfect lifestyle.

No one embodies this trend more than Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, whose podcast, The Huberman Lab, remains a top-charting show. Huberman offers science-based discussions on longevity, mental health, nutrition, and fitness. His goal is to provide insights from neuroscience on how our brain and body connections control our perceptions, behaviors and health. The podcast has rekindled scientific interest, captivating millions of listeners — often fitness enthusiasts and biohackers — who are drawn to Huberman’s message that optimizing your body and mind is possible, and science holds the key to understanding how to achieve this.

Here’s the thing: even if science could optimize our lives, I’m not sure that we should.

It’s easy to forget that science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The questions we ask, how we collect data, and how we interpret results are shaped by our cultural context. Good science involves questioning why we investigate certain topics and challenging our assumptions about the results. What we consider “optimal” brain functioning is influenced by societal norms. Under capitalism, optimal means maximizing output and individualism. It’s telling that so much emphasis is placed on research into attention, focus, and productivity, all aimed at maximizing workplace efficiency.

Our unprecedented ability to intervene in neural processes has made our psychological states and behaviors seem increasingly open to transformation. Yet, this focus on individual agency perpetuates a culture of individualism. The brain optimization narrative, which promotes self-improvement, often legitimizes the rollback of social support systems and fuels the stigmatization of those unable to master their minds or bodies. It becomes a tool of neoliberal ideology, producing disciplined citizens who serve political and economic interests.

Many corporations profit from this obsession with self-optimization, marketing supplements and brain-training programs as ways to enhance physical and psychological performance. Biohacking — using science, technology and self-experimentation to optimize one’s mental and physical performance — has never been more popular. Whether these hacks “work” is not the main issue; many do achieve their intended effects. However, the real harm occurs when biohacking becomes an ingrained mentality. The “always optimizing” mindset is insidious, damaging health and wellness in ways that often go unrecognized.

The diffusion of capitalist optimization into daily life leads to an achievement society, ultimately causing mental fatigue and burnout. If we spend all our energy on these hacks and optimizations, what energy is left to enjoy our lives? As we focus more on controlling our bodies and minds, we retreat from fundamental societal issues and lose the ability to dissent and question the meaning of our actions. We fixate on how we can change, rather than why we want to optimize in the first place.

As scientists and consumers of science, it’s crucial to ask why we pursue certain lines of inquiry and how our insights are used. Science should be a tool for understanding the world, fostering well-being and addressing fundamental societal challenges — not for fueling the capitalist agenda of relentless self-optimization. We must guard against the misuse of scientific research to support individualism and conformity and instead use science to promote a more equitable society and dismantle systems of oppression.