Key points
- Biohacking can reinforce the belief that aging, illness, weight, and appearance are controllable.
- Many wellness claims sound more established than the available research supports.
- Constant monitoring can increase anxiety rather than create reassurance.
- A health practice may be a problem when it creates fear, rigidity, or preoccupation.
Wish you had more energy, slept better, recovered faster, had clearer skin, sharper thinking, more strength, or could slow down aging? Wellness clinics, medspas, podcasts, and online influencers are full of advice on how to get there, usually involving a mix of injections, supplements, tests, diet changes, and habit tracking
A lot of these trends fall under the label of “biohacking,” which just means trying to change or improve how your body works. Sometimes that’s as simple as cutting back on coffee or aiming for more sleep. Other times, it means lots of lab tests, strict diets, constant tracking, handfuls of supplements, or injections that promise to help with looks, performance, recovery, or aging
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel better or take charge of your health. But this push to constantly optimize can make it seem like our bodies always need fixing. It can also lead us to believe that if we just have enough information and willpower, and the right routines, we’ll be able to control our weight, dodge illness, slow aging, and avoid many of the changes that just come with being human
At what point does caring for yourself become an endless effort to improve yourself? And what happens when the body changes anyway?
The Peptide-Shot Craze
Peptides are short chains of amino acids that act as signals in the body. Some have well-established medical uses, including insulin and GLP-1 medications.¹ That legitimate medical hist ory can make all peptide treatments sound more proven than they are, even though the products now being promoted by medspas are very different from the medications approved for specific conditions
Medspas and wellness or longevity clinics advertise peptide injections for everything from reducing body fat and building muscle to healing injuries, improving sleep, and slowing signs of aging. The “Glow Stack,” for example, is a medspa name for a combination of GHK-Cu, BPC-157, and TB-500. It is promoted for younger-looking skin, collagen production, reduced inflammation, and tissue repair, but there is no standardized, FDA-approved treatment by that name
I could not identify a published human clinical trial evaluating the Glow Stack as a combination. Much of the research cited in support of its ingredients comes from laboratory, animal, or topical studies, none of which tells us whether injecting the three together is safe or effective. A 2026 review found that the proposed benefits of BPC-157 remain largely unvalidated in human trials, human data for TB-500 are lacking, and evidence for injectable GHK-Cu is limited.¹,² The FDA has also identified limited or insufficient human safety information for all three compounds.³
The language does some of the selling. A name such as “Glow Stack” makes an injection sound more like a beauty treatment, while scientific terminology and a clinical-looking setting make it feel medically established. Neither the word “peptide” nor the fact that something is injected tells us whether it works, is safe, or is appropriate for a particular person. What it can offer, at least psychologically, is the feeling that we are doing something to keep the body from changing in ways we do not want.
When the Body Becomes a Project
People have always been encouraged to improve their bodies. What has changed is how many aspects of the body we are now encouraged to measure and manage. Weight and calories have been joined by glucose responses, sleep scores, heart rate variability, hormone levels, gut health, inflammation, biological age, recovery time, and body composition. A person can wake up feeling reasonably rested, look at a low sleep score, and begin to doubt how they felt before checking the data
Tracking can be useful in treating certain medical conditions and may help people notice important patterns. More information, however, does not always create more reassurance. For someone prone to anxiety or perfectionism, it can provide a new set of numbers to get right
A poor night’s sleep becomes something to correct. A normal shift in appetite, mood, energy, or digestion can feel like evidence that the body is not working properly and may lead to new supplements, dietary changes, or hormone testing. Rather than increasing trust in the body, constant monitoring can make every fluctuation seem significant
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Restriction in the Language of Wellness
Biohacking can also give restrictive eating a different vocabulary. Someone may not consider themselves to be dieting, even while eliminating dairy, gluten, sugar, grains, seed oils, packaged foods, or anything described as “inflammatory.”The person may be focused on energy, digestion, hormones, or living longer rather than weight loss. Over time, though, eating can become governed by more and more rules. They may worry when the foods they usually rely on are unavailable, feel guilty after eating something outside the plan, or spend hours trying to determine which foods are safe.
This usually does not happen all at once. Someone removes one food and then another, paying close attention to every sensation that follows eating. If a feared food leaves them anxious or physically uncomfortable, they may conclude that the food caused the reaction. Removing it provides relief, making the restriction feel necessary and harder to question
This does not mean that food-related symptoms are imaginary or that dietary changes are never appropriate. It means that food, expectations, anxiety, and physical sensations can affect one another. What began as an effort to feel better may gradually make eating more stressful and life more limited, ultimately leading to problems they are trying to avoid or to the creation of new ones
What Are We Trying to Prevent?
The desire to optimize the body is not necessarily about vanity. It may be an effort to manage fears about illness, aging, disability, weight gain, loss of desirability, loneliness, or death. If the correct set of interventions can protect us, then perhaps the uncertainty of having a body will feel less frightening
The issue, though, is that bodies are far more complicated. They are affected by genetics, aging, environment, stress, trauma, access to healthcare, social conditions, and chance. No food plan, supplement regimen, injection, or tracking device can remove all uncertainty
That can be hard to accept in a culture that treats health as proof of personal responsibility. When health is presented as something we should be able to control, illness or bodily change may feel like evidence that we failed to do enough
Is It Helping or Taking Over?
The same health practice may be helpful for one person and anxiety-driven for another. What matters is not just what someone is doing, but the role it has taken on in their life
- Is this addressing an identified concern or the fear that something might be wrong?
- What evidence supports the claims being made?
- Has this practice made my life more manageable or more complicated?
- Can I change the routine without significant guilt or anxiety?
- Am I spending more time thinking about food, appearance, aging, or physical data?
- Does every improvement quickly reveal another problem I am expected to solve?
These questions are not meant to shame people for wanting to feel better. They can help us notice when a health practice has become rigid or when self-care and wellness have begun to feel like constant self-surveillance
We all want to feel better. We want less pain, more energy, a good night’s sleep, or some help when we’re not feeling our best. But these days, it can seem like every little discomfort or change is something we ought to fix. Growing older turns into a problem to solve. Being tired feels like you messed up. If your body changes, people act like you just haven’t found the solution yet
Caring for the body may involve medication, nutrition, movement, rest, and medical treatment. It may also mean recognizing that not every sensation, change, or perceived imperfection needs to be corrected
Before pursuing another intervention, it may be worth considering what it could add to our lives and what it might ask us to give up. Improving one aspect of the body may not feel like much of a gain if it takes time, attention, and freedom away from living in it
References
Mayfield, C. K., Bolia, I. K., Feingold, C. L., Lin, E. H., Liu, J. N., Hatch, G. F. R., Gamradt, S. C., & Weber, A. E. (2026). Injectable peptide therapy: A primer for orthopaedic and sports medicine physicians. The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 54(1), 223–229. doi.org/10.1177/03635465251357593
Pickart, L., & Margolina, A. (2018). Regenerative and protective actions of the GHK-Cu peptide in the light of the new gene data. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 19(7), 1987. doi.org/10.3390/ijms19071987
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2026). Certain bulk drug substances for use in compounding that may present significant safety risks. fda.gov/drugs/human-drug-compounding/certain-bulk-drug-substances-use-compounding-may-present-significant-safety-risks
