Why the Same Biohack Can Energise One Person and Exhaust Another
- 22 hours ago
- 7 min read
Connie Ng is an international speaker helping people overcome chronic pain, mobility issues, and complex health challenges, especially when conventional approaches fall short. Integrating Five Elements philosophy, vibrational medicine, and mind-body coaching, she empowers clients to reclaim their health, reconnect with who they truly are, and create lasting transformation.
Your friend steps out of an ice bath looking annoyingly refreshed. You step out, wondering why on earth you voluntarily paid to be refrigerated. Same cold plunge. Very different response. This is where biohacking becomes genuinely interesting to me. We spend plenty of time debating whether fasting works, whether cold exposure improves recovery, whether a particular supplement sharpens cognition, or whether the latest protocol can squeeze another few percentage points out of our performance. I would ask something else first: Does this actually suit the person doing it?
Your body is not a blank template waiting for the internet’s latest optimisation protocol. It comes with a history, a current state, and what traditional health systems would describe as a constitution.
Personalised data is useful. Knowing yourself is better. Biohacking is becoming increasingly personalised. We can track sleep, glucose, heart rate variability (HRV), recovery, temperature, and an impressive collection of other biomarkers.
I like data. Used well, it tells us useful things. What I question is the leap from personalised numbers to personalised health.
Someone swears intermittent fasting changed their life, so we fast. A podcast guest credits an elaborate supplement stack for extraordinary concentration, and suddenly six bottles have appeared in the shopping cart. Somebody posts enthusiastically about cold exposure, and apparently, we all need to develop a close personal relationship with a tub of ice. Maybe.
But personalisation should mean more than gathering information about yourself. It should mean knowing yourself well enough to interpret that information.
That idea sits behind my earlier article, Why I Look Beyond Symptoms to Understand Chronic and Complex Health Conditions. Before deciding what might support someone, I want to understand the person living inside the body we are trying to optimise.
I grew up with the idea of “constitution” before I knew the word
I probably notice this differently because of how I grew up. I am Singaporean Chinese, and long before I trained as a Five Elements Coach, studied the mind-body relationships within Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Five Elements theory, and trained in acupressure, my grandparents and parents were already teaching me how to live with the body in mind.
I had asthma as a child and was prone to coughs, colds, and phlegm. Covering my neck and shoulders, wearing socks, and keeping my legs warm at night were simply part of everyday life, even in humid Singapore with a fan or air conditioning running overnight.
Within the TCM-informed wisdom I grew up with, this was preventative. Protect the body from excessive “wind” and cold rather than wait for problems to appear. Due to my constitution, I was also largely barred from icy drinks and sugary foods.
This wasn’t a wellness trend in our household. It was simply how we looked after the body. I didn’t know the word constitution. To me, it was common sense.
My asthma has long since resolved, and I am a healthy adult today. Yet something still fascinates me when I consult highly experienced TCM practitioners for ailments completely unrelated to my childhood respiratory health.
Using their own traditional diagnostic observations, some have noticed signs in areas such as my ears or hands and asked whether I had asthma as a child before I had told them. Experiences like that stay with you.
Within that traditional framework, my current body is not viewed as though its history began this morning. To me, the body keeps a record. A condition may no longer be active, but our constitutional tendencies and the story of where the body has been do not necessarily become irrelevant simply because the obvious symptoms are gone.
So, knowing my own history, would I personally jump into an ice bath because cold plunging is fashionable and someone tells me it will optimise my performance? Hell no.
That does not mean cold exposure is bad. It means I already know something about my body. Cold exposure is simply not a good fit for mine.
Why would I disregard years of information from my own constitution just to copy somebody else’s biohack? My body’s history is also biofeedback. It just happens not to arrive on a screen.
When “healthy” stops making sense for the body in front of you
Years ago, during my corporate days, I remember watching someone with a chesty, phlegmy cough repeatedly drink icy orange juice because it contained vitamin C. The vitamin C wasn’t what puzzled me. It was the common sense or, to my mind at the time, the lack of it.
Within the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) principles I had grown up around, an icy, sugary drink was hardly the obvious choice for someone already struggling with a phlegmy cough. Traditional Chinese Medicine observes cold, dampness, and phlegm very differently from simply asking whether a food contains a desirable nutrient.
But even without knowing any TCM theory, I remember thinking: If your throat already feels clogged with phlegm and something cold seems to send you into another coughing fit, isn’t your body giving you information too?
That experience sparked a much bigger question for me: How many of us actually feel into our bodies before deciding what is supposedly “healthy” for them?
We can become so persuaded by a nutrient, a health claim, or someone else’s successful protocol that we stop noticing the response happening right underneath our nose.
I had a similar conversation years later with a parent whose ten-year-old had asthma. He had never really considered whether temperature, foods, or his child’s individual patterns might be worth observing.
That was when I began appreciating that much of what I had absorbed as ordinary body awareness growing up was not common knowledge at all.
Traditional Chinese medicine later gave formal language to ideas my family had already taught me intuitively: observe the person, the environment, the season, and the patterns the body keeps showing you.
In When the Body Speaks: Decoding Mental Health with the Five Elements, I explored how that same way of thinking can extend into emotional patterns, organ systems, and physical symptoms.
Ancient constitutional medicine and modern personalised health are obviously not the same system. What interests me is the question they can both encourage us to ask: How is this individual actually responding when a physical condition arises?
The high performer trap
This is where biohackers and high performers can get caught. Discipline is usually one of their greatest strengths. It becomes less useful when discipline quietly turns into permission to override every signal that interferes with the plan.
There is a difference between challenging the body and bulldozing it. If I wake feeling warm, strong, and well-rested, a demanding workout may be exactly what I need. If I am depleted, chilled, and fighting something off, I am not convinced that proving my mental toughness to an ice bath deserves a medal.
The same principle applies to fasting, stimulants, restrictive diets, intense exercise, or whatever performance protocol is currently having its moment. Something can be a perfectly respectable biohack and still be completely wrong for you today.
My first biohacking article, The Biohacking Blind Spot: Are You Optimising the Extras Before Understanding Your Body?, challenged the tendency to add another intervention before asking what the body truly needs.
This article takes that thought a step further. If we insist on using the word “biohacking,” perhaps one of the most useful things to “hack” is our ability to understand our own biology.
Perhaps body awareness is the original biofeedback
For all the remarkable tools we now have, I remain rather fond of paying attention. I notice how my energy changes after certain foods, how relentless work affects my sleep, how stress shows up in my digestion, and which environments leave me restored rather than depleted. I pay attention to the seasons too, because the body I inhabit in the middle of winter is not necessarily asking for exactly what it wanted in summer.
None of that makes me anti-data. A wearable may help confirm something I have noticed, and that can be genuinely useful. The problem begins when technology replaces the conversation rather than contributing to it. Otherwise, we risk outsourcing body awareness to a dashboard.
If my tracker announces that I am fully recovered while every fibre of my being is begging for another hour with a pillow, I would at least like to investigate the disagreement before obediently marching into the gym.
The machine has information, but so does the body I have been living in for decades. That mind-body conversation is something I explored from another angle in Can Your Emotions Be Causing Your Skin, Gut, and Respiratory Issues?.
It also connects with another question I explored in What Future Has Your Diagnosis Quietly Persuaded You to Stop Imagining?. Our present state matters, but it does not necessarily have to become the only future we imagine for ourselves.
For me, the interesting question is therefore not whether technology or intuition should win. It is whether we can become wise enough to use both.
Biohack wiser
Perhaps genuinely personalised biohacking requires something less glamorous than another device: discernment.
Health changes. Workloads rise and fall. Emotional states shift. Seasons come and go. An intervention that served you brilliantly six months ago may be unnecessary, or simply wrong for your body today.
Experiment, stay curious, and track what genuinely helps. But another person’s enthusiasm is not evidence that their intervention belongs in your body.
Nor does choosing recovery over another performance challenge automatically mean you lack discipline. Sometimes it simply means you noticed what was happening before a machine had to tell you.
The most sophisticated biohacker in the room may not be the person doing the most. It may be the person who knows themselves well enough to recognise when something works, when it doesn’t, and when today calls for something completely different. Your constitution is not someone else’s protocol.
So, before copying the latest supplement stack, fasting schedule, cold exposure routine, or performance ritual, I would ask one decidedly unsexy, low-tech question: What does my body actually need today?
If we can answer that with greater honesty, intuition, and body awareness, perhaps we are finally beginning to “hack” something genuinely worthwhile: our own biological needs.
That, to me, is how we stop biohacking harder and start biohacking wiser.
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Read more from Connie Ng
Connie Ng, Holistic Practitioner, Quantum Healing Facilitator & Transformational Coach
Connie Ng is a Multi-Disciplined Holistic Practitioner and Quantum Healing Facilitator who specialises in helping clients overcome chronic physical and emotional conditions by addressing their root cause at the energetic level. Blending Five Elements wisdom with Star Magic Healing, vibrational medicine, and holistic counselling, she facilitates deep transformation for those who feel stuck despite trying everything. Connie is the founder of The Salt Therapy Clinic & Sanctuary and works with clients both in-person and remotely.
