Loosely in the Huberman Cult of Optimization

For my handful of subscribers who even care about bro science and everyone else too.

I upload the drawing onto Instagram—the one of the orange tabby swatting at a tetherball when I get it in my head to send Lisa D’Amato the piece I wrote about how she rejected me in fifth and eighth grade. The piece might seem like a lot of me feeling sorry for myself, and I hope she doesn’t think that I need validation or for her to finally think I’m cool. She has over 100k Instagram followers, so I’m not sure she’ll even notice my message through the chatter.

To my surprise, it’s not long before she DMs multiple voice memos that explain her side of the story and turn my side into a tale of personal woe, one of my earliest and longest lasting works of fiction—me tossed aside, a wretched throwaway person in Pic ‘n’ Save garments.

When she stopped being my friend and started spending more time with Kim (the skinny girl with the styled-out shirts), she says she remembers that I got quiet, that she thought I didn’t want to be friends anymore. It was because Kim’s family fed her and let her stay for days, and gave her a sense of safety that she didn’t have at home where she was being abused by her narcissistic mom and her mom’s scumbag boyfriend. We exchange phone numbers.

The first thing Lisa says when I get on the phone with her is, “I hope you didn’t change it based on what I said.” That’s how I know she’s good. She’s not looking to interject her side into my story. She has her own platform. We talk for almost an hour. When I hang up, I realize I have to let go of one of my most dearly held beliefs about myself. It’s not that people don’t think I’m a dork, I’m sure some do. I’m much more sure that most don’t really think that much about me at all. They’re all busy thinking about themselves. I know this in my adult interactions but never thought to apply it to the things from childhood that have me in their grip.

The problem with me, which I have diagnosed this week, and may change next week and every week after is the false belief that I don’t have power in these things. It’s that I let myself disappear into someone else—a form of annihilation—a choice of annihilation. I want them to do and be everything so I can disappear and not have to make my own decisions.   

I think about the stories I invent about myself. The way I try to pin down the thing that I think happened. The way I can set it in words on a page like I’m trapping a monster. I invite anyone to come and tell me that how I remember it might not be exactly how it was. Please come and tell me how I was the villain because I’m tired of hearing my own recitations of my victimhood.

I was in the cult of Huberman for a good part of my early sobriety. I liked what he said about alcohol. I listened to it on a couch as I fell asleep at a bachelorette party. The headphones in my ears blocked out the noise of drunk women. I nodded along, validated.

I stumble upon a link to a New York Magazine article about Huberman’s deceptive relationships with women. It’s long. It keeps going. It tells a familiar story. There is a certain type of man who fakes a relationship. I spent a better part of last year listening to podcasts that told the stories of women who deal with these men. The Covert Narcissist, Something was Wrong, Navigating Narcissism, Trauma and Narcissism Redefined. I was in a period of extreme worry that someone could step in and take over my life. I was looking to gather everything they said as clues into what I would need to look out for in the future. Everyone was a threat. Everyone was out to deceive me.

I was also listening to Andrew Huberman espouse science-based tools to optimize my body. The breathing exersises the writer talks about in the New York Magazine article. I did those. I did them to relax on the way to work. I trusted Huberman as my mentor in getting through challenges. His status as a scientist elevated him in my mind.

Empirical data.

In a world where I felt I was drowning in my own feelings, I latched onto this idea that science could save me. I wanted him to create a framework for my daily activities. I disappeared into protocols. I worried that I was working too late. I worried that the blue screens of the POS at work were interrupting my circadian rhythm.  I couldn’t ascertain whether I should or should not be intermittent fasting, and I never ate enough protein. I did my open ocean swims in a wetsuit. Did it qualify as a cold plunge? I blasted myself with cold water at the end of my shower, but only for a week, and then I beat myself up for not being able to adhere to anything for a sustained period of time.

There was a time when my life was so regimented, I felt boxed in without any breathing room. I could sit here now and weave the tale that Huberman was just another in a long line of men who set out to deceive, that I had this supernatural sense that drew me to him, that he was my charismatic magnet, that there was something in his instructions that I needed—that he was a drug.

I wanted him to tell me what to do because I didn’t trust myself to control my own life. I DON’T trust myself to control my own life.

I go onto the Huberman Instagram page to see what people are saying. There are two camps that deign to participate in the public lynching. First is the people who feel personally betrayed by his deception, and then the die-hard fans. I wonder if they are all really listening to the sometimes three hour long episodes. I paused for a long time after the psychedelics one because I just hate psychedelics. I hate doing them. I hate hearing about them. The whole everything around them is repulsive. Some people are reading that and thinking, ‘oh that’s just because you…’

NO. Whatever you’re going to say is wasted, so drop it.

‘…but they’re shown in multiple studies to…’

STOP. Go find your psychedelic encouragement friends and talk about it with them. I don’t want to hear it.

I get this idea to get it tattooed on my hand while I’m on a run. You have to earn your own trust. I have to earn my own trust. I’m not getting that tattoo, though. The thought was fleeting.

Okay but this dopamine everything has been an obsession of mine for over a year. Because of Huberman I know how to pronounce dopaminergic, and that’s gotta mean something in the grander scheme of things. In between this bro-science cold blast of water and this girl-science of being a soft animal of contentedness, therein lies me.

I tell every person I come across about the Huberman scandal, but most of them don’t know who he even is. None of my family noticed that I was living in a virtual cult of science-based protocols—probably because I just wasn’t all that great at sticking to them, and in the end, I’m always going to rebel, even if it’s against myself.

I like writing in first person present tense, and that’s what I use in the memoir I’m serializing. One of the biggest struggles is telling the story as it happened from my present perspective which is a perspective I didn’t have when the events of life were unfolding. The narrator becomes this other person who is not quite me then, but also not quite me now because she isn’t supposed to know what I know. Anyways this week’s installment of the memoir details the effects of optimization on a partner who wasn’t ready for it and just keeps going along. It’s about one of the last fights we had before the final fight. Paid subscribers who have been with me will probably recognize the story.

I’ve sent everything I wrote about Henry to him. Like Lisa, he didn’t ask me to change anything or alter my version of the story. His only qualm being that he didn’t like the name Henry, but he had no alternative suggestions.

The year of optimization was also the year that Kare Bush’s song, “Running up that Hill” resurged in popularity. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Read about the time the trail was dirty