Hey {{first_name|there}},
I'm back in London.
Last week I wrote about how much your environment shapes your baseline. Portugal, Malta, 45 degrees, all of it.
Here's the part I didn't expect.
I've come home to the most optimised setup I own. My own bed. My own kitchen. Sleep numbers that look great. Everything dialled in exactly how I want it. And I'm more stressed than I was on the road.
I'm still getting my steps in. Ten thousand, sometimes twelve, every day.
But I'm walking on pavement. Pavement to a park, a bit of green, then pavement home. On paper that number is identical to the walks I was doing along the coast. In my body it is not remotely the same thing. That was the first thing I noticed.
The second took longer to admit.
Coming back into the city after being away meant my weekly routines quietly disappeared. The boxing stopped. The tennis stopped. The journaling and the meditation went with them. Nothing dramatic happened. They just fell off one at a time, and I didn't put anything back in their place. What filled the gap was work.
My friend TJ Power, who researches dopamine and attention, talks about resetting your dopamine baseline. I've been sitting with that a lot this week. Because I've noticed something uncomfortable about myself. When I don't have every minute of the day filled, I get edgy. Unsure what to do with myself. So I reach for something, anything, to fill it. That urge feels like productivity.
It isn't.
Which leads me somewhere I've been reluctant to write down.
My setup here is as good as it gets. The sleep scores prove it. And I still did better work, and felt better doing it, from a rented flat abroad with none of my kit.
I'm not saying throw out the setup. It's real and it earns its keep. But it was never the biggest variable. Being somewhere that pulls you outside and breaks your defaults beats a perfect bedroom, and it isn't close. That's an annoying thing for me to admit. It's also the most useful thing I've learned this month.
The fix here isn't a supplement or a device. It's putting the things back in the calendar.
Boxing, weekly. Tennis, weekly. Journaling and meditation back in the morning. Not because they're impressive habits, but because they're the structure that stops low-grade edginess turning into three months of stress I don't notice until it's already there.
Every time I've done this, my mental health improves and my output goes up significantly. Not slightly. Significantly. That's the bit most people miss. Scheduling the things that aren't work is what makes the work better.
I meant what I said about this not being a supplement problem. But there's one thing I've kept taking the whole way through, and it's BodyBio PC.
It's a phospholipid complex, the raw material your cell membranes are made from. Every cell you own is wrapped in one, including the ones in your brain, and when those membranes are in decent shape the things that depend on them run better: energy production, focus, how well your body clears what it doesn't need.
It won't put boxing back in your calendar. Nothing in a bottle will. But if you're going to run hard for a stretch, give the machinery underneath something to work with.
Use code TIMBIOHACKER for 20% off. Find out more here →
ONE THING WORTH DOING THIS WEEK
Open your calendar for next week and find the thing that used to be in there and isn't anymore.
The class you stopped going to. The walk. The evening you used to keep free.
Put one of them back. Properly in the calendar, with a time on it, like a meeting you can't move.
Then notice what happens to everything else that week.
Look after yourself,
Tim 💚
P.S. London can be a genuinely lonely city. You can be surrounded by people all day and not properly connect with any of them. I think that's a bigger health problem than most of what gets talked about in this space, and it's part of why I started the Health Optimisation Summit in the first place.
We're also building something specifically for the connection side of it. A proper way to meet people who care about their health as much as you do, rather than hoping you happen to bump into them. More on that soon.
Wim Hof is the latest keynote confirmed for London, 11-13 September, alongside Bear Grylls and a lineup that keeps growing. Tickets are moving fast. Come and join us. Get your ticket →
P.P.S. I filmed a full tour of my London apartment and everything in it if you want to see the setup. Take a look here →