Can Therapy and Neurohacking Work Together?
While I’ve always had a friendly stance toward therapy and medicine — my book has many strongly worded encouragements to would-be neurohackers with medical conditions that they should work closely with their doctors and health care providers — I have to confess that, before the book came out, I encountered lukewarm or even downright hostile responses from some psychologists. So, I assumed that, as a group, psychologists would be uninterested when my book came out. It was a pleasant surprise when psychologist-readers reached out with enthusiasm. Curious, I asked what they liked so much. It turned out that they were looking for ways to empower their clients even after sessions ended. They saw neurohacking as a way to teach their clients more self-agency. As long as their clients felt comfortable with sharing their at-home data, they also saw neurohacking as a way to gain visibility into their clients’ lives outside the session — helping them do their jobs better as therapists.
This not only thrilled me, it was a great relief. I’d always suspected that therapy and neurohacking could be a beautiful match. After all, I’d seen the accountability partner or “neurohacking buddy” paradigm work so well, so it seemed reasonable that a trained social support system — in the form of a mental health professional — would work as well or even better. That was part of why, in chapter…
