Biohacking Pioneer Dave Asprey on Why Trump's Psychedelics Order Could Change Men's Mental Health

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For most men, health optimization starts after something breaks. Bloodwork comes back bad. Energy disappears. Stress becomes impossible to ignore. For Dave Asprey4x NY Times Bestselling Author, Longevity Expert and Creator of the Biohacking Movement, the process started decades earlier and eventually became a movement.

Asprey has spent years experimenting at the edge of performance and longevity. He lost more than 100 pounds, helped popularize the modern biohacking movement through Bulletproof, and built a career around one question: how far can the human body and brain actually go when optimized correctly?

Now his attention is focused on what he believes is the next frontier: consciousness.

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the FDA to accelerate the review process for psychedelic breakthrough therapies, Asprey viewed it less as a surprise and more as an inevitability. The conversation he has been having privately with executives, founders, and high performers for years is suddenly becoming public.

"This isn't about getting high. It's about getting unstuck," Asprey told Men's Fitness.

For Asprey, psychedelics are not recreational shortcuts or Silicon Valley trends. He sees them as precision tools capable of helping people process trauma, improve emotional regulation, and remove the mental friction that quietly sabotages performance.

He believes many men spend years training around unresolved stress rather than actually addressing it.

"Biohacking has always been the Trojan horse to get people to care about longevity," Asprey said when asked what the next phase of the movement looks like. "The next phase of longevity and this field is going to be more focused on consciousness."

That idea sits at the center of his work with 40 Years of Zen, a neuroscience based performance program designed for executives and entrepreneurs seeking deeper cognitive clarity. The program combines neurofeedback, meditation, and psychedelic assisted therapy protocols in an effort to improve how people think, regulate stress, and operate under pressure.

Asprey argues that physical performance and mental performance are impossible to separate.

"You're not going to live a long time or perform very well or quite frankly get a six pack if you're always worried about stuff your mom said to you a long time ago," he said.

It is part neuroscience, part emotional processing, and part cultural shift. Men are becoming more willing to discuss anxiety, burnout, trauma, and mental fatigue, particularly high performers who outwardly appear successful but internally feel stuck.

The timing matters. Depression rates continue to climb, stress levels remain elevated, and many men still feel trapped between outdated "push through it" mentalities and pharmaceutical approaches that often leave them emotionally flat. Clinical research surrounding psychedelic assisted therapy has shown promising results for PTSD, treatment resistant depression, and anxiety when administered in controlled therapeutic settings.

Asprey is also careful not to romanticize it.

"These are tools, not toys," he warned.

He does not advocate for reckless experimentation or unsupervised use. The future he sees is structured, regulated, and medically guided, integrated into the larger conversation around longevity, recovery, and human performance.

His latest book, Heavily Meditated, explores many of those ideas further, particularly around stress reduction and achieving deeper states of calm and awareness faster than traditional methods alone.

For Asprey, the real future of biohacking may have less to do with ice baths, supplements, or wearable technology and more to do with understanding the mind itself. The next evolution of performance, he believes, is not just physical optimization. It is learning how to finally clear the emotional noise that keeps people from operating at their full capacity.

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This story was originally published May 9, 2026 at 5:47 PM.