Opening Remarks - Optimize The Day 24/7 (Day 1)
Teemu Arina
Teemu Arina has a professional career of two decades as a technology entrepreneur, author and professional speaker. Mr. Arina is one of the forefront figures of the biohacking movement. Mr. Arina has received the Leonardo Award in 2015 (under the patronage of European Parliament and UNESCO), selected as Top 100 most influential people in IT in 2016 (TIVI), and awarded the Speaker of the Year in 2017 (Speakersforum) and Leadership Trainer of the Year (Turku School of Economics, 2018). He is the co-author of the bestselling Biohacker’s Handbook series for optimising what it means to be human with technological and biological tools. Mr. Arina is also curating the Biohacker Summit (world's top conference for biohacking) and co-founder of the Biohacker Center (an independent think tank focused on optimal human performance, health and wellbeing).
Also features on stage, 21st Sense
Time is not actually limited; time is infinite. If you feel that you don't have time, remember that time doesn't go anywhere—it is just there. Optimizing your day is all about how you interact with the signals from your environment.
Summary
- The Biohacker Summit marks its 10th event in five years, with an upcoming expansion to Amsterdam scheduled for June 5-6 next year in a significantly larger venue. - Attendees can utilize the Keto Mojo GKI Multifunction Monitoring System to measure blood glucose and ketone levels, a technology launching in Europe during the event. - Event logistics have been improved with an upgraded food court and additional restaurant options to address wait times, alongside wireless headphones for active conference participation. - Specialized sessions led by a Finnish sauna master offer traditional wellness practices, supported by on-site facilities like changing rooms and rental gear. - Innovation from 21st Cent introduces wearable tech that provides a physical sensation of time via electrical impulses, enabling users to alter time perception and improve reaction speeds.
Article
Hacking Time, Optimizing Life
Teemu Arina Opened Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki With A Provocation: What If Time Could Be Felt, Trained, And Stretched?
In the opening remarks for **“Optimize The Day 24/7 (Day 1)”** at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki**, **Teemu Arina** did not merely welcome the crowd. He offered a manifesto for a culture increasingly obsessed with productivity, recovery, and the possibility that the human body, properly tuned, might yet surprise itself.
Inside a former electric factory in Helsinki on 1 November 2019, Arina framed the summit as both laboratory and ritual. The event, he reminded attendees, had reached its tenth edition in five years, a milestone that spoke to the rapid mainstreaming of biohacking from fringe fascination to a serious language of human performance. He also looked ahead, announcing the summit’s next expansion to Amsterdam, where the gathering was set to grow larger still.
But scale was only part of the story. The deeper theme was perception: how people slept, ate, moved, recovered, focused, and above all, how they experienced time.
A Conference Built On The Promise Of Human Plasticity
Arina, a technology entrepreneur and one of the most visible figures in the biohacking movement, anchored his remarks in a familiar conviction of the field: that the body is not fixed, but trainable. The nervous system, in his telling, was less a static inheritance than an adaptable frontier.
“There is infinite potential in the human nervous system in terms of what is possible,” he said.
That idea became the philosophical spine of the session. Biohacking, at least in this formulation, was not simply about supplements or wearables. It was about neuroplasticity, about teaching the body to interpret signals differently, and perhaps more effectively, than before.
“There is infinite potential in neuroplasticity and reprogramming our nervous systems to understand signals from the environment in new ways,” Arina said.
It was a striking line because it captured the summit’s central ambition. This was not wellness as indulgence. It was wellness recast as systems engineering.
Sleep, Fasting, And The Daily Discipline Of Optimization
Arina grounded that larger vision in personal routine. He spoke about using low-level vibration technology from Neurosonic to improve his sleep while staying in a temporary accommodation where light leaked through the blinds. He described beginning the morning with an electrolyte and amino acid drink, and spoke of a fasting pattern that had condensed eating into a single daily meal.
Such details might have sounded intimate, even mundane, were they not delivered as field notes from a broader experiment in self-regulation. Sleep was not just rest. It was a variable to improve. Food was not merely nourishment. It was timing, metabolic control, and digestive management, down to the use of enzymes to handle the strain of a large meal.
The modern optimization creed often lives in these small acts, where everyday life is broken into measurable parts and each part becomes improvable.
A Summit That Asked Attendees To Participate, Not Merely Listen
If Arina’s remarks suggested anything, it was that passivity had no place here. He encouraged movement across the venue, conversation with exhibitors, and use of wireless streaming headphones so that no one had to remain rooted to a seat in order to keep up with the programme.
“We promote active presence,” he said. “Go around, interact with people, and talk to the exhibitors.”
That phrase, active presence, captured something revealing about the summit’s ethos. Presence itself was not imagined as stillness or contemplation, but as engagement, circulation, responsiveness. Even attention had become kinetic.
The logistical details mattered too. After complaints about queues the previous day, the food court had been upgraded and additional restaurant options added. It was a reminder that conferences devoted to peak performance are still bound by the ordinary realities of hunger, delay, and infrastructure. Even in a room full of self-trackers and neurohackers, lunch remains a problem to solve.
Finnish Sauna As Tradition And Technology
One of the event’s more grounded offerings lay not in futuristic gadgets but in the enduring Finnish sauna. Arina highlighted guided sessions led by a local sauna master, placing an ancient national practice alongside cutting-edge devices and metabolic testing kits.
That pairing was telling. At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, tradition and technology were not adversaries. They were co-branded tools in the same pursuit of recovery, resilience, and enhanced function. Sauna, in this setting, was not only cultural inheritance. It was physiological strategy.
Measuring The Body, Measuring Control
Arina also drew attention to the **Keto-Mojo GKI Multifunction Monitoring System**, which attendees could use to measure blood glucose and ketone levels. Its European launch at the summit was presented as a point of excitement, and not only for those already immersed in ketogenic living.
The appeal of such devices lies in what they offer psychologically as much as biologically: a promise that invisible bodily states can be made legible, tracked, and acted upon. In the biohacking world, measurement is rarely neutral. It implies agency. If a metric can be seen, perhaps it can be mastered.
The Strange New Frontier Of Time Perception
The most arresting moment of the session came when Arina invited **Paul Palin** to the stage to discuss a wearable device developed by **21st Century Senses**, one that allowed users to feel time through electrical impulses on the skin.
The concept sounded almost science fictional. Instead of checking a watch, the wearer received physical signals that conveyed the passing of time directly through the body. Palin described the effect not as intrusive, but intimate.
“Time can become a trusted friend when it cannot creep up on you or surprise you,” he said.
In a culture where clocks often intensify anxiety, the promise here was radical in its simplicity: to move from seeing time as an adversary to sensing it as a companion. Palin suggested that the device transformed planning, made the day easier to navigate, and altered the emotional relationship between schedule and self.
More extraordinary still was the claim that the technology could alter time perception itself, making an hour feel longer and sharpening reaction speeds in the process. Whether taken as neuroscience, performance tool, or philosophical experiment, the idea struck directly at one of modern life’s deepest complaints: that there is never enough time.
A New Sensory Politics Of Everyday Life
Arina connected the demonstration to a broader theory of the adaptable nervous system. He referenced earlier experiments in sensory augmentation, including devices that helped wearers sense magnetic north, and argued that humans might learn to incorporate entirely new streams of information into ordinary consciousness.
This was where the summit’s ambitions became most expansive. If the nervous system could be taught to register orientation, timing, and environmental cues in novel ways, then biohacking was no longer just optimization. It was sensory redesign.
“It is time to hack time and find new ways of interacting with your environment to improve your health, performance, and well-being,” Arina said.
The line landed with the clean force of a slogan, but it also carried a more disquieting implication. If time itself could be hacked, then even the most basic texture of human experience had become open to intervention.
The Mood Of An Age
What unfolded in Arina’s opening remarks at Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki was more than a preview of a conference programme. It was a snapshot of a wider cultural mood, one in which exhaustion, distraction, and temporal pressure had created a market for tools that promised not merely better habits, but altered perception.
There was something undeniably compelling in the vision. Better sleep. Better recovery. More deliberate attention. A more intelligent relationship with the body. Yet there was also a harder question lingering beneath the enthusiasm: when every function becomes improvable, what happens to the simple right to exist without optimization?
For those gathered in Helsinki, that tension appeared less like a warning than a challenge worth pursuing. The summit’s wager was that the human organism still contained unrealised capacities, and that technology, ritual, and disciplined experimentation might help unlock them.
In Teemu Arina’s hands, the opening of the event became an argument that the future of performance would not be defined only by what people did, but by how they sensed, interpreted, and inhabited the hours they had.
And in that room, for a moment, time itself seemed newly negotiable.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki