Upgrading the Workplace for Better Productivity and Wellbeing

Biohacker’s Handbook

Teemu Arina (FIN) Biohacker & Technology Entrepreneur, Founder @ Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland, Author @Biohacker’s Handbook Teemu Arina has a professional career of over 15 years as a technology entrepreneur, author and speaker. He is one of the forefront thinkers on the intersection of the human and the machine, social media, digital work and online learning. He is a Leonardo Award laureate under the patronage of European Parliament for "Humanity in Digitization". Mr. Arina is the founder of three award winning technology companies, ambassador for Rockstart Digital Health accelerator, co-founder of Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland and co-author of the Biohacker’s Handbook for optimizing health and wellbeing with technological and biological tools. Mr. Arina is a popular keynote speaker who has presented internationally in countries such as USA, UK, Japan, Hongkong, Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany. MD Olli Sovijärvi (FIN) Licensed General Practitioner, Helsinki Antioxidant Clinic, Author @ Biohacker’s Handbook Olli Sovijärvi is a Licensed General Practitioner at Helsinki Antioxidant Clinic and co-author of the Biohacker’s Handbook. He is one of the pioneers in holistic medicine in Finland and the only finnish medical doctor with a psychologic-philosophical Integral Theory degree from John F. Kennedy University. Sovijärvi graduated 2006 as a licensed physician from University of Helsinki. He has pioneered health podcasts in Finland with Helsinki Paleo Podcast and Biohacker’s Podcast. Sovijärvi has also consulted many natural health brands and organizations. Jaakko Halmetoja (FIN) Nutrition Specialist, Independent Wellness Entrepreneur, Author @ Biohacker’s Handbook Jaakko Halmetoja is a nutrition expert, author and professional speaker. Jaakko has managed multiple special caféterias in Tampere and works as a product developer for food growth companies. Halmetoja has been popularizing health benefits and unique uses of e.g. chaga mushroom, chocolate, wild foods, various berries and medicinal herbs. Halmetoja maintains a non-profit website loydalahde.com, a database for finding local springs around Finland and hosts weekly talk show – InspiRadio Podcast. He has also written a book on chaga mushroom as well as co-authored the Biohacker’s Handbook. Halmetoja is a popular lecturer with over 500 public lectures and performances.

The Biohacker’s Handbook team explores upgrading the workplace for enhanced productivity

Learn the recovery things. That is actually more important than learning the productivity things. Recovery is half of the work that you do.

Summary

- Upgrading the workplace involves optimizing the environment by improving air quality, adding plants, and using diffusers to reduce cognitive load and enhance overall wellbeing. - Prioritizing deep sleep and REM is essential for cognitive detoxification, while blocking blue light from digital devices helps maintain natural melatonin production for better recovery. - Optimal cognitive performance is supported by maintaining stable blood sugar levels and consuming brain-specific nutrients like wild berries, medicinal mushrooms, and healthy omega-3 fats. - Managing chronic work stress requires activating the parasympathetic nervous system through techniques such as deep diaphragmatic breathing, strategic napping, and regular mental breaks. - Effective ergonomics involves alternating between sitting and standing, maintaining a natural spinal posture, and incorporating regular movement to prevent physical degeneration.

Article

Upgrading The Workplace For Better Productivity And Wellbeing

At Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki, Three Finnish Advocates Argued That The Modern Office Was Not Built For The Human Body

The office, as Teemu Arina told the audience at Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki, had become a place where ambition too often ran ahead of biology. Screens glowed late into the night, blood sugar spiked and crashed beneath fluorescent lights, and workers remained trapped in chairs and stress loops that slowly eroded the very capacities their jobs demanded. Productivity, in this telling, was not simply a matter of discipline or software. It was a physiological condition.

In the presentation, *Upgrading the Workplace for Better Productivity and Wellbeing*, Arina appeared alongside MD Olli Sovijärvi and nutrition specialist Jaakko Halmetoja, the three Finnish co-authors behind *Biohacker’s Handbook*. Speaking in Helsinki on Thursday, 17 November 2016, they offered not a conventional corporate wellness sermon but a broader thesis: that the workplace itself needed redesigning around sleep, breathing, food, movement and recovery if it was to serve human beings rather than deplete them.

A Case Against The Heroics Of Overwork

Arina framed the subject through personal collapse. He described a period of punishing work that ended in stress-related illness, including an ulcer that conventional treatment did not quickly resolve. The point was not merely autobiographical. It was diagnostic. The culture of overwork, he suggested, rewards the appearance of commitment while quietly corroding health.

“Many people lose their health to make money and then they lose their money to restore their health,” he said. “They live as if they will never die and die as if they never lived.”

It was the kind of line that might have sounded moralising in another setting. Here it landed as an indictment of a work culture that mistakes exhaustion for virtue. The speakers returned repeatedly to a deceptively simple proposition: the body keeps score, and the workplace is one of the places where the accounting becomes unavoidable.

The Brain At Work, And At Night

One of the talk’s most striking ideas concerned the glymphatic system, the brain’s nocturnal cleaning mechanism. Deep sleep, the speakers said, was not passive downtime but a biological maintenance cycle in which glial cells helped clear metabolic waste and toxic byproducts, including beta-amyloid. In a world where knowledge work depends on memory, attention and judgment, sleep deprivation was presented not as a badge of hustle but as a direct attack on cognitive performance.

“If you sleep enough, you are investing in yourself and in your future,” the speakers argued. “When you are resting, you are doing your work and investing in the future of your company.”

That inversion mattered. Rest was not the opposite of work. It was one of its hidden conditions. Strategic napping, sufficient REM sleep and protection of melatonin rhythms through blue-light blocking glasses all formed part of the case for an upgraded workplace. The modern employee, in this view, did not need another motivational slogan. They needed darkness, recovery and a circadian rhythm not permanently hijacked by devices.

The Office As A Biological Environment

The presentation also challenged the idea that poor performance stems mainly from weak will or poor time management. Sometimes, Arina suggested, the problem was the room itself.

“Changing the environment changes the way you relate to your work,” he said. “It is not necessarily a problem with the amount of work you do, it might be the context in which it happens.”

That context included air. Cognitive ergonomics, as the speakers described it, began with indoor air quality: carbon dioxide accumulation, stale ventilation and sensory overload all imposed invisible taxes on attention. Plants were recommended not as decorative tokens of corporate virtue but as practical agents in improving the indoor atmosphere. Diffusers and essential oils, particularly rosemary, were suggested as tools to sharpen focus and reduce mental fatigue.

There was a subtle politics to this argument. If the environment shaped cognition, then burnout could not be treated purely as an individual failure. Workplaces, too, were responsible for the conditions under which attention either flourished or fractured.

Food, Fasting And The Search For Stable Energy

If bad offices drain the brain, bad eating habits compound the damage. Halmetoja and Sovijärvi focused on blood sugar as one of the most neglected variables in workplace performance. The aim was not simply to avoid overeating, but to prevent the cycle of spikes and crashes that leave workers irritable, distracted and fogged by mid-afternoon.

Bilberries, medicinal mushrooms, healthy omega-3 fats and cinnamon all appeared in their nutritional toolkit, alongside broader advice about stabilising glucose and reducing inflammatory load. Intermittent fasting was presented as more than a weight-management trend. The speakers linked it to heightened sensory awareness and sharper cognitive focus, drawing on the evolutionary logic that the human organism often becomes more alert when not occupied with digestion.

There were flourishes of individualisation too. Caffeine, they noted, did not affect everyone equally. The CYP1A2 gene could influence whether coffee functioned as a useful stimulant or a trigger for elevated blood pressure, ocular pressure or other adverse effects. For some, adding L-theanine could smooth the jagged edge of caffeine. For others, warming spices such as cayenne and black pepper might aid circulation and alertness, especially in colder climates.

This was wellness reframed as systems management: less a universal prescription than an effort to understand what the body was already trying to signal.

Breathing Against Chronic Stress

Much of modern work, the speakers implied, trapped people in a prolonged sympathetic state: alert, stimulated, productive on paper and physiologically overdrawn. To break that cycle, they emphasised activation of the parasympathetic nervous system through deep diaphragmatic breathing, mental pauses and sensory withdrawal.

The remedies were low-tech and almost unfashionably simple. Close the eyes. Use noise-cancelling headphones. Step away. Breathe with intention. Take regular breaks before the nervous system begins to fray. The body, they argued, cannot remain indefinitely in a state of invisible emergency without consequences for metabolic health, emotional regulation and long-term resilience.

In that sense, the presentation was quietly radical. It did not celebrate relentless connectivity. It treated overstimulation as a design flaw.

Ergonomics Beyond The Expensive Chair

The trio also widened the definition of ergonomics. It was not enough to buy a standing desk and call it reform. Workers were encouraged to alternate between sitting and standing, move regularly and maintain a natural spinal posture. One practical recommendation was to sit on the front edge of the chair, balancing on the sitting bones rather than collapsing backward into the lumbar slump common to office life.

The body, they suggested, had been engineered for variation, not immobilisation. Without movement, the musculoskeletal system degrades, circulation slows and attention dulls. Productivity is then defended with coffee and urgency, though the underlying problem is biomechanical stagnation.

Tracking The Invisible Habits Of Digital Work

Arina, whose career bridged technology entrepreneurship and human optimisation, also turned the tools of the digital age back on digital behaviour itself. Tracking applications such as RescueTime and Moment, he said, could expose the difference between actual work and the seductions of fragmented attention. Device use often feels productive because it is active and immediate. Measurement can reveal otherwise.

That idea fitted the spirit of the wider talk. Biohacking, as presented here, was not merely a collection of supplements and gadgets. It was an attempt to make hidden patterns visible, then intervene before those patterns hardened into illness or inefficiency.

“You are what you repeat,” the speakers said. “You eat, you train, you work, you love, and you sleep. You repeat yourself, and you can upgrade all of these patterns.”

Self-Awareness As The First Upgrade

For all the references to genes, glial cells and medicinal plants, the presentation kept circling back to awareness. The point was not to become mechanistic, but to become observant. To notice which habits depleted energy, which spaces sharpened or dulled the mind, and which rhythms made work sustainable rather than merely possible.

“To upgrade yourself means to be in harmony, to be in touch with yourself, and to be self-aware,” Arina said. “Without being self-aware, you cannot do any of this stuff.”

That may have been the talk’s deepest challenge to workplace culture. It is easier to redesign a floor plan than to confront the fact that many professional environments reward disconnection from bodily limits until those limits become impossible to ignore.

A Different Vision Of Productivity

What Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki offered, through the voices of Teemu Arina, Olli Sovijärvi and Jaakko Halmetoja, was a vision of productivity stripped of some of its modern mythology. Better work, they argued, did not emerge from squeezing ever more output from an exhausted body. It emerged from respecting the body as the infrastructure of thought itself.

In their account, a more productive workplace might smell faintly of rosemary, contain cleaner air and more plants, allow for movement and strategic rest, favour stable blood sugar over sugar-fuelled urgency, and treat deep sleep as a corporate asset rather than a private indulgence. It might even recognise that five minutes in nature after an hour indoors was not laziness but maintenance.

The proposition was both practical and quietly profound: if the workplace was making people ill, then upgrading it meant more than installing better software or issuing another slogan about resilience. It meant redesigning work around the human organism that had to endure it.

Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki