DEBUGGING YOUR LIFE
Thomas Blomseth Christiansen
Thomas Blomseth Christiansen is recognized as one of the most experienced and influential self-trackers in the global Quantified Self community—both as a technologist and someone seeking to discover things about himself. Most widely known for tracking his every sneeze for the past seven years he has effectively cured himself of his allergies through long-running experiments with his lifestyle. In the process he has collected a unique dataset of over 100K observations made by paying attention to his subjective experience and daily living. He is working on next-generation technology for self-tracking and human augmentation as co-founder of TOTTI Labs and Flowrunner.
Thomas Blomseth Christiansen, a pioneer in the Quantified Self
My personal data beat the generic molecules of the medication I was offered. By collecting data and experimenting, I’ve arrived at something much better and more sustainable than those generic molecules. Data tomorrow beats data in a year.
Summary
- Significant long-term health improvements, such as eliminating allergy medication and doctor visits, can be achieved through rigorous personal data tracking and experimentation.
- Applying the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle and root cause analysis from engineering can effectively "debug" health issues and move beyond merely treating symptoms.
- Combining active observations, like noticing bodily sensations and food habits, with passive sensor data provides a comprehensive baseline for understanding personal health patterns.
- Prioritizing observation before starting interventions is essential to ensure that any subsequent changes to diet or lifestyle can be accurately measured for effectiveness.
- Seeking high-leverage interventions offers simple, sustainable solutions to complex problems that can be more effective than generic medical treatments for chronic conditions.
Article
Debugging Your Life
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Thomas Blomseth Christiansen Argued That The Most Powerful Health Technology Might Be Attention Itself
In a conference hall filled with devices promising sharper sleep, cleaner energy and upgraded human performance, Thomas Blomseth Christiansen offered something both less glamorous and more radical at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki: the idea that a person could treat chronic health problems the way an engineer treats a failing system.
His presentation, *Debugging Your Life: Personal Health Optimization Through Self-Tracking & The Scientific Method*, was not a sermon for miracle supplements or a sales pitch for biohacking bravado. It was, instead, an argument for patience, observation and rigor. If the body appeared to malfunction, Christiansen suggested, the answer was not merely to suppress symptoms but to understand the machinery beneath them.
“If you are only treating symptoms, the problem will come back,” he said. “To truly solve a problem, you must understand it deeply and address the root cause so it does not return.”
A Man Who Counted Every Sneeze
Christiansen arrived at that philosophy through necessity rather than theory. Speaking in Helsinki on Friday, 13 October 2017, he described a decade-long struggle with allergies, eczema, fatigue and mental fog that had steadily worsened in his early thirties. What alarmed him was not only the physical discomfort but the creeping sense of premature decline. He felt, he said, like an old man long before old age had earned the right to announce itself.
So he began to track.
Not casually, not in the half-hearted way of a New Year health app, but with the obsessive precision of a man determined to reclaim his own life. Over the years, Christiansen compiled more than 110,000 observations, many of them actively recorded by hand. He photographed meals, logged water intake, monitored supplement use, tracked toilet visits, noted chills and fatigue, documented eczema flare-ups, and, in the detail for which he became best known in the Quantified Self community, recorded every sneeze.
That sneeze archive alone stretched back to May 2011. It became more than a curiosity. It was evidence: a visible pattern of seasonality, sensitivity and response. By mapping those sneezes over time, he could see not just when his allergies flared, but how they changed as his diet, environment and stress shifted.
Such data, gathered over years rather than weeks, gave him something medicine had not: a history dense enough to ask meaningful questions of.
The Quiet Revolt Against Generic Medicine
Christiansen was careful not to present himself as a doctor, nor to claim a universal cure. What he did claim was narrower and, in some ways, more unsettling for conventional medicine. Personalized, longitudinal data, he argued, could sometimes outperform the generic pharmaceutical solutions offered to people with chronic but poorly understood conditions.
His own results were striking. He told the audience that he had stopped using allergy medication in 2010 and had not resumed it. He had not seen a medical doctor since 2008 for the chronic issues that once dominated his life. He reported clearer thinking, better sleep and a newfound ability to distinguish between an allergic reaction and the immune response to something genuinely harmful. Even his cat allergy, once severe enough to shape where he could sleep, had largely receded.
The point was not that everyone should mimic his interventions. In fact, Christiansen explicitly resisted turning his personal protocol into a public doctrine. The interventions, he said, were personal. The method was general.
“Even when the interventions are personal, the method is general,” he told the audience. “You can take the scientific method and boil it down into something you can use to address issues in your everyday life.”
The Pocket-Sized Scientific Method
The intellectual backbone of the talk came from an unlikely source: industrial process improvement. Christiansen drew on Toyota’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, or PDCA, which he described as the scientific method compressed into an everyday operating system. In factories, it had been used to improve quality and solve recurring problems. In his own life, he had turned it on allergies, skin inflammation and fatigue.
First, know the problem. Then test an intervention. Then evaluate. Then adapt.
It sounded simple, even obvious. Yet simplicity was precisely the challenge. In a health culture drawn to dramatic fixes and immediate transformation, Christiansen advocated for a slower discipline: establish a baseline before changing anything. Observe before intervening. Learn what your system is already doing before trying to force it into a new state.
“Err on the side of observations and establish baselines,” he said. “If you do not know what is really going on to begin with, you will not know whether you are actually improving when you start your interventions.”
This was perhaps the most subversive argument of the afternoon. In a marketplace crowded with things to buy, he proposed that the first act might be not purchasing another intervention, but paying closer attention.
Observation As A Form Of Power
Much of Christiansen’s work relied on what he called active tracking, a category often overshadowed by the glamour of wearables and biomarkers. Passive sensing from devices could capture heart rate, sleep, activity and posture. But many of the most important signals in chronic illness remained stubbornly subjective: itchiness, sudden fatigue, subtle chills, mental dullness, the bodily sensation that something was off before any machine could detect it.
Those phenomena had to be observed from the inside.
This emphasis on consciousness as an instrument was central to his argument. He was not anti-technology. As co-founder of TOTTI Labs and Flowrunner, and as one of the most experienced self-trackers in the global Quantified Self movement, Christiansen had spent years building and testing tools. But he insisted that no sensor could replace the disciplined noticing of one’s own life.
His visual archives of food and skin offered a good example. Thousands of meal photographs, without calorie counts, still revealed patterns. Images of eczema flare-ups across seasons made progress visible, even when memory blurred it. Long after suffering has faded, historical data can remind a person how far they have traveled and how fragile that progress might be.
In this sense, self-tracking was not merely measurement. It was a defense against amnesia.
High-Leverage Changes, Not Heroic Suffering
Another of Christiansen’s strongest themes was leverage. Good health interventions, he argued, should not be judged by how punishing or expensive they are, but by whether they solve large problems with small, sustainable adjustments.
“Look for high-leverage interventions where you can solve a big problem with small, mild changes,” he said. “You want to find the factors in your life where a few adjustments lead to significant results.”
That philosophy separated debugging from punishment. The aim was not to impose endless discipline for its own sake. It was to identify root causes, make precise changes and reduce the need for harsh ongoing treatment. The best intervention was one durable enough to live with, cheap enough to maintain and effective enough to make itself almost invisible in daily life.
This is where his talk cut against a familiar tendency in wellness culture: the attraction to severity. Christiansen’s method was demanding, but not theatrical. It valued consistency over spectacle, iteration over ideology.
What Self-Tracking Could Actually Teach
There was humility in his presentation, and also a challenge. Christiansen reminded the audience that when the Quantified Self movement first emerged, much of it looked eccentric. Tracking food with photos seemed strange. Wearing activity sensors seemed stranger. Yet many of those once fringe behaviors had, by 2017, become ordinary. The deeper question was no longer whether people would collect data, but whether they would learn from it.
“Experiment with self-tracking to see what you can actually learn,” he said. “It is about figuring something out for yourself that is potentially beneficial and then inspiring others by doing it.”
That insistence on experimentation mattered. He did not present data as self-justifying. Numbers alone were not wisdom. They became useful only when tied to questions: What do I want more of? What do I want less of? What am I curious about? What might this problem really be about?
Such questions returned agency to the individual without collapsing into narcissism. They acknowledged that the body is not a machine in the crude sense, but a system whose patterns can still be studied, nudged and, sometimes, repaired.
A Different Future For Chronic Health
By the end of the session at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Christiansen had offered something more durable than a protocol. He had proposed a new moral framework for chronic health: that people need not remain passive recipients of symptom management; that carefully gathered personal evidence can reveal truths population averages miss; and that the scientific method, stripped of institutional grandeur, can fit into a pocket and into a life.
His was not a promise of easy cures. The process, he said, was messy. It could take years. It demanded iteration, doubt and stamina. But it also held out a form of hope more serious than hype: that sustainable health might emerge not from the next miracle molecule, but from the long discipline of noticing.
And perhaps that was the deepest provocation of all. In an age of optimized products, Christiansen suggested that the first technology to master was still the self.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki