No matter where you look, guys are talking about stacks. Big Sean, for one, who bragged in a recent single: "I been on my supplements, fish oils, chlorophyll, multis..." Tech newsletter The Information declared the supplement stack is Silicon Valleys latest invention and gave 11 business leaders the MTV Cribs treatment for their medicine cabinets, in which they touted cocktails for goals ranging from productivity to dialing back their biological clock. There are now sleep stacks, productivity stacks, libido stacks, and yoga recovery stacks.

On the r/StackAdvice subreddit (54,000 members) you can find users touting their gaming stacks and dopamine stacks. This subreddit also shows the power ascribed to stacks: one user asked if theres a stack to make you an extrovert, while another asked what nootropics enhance charisma and reduce social anxiety. Vitamin company Nourished offers a custom gummy that is a literal stack: layers of supplements pressed into a sandwich based the users personal information and intended goals.

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A stack, in its most basic form, is basically just a bunch of stuff. In optimizer-brain parlance, sunlight, exercise, and rest are all stackable. But it most often refers to nutritional supplements, which are unregulated and range widely in their ingredients, from vitamin C to caffeine to things like tianeptine, which has earned the name gas station heroin. (Not a good component for most stacks.)

Before Silicon Valley executives were optimizing for peak email response times and/or eternal life, meatheads were more than familiar with the concept of the stack. A 1998 article about MLB slugger Mark McGwires advanced supplement routine notes that one of his old reliables, Androstenedione, was available in a supplement bundle called Andro-Flav Stack produced by Great Earth Vitamins. The companys marketing managerlocated not in Silicon Valley but Long Islandsaid the stack was very popular, with the 18 to 35-year-old muscle-head.

These muscle-heads were also first to the nutritional supplement stack: caffeine and sugar for pre-workout pumps and protein cocktails for post-workout recovery. Bodybuilding.com lore shows this dates from far before any guy in a fleece vest knew about ashwagandha. But now, there are stacks for every guy, even those uninterested in benching two plates.

The concept of a stack, from Silicon Valley executives to niche subreddits, feels psychologically sticky. Brady Holmer, a researcher at Examine.com, an online resource that synthesizes research about various supplements, diets, recovery protocols, told GQ he first noticed an increased deployment of stacks during the nootropics craze a couple of years ago.

Nootropicswhich Holmer says is a meaningless termresonated with Silicon Valley executives as well as more experimental biohackers. Tech CEO Bryan Johnson included nootropics in his supplement stack, as part of his goal to Benjamin Button himself while raising awareness for Blueprint, his company that offers a way to build your autonomous self. This Bryan Johnson is not to be confused with Brian Liver King Johnson, the guy who employed the OG stacksteroidsas a way to bolster his credibility to spin a different ancestral stackdesiccated testicle and organ capsules.

Either way, both Johnsons are pushing stacks. As Holmer sees it, the stack mentality can also make the same routine feel more regimented, and therefore more effective. In the world of fitness and supplementation, there's definitely this mindset of one thing is good, so more equals better, Holmer said. Well, caffeine is good, but also caffeine plus L theanine plus ashwagandha, that that must be better, right? All of these supplements have data to show effects on neurotransmitters, Holmer said, and one can devise a mechanistic story about how these products must work in synergy.

But unfortunately, he says. a lot of those ingredients aren't often studied together." The individual supplements in the stack are studied independently. And then the mechanisms are kind of lumped together, like, this is going to do this when you take them all at once. However, theres not a lot of evidence to support that, he said. But I think thats one of the appeals of stacks.

On top of cognitive performance, Holmer has also seen stacking applied to morning routines, such as sunlight, hydration, and deep breathing protocols. Hes personally interested in stacks around training, such as stacking cold plunges before exercise or sauna post-exercise or to optimize potential benefits.

To decide what to incorporate into your stack is more difficult than just doing your own research, Holmer said. If you want to find evidence that something is going to work, you can find a study for that. (This is the confirmation bias component of the logical fallacy stack.) He recommends trying one supplement at a time, if at all, to see if its right for you.

The linguistic deployment of the term stack does a lot of heavy lifting, according to Colleen Derkatch, professor in the English department at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Why Wellness Sells. Derkatch studies how language shapes our understandings and experiences of health. What it does," she said, "is reframe ordinary aspects of living as a system, This language adds a rationale, motivation, and purpose to things you may have already been doing. (Simply referring to your workouts protocols does seem to have a powerful effect for this reason.)

Still, Derkatch doesnt see stacks as something the marketing department whipped up from thin air. Marketing doesnt create markets from scratch, she explained. Instead, it must tap into existing needs. Weve been told for decades that health is an individual responsibility and consumer choice, and weve internalized that logic, she said. So public interest in things like supplement stacks, regardless of their efficacy, makes perfect sense.

The stack mindset is amplified in an era of the optimization-at-all-costs, where we often think of the body in terms of instruments of productivity, Derkatch said. (In the same song where Big Sean rattles off his stack, he says that I overwork and do shit I don't have to do.)

Unbridled pharmaceutical advertising has also reframed our way of thinking, she said, and the same logic has been deployed in the wellness sphere. (e.g. Ask your doctor if XYZ is right for you, a type of pharmaceutical advertising only allowed in America and New Zealand.) Supplements are even easier to market and advertise, since theres no pesky doctor or FDA required.

Its worth remembering that a stack is a very small piece of a much bigger puzzle. If youre trying to build a table of health, nutritional supplements might be like a coaster that you wedge under one of the legs to make it even. And while a stack may be a compelling way to think about your supplements, exercise, or recovery protocols, its only as good as its components, and the fundamentals matter much more than anything that comes in a bottle.

The rest is here:
Everybody Has a Stack Now - GQ