Is “Biomarking” the Missing Piece of Your Wellness Routine?
Last month, I wandered far outside the confines of my typical comfort zone when I attended a group hypnotherapy session. Although I’m not usually one to be hypnotized or therapized in large groups, I thought it’d be an interesting exercise before the end of the year. After all, the new year is prime time for those seeking to recommit themselves to their wellness routines. For years now, my personal routine has been as rigid in its consistency as its simplicity. So, I thought, why not take advantage of some of the pitches that come into the SHARP orbit and experiment with some of the modern practices I’d overlooked?
While hypnotherapy was a worthwhile experiment, the second pitch that came across my desk was far more in my wheelhouse. As a runner, I like relying on objective metrics to measure progress and effort: if you want to run a certain race time, the bar for “success” and “failure” is clear (apparently that’s not really in the “spirit of hypnotherapy”). But when a company called NiaHealth reached out with promises of discovering my “biological age,” my interest was piqued.
In essence, the process itself won’t feel much different from a regular doctor’s checkup — one that happens in the convenience and comfort of your own home, that is. You simply log onto the company’s website, create a profile, select the test you want (I went with a general “Nurse Practitioner Consult” but you can do everything from checking your gut microbiomes to calculating your VO2 Max), and book a time. Creating a profile doesn’t take more than 10 minutes, but you’re asked to give a strong foundation of information for NiaHealth to work from. Before an appointment was booked, I filled out an extensive survey that provided a baseline on my medical history, weekly exercise routine, diet, family conditions, substance use, specific points of concern, and more. You can skip any sections that you’re unsure of, but it helps to provide the clearest possible picture for the team beforehand.
Within a week of filling in my information, a nurse arrived at my apartment in a small silver sedan, taking my blood pressure, pricking a couple of vials full of blood, and closing the door in 20 minutes. As someone whose procrastination for a doctor’s visit is mostly fuelled by the sheer inconvenience of it all, being able to fit getting my blood drawn between Zoom meetings is a pretty vital shortcut. Aside from convenience, what drew me into the process was the clarity on results and, most importantly, next steps.
When it comes to wellness, I tend to treat myself like a withholding parent looking over their gifted child’s exam scores (“Oh, 95%… where’d the extra 5% go?). If I run a personal best, I tend to be happy for 10-15 minutes before replaying how I could’ve shaved a few precious seconds at a water station. So, when I received a notification that my results were in, my eyes shot straight over to the grading section.
“A+” overall score, to start. I breathed a sigh of relief. My eyes then scanned over to the next metric: “88th percentile.” “Where’d the other 12% go?” I thought. Thankfully, the third metric on the dashboard was NiaHealth’s biological age, which uses key biomarkers and your calendar age to compare with others in your age group to give you a dialled-in perspective of where you stand relative to your peers. My blood draw put me at 24.3 years old, which is 3.7 years younger than my calendar age (28). This offered some retribution for my 88th percentile, but even so, I was eagerly searching for how I could improve.
Again, NiaHealth makes this as simple as possible. A menu of “recommendations” (which has a helpful sub-category of “priorities”) provides specific ways you can improve deficiencies. For me, it meant vitamin D and vitamin B12 supplements, and making a follow-up appointment to look into my white blood cell levels. Truthfully, I’ll be eager to circle back in six months after supplementing my mornings with a few easy vitamins (trying to inch into a more prestigious percentile and knock a few more years off my biological age).
Of course, Father Time is undefeated. I know I won’t be able to stave off the aging process forever, but that doesn’t mean we have to ignore it blindly and hope for the best. For me, it was as simple as adding some vitamins into my routine and scheduling a follow-up on cell counts. For others, programs like NiaHealth can give a life-changing heads up about cancer risks, lifestyle factors impacting your day-to-day happiness, and nutritional insights.
The road to my 2026 wellness journey is still foggy — the New Year comes with a full inbox of pitches — but if turning off the beaten path has taught me anything, it’s this: there’s always room for improvement. We’ll keep chasing those last few percentage points, wherever we can find them.
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