I spent almost twenty years in the modern day gold rush: SaaS software startups, AI, Crypto, and NFTs. I watched them all come, and rise, and inevitably fall away, along the way UX design turned into product management, something that came very naturally to me. From the outside, it looked like a good career, because it was one.
Inside was a very different story.
I had crippling social anxiety and performance anxiety that at the time I never could have called it out, because I didn’t have the understanding of it. I thought that feeling in my chest was the mark of my ambition and drive. Every meeting had a low hum of anxiety underneath it. Every decision was dependent on me. My busy-ness was a mask. Every time I had to speak up, present a roadmap, weigh in... I would panic. Not because the particular stakes were that high, but because my nervous system had stopped being able to tell the difference between a normal Tuesday morning scrum standup and facing a scrambling den of badgers.
Grind hustle culture, if you want the short version. Startups selling for millions, David Goggins, and wounds of insecurity, with and a surface-level reading of Marcus Aurelius, turned into two decades of treating an overstimulated nervous system as “the way it is.” A frantic, gnawing energy just under the surface. Not a mode to shift into when danger arises, but a permanent setting of my reality.
The collapse wasn’t dramatic
Eventually I collapsed. No headline moment. Just a slow arrival at a place where I couldn’t keep pretending the hum was normal. I had to stop and actually ask: why can’t I simply relax?
The answer wasn’t the job. The job was just the first place it became obvious. The real answer was that I’d built an entire operating system around a constantly overactivated nervous system, and I’d never once sat with the feeling of it fully off.
Except with booze.
Craft beer was my savior for a long time. I didn’t have to think, feel, or worry at all after a few drinks. 5pm, time to shut off, = beer time.
I knew from the first sip that alcohol was going to be my friend. But over time the medicine became the poison. I had to confront its role in my burnout, and it was right around then that Andrew Huberman released a multi-part podcast on the effects of alcohol. I knew it too was playing a key role in my system crash.
At first, I wanted just something to replace my weekday beers, Lacroix was good, and NA beers started to get good. but I was looking for something different.
So I went looking. Not for another type of shift, I wasn’t looking for an alcohol replacement. Kava, cannabis, those work great for a lot of people. I was looking for something that could actually support the underlying system.
I wanted something that could keep me calm in the moment, when the panic sweats show up ten minutes before a meeting. And alongside that, I was seeking support for the deeper system, mind, body, and spirit.
Herbs have always been fascinating to me. That a specific plant could contain compounds that we as chemists isolate and modify and turn into medicines gave me some permission to begin my searches there. Nervines, Adaptogens, botanicals, and plant-based ingredients. I found kanna first, from an episode of the Huberman Lab podcast in 2021. If you don’t know it, kanna, studied in all the literature under the standardized Zembrin, is a South African plant with a long history of traditional use for exactly this: taking the edge off in the moment, for better hunts and more social cohesion.
I experimented with brewed kanna tea, kept cold in pitchers in my fridge. adding different herbs to the blend, for six months, mixing with fruit juices, before I began knowing what this could become. I chose ingredients for two jobs at once: the in-the-moment shift, and the unseen work of supporting an overactive nervous system tuned to our modern day, in my perspective, one that had forgotten what “turning down” even felt like.
That’s Bodhi Bubbles
Zembrin (kanna extract), damiana, and Magnesium L-Threonate do the heavy lifting on the initial in-the-moment shift. Tulsi holy basil, gotu kola, and lion’s mane do the slower, deeper work.
It’s not an alcohol replacement. It’s not some transformation-in-a-can. What it is: fruit juice, sparkling water, and six ingredients plus pink salt, combined into one tool that helps support and regulate the system. Use it alongside the other tools, sleep, yoga, breathwork, meditation, whatever else is in your toolbox. It doesn’t replace any of them.
It just makes life a little easier to be in.
It was the lived experience for me, before I ever built a product around it.
— David
