Everybody Has a “Stack” Now

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 Valley’s 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 there’s 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 user’s personal information and intended goals.

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 McGwire’s 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 company’s marketing manager—located not in Silicon Valley but Long Island—said 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.

Nootropics—which Holmer says is a “meaningless term”—resonated 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 stack—steroids—as a way to bolster his credibility to spin a different “ancestral” stack—desiccated 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, there’s not a lot of evidence to support that, he said. “But I think that’s 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. He’s 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 it’s 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 doesn’t see stacks as something the marketing department whipped up from thin air. “Marketing doesn’t create markets from scratch,” she explained. Instead, it must tap into existing needs. We’ve been told for decades that health is an individual responsibility and consumer choice, and we’ve 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 there’s no pesky doctor or FDA required.

It’s worth remembering that a stack is a very small piece of a much bigger puzzle. If you’re 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, it’s only as good as its components, and the fundamentals matter much more than anything that comes in a bottle.