Many of you may know me as the “ice bath guy” in Chiang Mai.

Maybe you’ve joined me for breathwork, plunged into the cold, and felt that rush of primal energy and calm.

But what you probably don’t know is why I started Zen Strength in the first place.

Truth is—it wasn’t a passion project. It was a lifeline.

Before the breathwork and biohacking, I spent over 15 years in tech—building apps, leading teams, and chasing startup dreams. I worked with giants like IBM and J.P. Morgan. From the outside, it looked like success. But on the inside, I was running on fumes.

Then my body gave me the wake-up call I couldn’t ignore.

I started having chest pains and a racing heart. I was fit, active, and relatively young—so I knew something was seriously wrong. The doctors didn’t have clear answers, and I didn’t know where to turn.

So I did what most of us do when we hit the edge: I started experimenting.

I went plant-based after watching Forks Over Knives and stuck with it for almost two years. The good news? My chest pains went away. The bad news? I was still missing something. I was losing muscle, my energy was low, and my hormones were crashing.

That’s when I discovered Dave Asprey and the Bulletproof Diet—and everything changed.

It was my introduction to biohacking: optimizing the body and mind through nutrition, fasting, light exposure, breathwork, cold therapy, and everything in between. I became my own experiment.

I dove deep into performance, resilience, and recovery—and I felt empowered again.

But while my health was improving, my business life was falling apart.

Back in the early 2010s, my software consulting business was collapsing. I wasn’t bringing in new clients, I’d taken out a loan, and I had side projects burning through cash fast. Rather than fix the business, I threw myself into another “next big thing”—my so-called Airbnb empire (a wild story for another day).

I remember hearing a question on a business podcast that stopped me in my tracks:

When is it time to throw in the towel?

That was my moment.

When I asked myself why I started that business in the first place, the answer hit hard: money.

I’d begun with passion—building a fitness app called FitDeck Mobile. But after years of chasing revenue, freelancing, and managing difficult clients, the joy was gone.

So I let it go.

And with that decision came clarity.

I realized that the same tools I’d used to rebuild my health—breathwork, biohacking, cold exposure—were exactly what I needed to rebuild my life.

That process became Zen Strength.

It’s the system that saved me. And now it’s what I teach others—how to build resilience, recover from burnout, and thrive under pressure.

Because what I’ve learned through all of this is simple:
Human performance and business performance aren’t separate. They’re the same game.

In my next post, I’ll share how these two worlds—tech and wellness—are colliding in my work today, and how that collision has become something powerful I call The Leader OS.

Stay tuned,
Jason