Most of us are very good at noticing ourselves once something has gone properly wrong.
We notice sleep when we are exhausted. We notice stress when our patience has vanished. We notice our breathing when it becomes shallow. We notice a relationship is draining us when the cup is not merely empty but lying on the floor, dented, while somebody asks whether there is any more tea.
The harder practice is noticing earlier.
That is the thread running through this episode of Sisters with Mirrors. We talk about biohacking and sleep, then move into intuition, dreams, psychic experiences, mediumship and the reversed Ace of Cups. On the surface, those subjects look as though they wandered in from completely different podcasts.
They are connected by attention.
Before we can change a habit, question an instinct, set a boundary or make sense of an unusual experience, we have to notice what is happening. Not what an app, guru or stranger on the internet says should be happening. What is actually happening in our body, mind, emotions and life.
Biohacking has an image problem
The word biohacking can sound like something that requires a private laboratory, six monitors and a billionaire’s sincere belief that death is a software bug.
The useful definition is much wider and much less dramatic.
At its core, biohacking means making intentional changes to your lifestyle, environment or body in an attempt to understand or improve how you function. It can include ordinary habits such as sleep, food, exercise, stress management and meditation. It can also include supplements, wearables, testing and interventions that are far more experimental.
That broad spectrum matters. Putting your phone away before bed and implanting technology into your body do not carry the same evidence, cost or risk just because somebody puts the same fashionable label on both. Cleveland Clinic’s overview of biohacking makes the same useful distinction: some practices are simple and evidence-based, while others remain unproven or genuinely risky.
For us, the interesting question is not how to turn a person into a machine.
It is how to become a better listener to the human being already there.
Four parts of one life
Warren describes wellbeing through four interconnected parts: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
The categories are not a scientific model. They are a practical reminder that we do not experience life in sealed compartments.
When we are physically exhausted, our mood and judgment can change. When we are emotionally overwhelmed, our habits can unravel. When our minds never receive a quiet moment, sleep can become another task we fail at. When we feel cut off from meaning, curiosity or connection, that loss can colour everything else.
This is why the promise of one perfect optimisation is so seductive. One supplement. One routine. One device. One trick that fixes the whole complicated system.
Human beings are rarely that tidy.
Sometimes the most useful change is not the most advanced one. It is the change that helps us notice how one part of life is leaning on all the others.
Start with sleep, because everything else has to
Sleep is not glamorous enough for the wellness industry. It is difficult to package as a secret when humans have been doing it for quite a while.
It is also remarkably easy to sacrifice.
We borrow from sleep to finish work, keep scrolling, catch a flight or squeeze more life into the day. Then we try to recover our concentration, patience and energy with caffeine, supplements or sheer stubbornness.
Warren’s interest in sleep became more immediate while travelling from New York through Dubai and back to Australia. Jet lag and sleep deprivation have a way of turning an abstract interest in performance into a very practical desire to know which country your brain thinks it is in.
The useful lessons were not particularly futuristic: make the bedroom properly dark, pay attention to air and breathing, and recognise that different people may naturally feel alert and tired at different times.
Popular chronotype labels — Warren identifies with the early-rising lion — can be a prompt for self-observation, not a diagnosis or a commandment. The point is not to acquire a new identity from a quiz. It is to notice when you reliably work, fade and recover, then stop treating every signal from your body as a character flaw.
There is no hack clever enough to make sleep permanently optional.
Sometimes the optimisation is going to bed.
Creatine is interesting. It is not magic.
Creatine came up repeatedly during Warren’s trip because it sits at an interesting boundary between established use and developing research.
Its role in certain kinds of high-intensity exercise is well studied. The US National Institutes of Health describes creatine as one of the most thoroughly studied supplements used for exercise and sports performance, particularly repeated short bursts of intense effort. That does not mean every claim attached to a tub of powder inherits the same quality of evidence.
Research into creatine and the brain is still developing. A 2026 systematic review of creatine during acute sleep deprivation found an encouraging trend across cognitive, psychomotor and mood outcomes, but only five studies met its criteria. The authors were clear that the evidence remains sparse and better trials are needed.
That is worth discussing. It is not the same as saying creatine prevents jet lag, replaces sleep or comes with one correct dose for every person.
We do not make those claims here, and we are not prescribing a supplement. Health conditions, medications and individual circumstances matter. Anybody considering supplementation should use credible guidance and, where appropriate, speak with a qualified health professional rather than treating a podcast as a personalised medical consultation. We are many things. Your GP is not one of them.
The larger lesson is useful well beyond creatine: emerging evidence is not the same thing as settled evidence.
Curiosity should make us more careful with that distinction, not less.
Breathwork is less about doing more
Breathing may be the least exclusive practice on Earth. No subscription required. No charging cable. No delivery window.
We usually do it without attention, which is precisely why consciously returning to it can feel so different.
Warren uses short breathwork practices when his energy drops and before moments in which he wants to feel focused and present. The value, for him, is not that breathing unlocks a superhuman setting. It interrupts the noise.
For a few minutes, the meeting disappears. The phone disappears. Yesterday and tomorrow stop shouting over one another. Attention returns to the body and to the fact of being here.
That pause is where the physical and spiritual parts of this conversation begin to meet.
Biohacking asks us to observe our inputs, patterns and responses. Intuitive practice asks us to notice impressions that are quieter, stranger and harder to measure. Neither benefits when every spare second is occupied.
You cannot hear much beneath constant noise.
Intuition does not need a movie costume
Popular culture gives psychic ability an excellent wardrobe and a fairly limited vocabulary.
Real experiences, at least as people describe them, tend to be less theatrical. An image appears in the mind. A word feels distinct from the usual internal monologue. A feeling arrives without an obvious cause. A person suddenly knows to take something, call someone or pay attention.
Spiritual traditions have names for different forms of perception: clairvoyance for seeing, clairaudience for hearing, clairsentience for feeling and claircognizance for knowing.
The labels can be useful without settling the question of what caused an experience. A vivid impression might be intuition, pattern recognition, memory, imagination, coincidence, spiritual communication or a mixture we do not yet understand.
We do not need to force certainty where certainty is not available.
The better questions are often practical ones.
What exactly did I experience?
Did I record it before later events changed my memory of it?
Does acting on it create care, clarity and proportion — or fear, dependence and chaos?
What other explanation might fit?
Being open-minded does not require becoming empty-headed. Questioning an experience does not make it meaningless. It simply gives curiosity some boundaries to work within.
Some dreams refuse to feel ordinary
Dreams make the border between imagination, memory and meaning especially slippery.
Most are gloriously unruly. A shopping centre becomes a medieval fortress. Somebody you have not seen in years is now responsible for an airport. A dragon appears and, somehow, that is not the strangest part.
Then there are dreams that feel different.
Warren remembers unusually vivid dreams involving enormous bodies of water, which he later associated with real tsunami events. DJ remembers a dream after his mother’s death that felt less like fantasy and more like a direct meeting: familiar, calm and complete in a way that was difficult to explain after waking.
Neither experience proves that consciousness travels beyond time or that the dead visit us in dreams. Reducing them to nothing but neurological static, however, can also miss their emotional importance.
Dreams can help us process grief, fear and memory. They can reveal patterns we have avoided while awake. They can give the imagination room to build symbols bigger than ordinary language. And, for some people, they can feel like contact with something beyond the self.
The honest position is not always a verdict.
Sometimes it is simply: I do not know what that was, but I know it mattered.
Evidence, memory and the temptation to improve the message
Warren’s approach to mediumship has increasingly focused on details: a private memory, an unexpected photograph, a phrase or personality trait that carries specific meaning for the person receiving it.
He describes one experience in which an image of a childhood scene came to mind while he was trying to comfort a grieving friend. The details did not mean much to him. They later meant something to her.
For Warren, moments like that are reasons to continue exploring. They are personal accounts, not controlled proof of life after death, and the difference matters.
Memory is reconstructive. People find patterns. Broad statements can feel uncannily personal. We can unconsciously offer cues, revise recollections and remember the hits more vividly than the misses. Any practice using the language of evidence should be willing to face those possibilities rather than hiding from them.
That also means resisting the urge to improve a message after it arrives.
If an impression is strange, softening it until it fits can create a better story and worse evidence. Recording the original detail, including the misses, gives us something more honest to examine.
The same discipline is useful in ordinary intuition. Write the impression down. Date it. Do not quietly rewrite it after the fact. Stay curious about both the experience and the ways a human mind can fool itself.
Wonder and scepticism are not enemies. At their best, they keep each other honest.
Openness needs boundaries
Warren refers to the spirit guides he believes support him as his team of light. His boundary is that any connection should serve his highest good and the highest good of the person involved.
Whether you understand that boundary spiritually or psychologically, its purpose is sensible: openness should not require surrendering judgment.
A reading, dream or intuitive feeling should not take control of somebody’s medical care, money, safety or major life decisions. It should not make a person dependent on the reader. It should not use grief as leverage. It should not demand that doubt be treated as a moral failure.
Useful questions remain available:
- Does this leave me clearer or more confused?
- More grounded or more afraid?
- More able to make my own decisions or more dependent on somebody else?
- Is this an invitation to reflect, or a demand to obey?
You are allowed to listen and still say no.
You are allowed to find meaning in an experience without building your entire life around it.
Opening a door does not mean removing the door from its hinges.
The reversed Ace of Cups and the problem with endless giving
The card of the week is the Ace of Cups reversed.
Upright, the Ace of Cups is commonly associated with emotional beginnings, openness, love and a cup so full that it overflows. Turn it around and the water pours out.
That image can be read as loss or blockage, but it can also ask a much better question:
What are you pouring out, and what are you pouring back into yourself?
Not everything leaving us is a tragedy. Grief needs movement. Old resentment needs somewhere to go. A habit may have served its purpose. A version of ourselves may be ready to end.
But constant giving is not the same as healthy overflow.
If a relationship, routine or responsibility only drains the cup, generosity eventually becomes depletion. If we wait until we have nothing left before noticing, we have confused self-abandonment with kindness.
The reversed cup brings us back to the same principle as sleep, breathwork and intuition: pay attention before the system reaches crisis.
Pay attention, then decide
There is a version of self-improvement that treats every signal as a defect to optimise away.
Tired? Override it.
Distracted? Add another system.
Sad? Fix it quickly.
Uncertain? Find somebody willing to sound certain on your behalf.
We are interested in something slower and more honest.
Notice the signal. Ask what it might mean. Check the evidence available. Make room for mystery without using mystery to excuse harm or nonsense. Try a change. Observe what happens. Keep your agency.
That approach works whether the subject is sleep, supplements, intuition, grief, mediumship or the relationships into which we pour our energy.
The body is speaking.
The emotions are speaking.
Our habits and relationships are speaking.
Maybe something beyond us is speaking too. We can remain open to that possibility without pretending we have proved it.
The first step is quieter than certainty.
It is attention.
Open your mind. Question everything. Step through the mirror.