Transcript
In the current biohacking era, people are increasingly encouraged to believe that almost every human problem has a biological shortcut. Struggling with sleep? There’s a supplement, wearable, or peptide for that. Low energy? There’s a protocol for that too. Need to concentrate better, recover faster, feel calmer, or optimise your mood? The market offers another stack, injection, or routine promising control over the body and brain.
The term “Biohacking” means using biological, behavioural, or technological interventions to alter the body or brain, often with the aim of improving mood, cognition, performance, or social behaviour. This raises a natural question, if we can try to biohack sleep, energy, concentration and mood, can someone also biohack their way into becoming a nicer person?
For this article, I’m focusing on people with strong narcissistic traits rather than using the word “narcissist” to diagnose every selfish or arrogant person. By narcissistic traits, I mean patterns such as entitlement, grandiosity, a need for admiration, difficulty accepting criticism, exploitation of others, and a lack of concern for how one’s behaviour affects people around them. Most of us have probably come across someone like this at least once: someone self-centred, attention-seeking, easily offended, or seemingly uninterested in other people’s feelings. Obviously, I’m already a nice person, so this is purely research for me, but what about people who are not so nice? Could someone with narcissistic traits biologically alter themselves into becoming kinder?
(Important note; This is different from narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD, which is a more severe and persistent clinical condition. The American Psychiatric Association describes NPD as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and appearing across different contexts. Its diagnostic criteria include grandiose self-importance, fantasies of unlimited success or power, belief in being special, excessive need for admiration, entitlement, exploitation, lack of empathy, envy, and arrogant behaviour)
At first, the idea of biohacking narcissism seems plausible. If hormones and neurochemicals influence bonding, trust, reward, stress and empathy, then perhaps altering those systems could make a narcissistic person warmer, more compassionate, or less self-centred. The most obvious candidate is oxytocin, a hormone and neuropeptide often called the “love hormone” or “bonding hormone” because it’s involved in childbirth, lactation, bonding and aspects of social behaviour.
Narcissism isn’t caused by an oxytocin deficiency alone. That would be far too simple. However, research suggests that narcissistic traits may involve altered oxytocin-related bonding, empathy, self-other processing and social reward responses. This is important because NPD is partly defined by disturbed interpersonal behaviour: lack of empathy, exploitation, entitlement, admiration-seeking, and problems recognising or caring about other people’s needs.
The empathy issue is especially relevant. People with narcissistic personality disorder are often described as lacking empathy, but the research is more complicated than that. A review in Frontiers in Psychiatry argues that empathy isn’t a single ability. It can be divided into cognitive empathy, which means understanding what another person is feeling, and affective empathy, which means emotionally resonating with that person. In NPD, affective empathy appears more impaired, while cognitive empathy may be partly preserved. This means a narcissistic person may understand what someone else feels without being emotionally moved by it in a caring way.
This is where oxytocin becomes relevant. Oxytocin is involved in social bonding and social responsiveness, and genetic research suggests that variation in the oxytocin receptor gene, OXTR, is linked to individual differences in sociality. A meta-analysis of the OXTR rs53576 polymorphism found a small but significant association with general sociality, although the authors also noted that results across the wider literature have been inconsistent.
There is also some direct, but limited, evidence connecting oxytocin with narcissistic-style traits. A small double-blind pilot study of postnatally depressed mothers found that mothers who received intranasal oxytocin alongside short-term psychotherapy showed a decrease in narcissistic attitudes compared with those receiving psychotherapy and placebo. The authors suggested that oxytocin may have reduced the self-centred dimension of distress in this specific group. However, this wasn’t a trial of diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder, so it can’t be used to claim that oxytocin treats narcissism generally.
Another small study, published as a Research Square preprint, examined Dark Triad traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. It found that narcissism moderated the oxytocin response after a competitive group problem-solving task, suggesting that people higher in narcissistic traits may show a different oxytocin response to team success or social reward. This supports the idea of altered oxytocin responsiveness rather than a simple “low oxytocin equals narcissism” model. But the study had only 34 participants and was a preprint, so it should be treated as early evidence rather than settled science.
Some recent reviews and grey-literature sources also describe narcissism as involving altered oxytocin and vasopressin functioning, but these need to be handled carefully. For example, a 2025 PsychArchives item states that hormonal investigations reveal altered oxytocin and vasopressin functioning in narcissism, but the same record lists its review status as not reviewed, so it shouldn’t carry the main weight of the argument. It can support the idea that researchers are discussing this link, but it shouldn’t be treated as stronger than peer-reviewed evidence.
The key point is that “altered oxytocin” doesn’t necessarily mean “not enough oxytocin.” It could mean differences in oxytocin release, receptor sensitivity, oxytocin receptor genes, response to social reward, or interaction with other systems such as cortisol, dopamine and vasopressin. This makes oxytocin relevant to narcissistic behaviour, but it also makes it a poor candidate for a simple biohack.
The biggest problem with oxytocin as a “make me nicer” chemical is that its effects are context-dependent. Early research found that intranasal oxytocin increased trust in a financial trust game, which helped create the popular idea of oxytocin as a prosocial hormone. However, later research complicated this picture. The social salience hypothesis argues that oxytocin increases the importance of social cues rather than simply making people kinder. It can influence empathy, trust, in-group preference and memory for socially relevant information, but the direction of the effect depends on the person and the situation.
This is why oxytocin is sometimes described as a double-edged sword. In safe, cooperative contexts, it may encourage bonding, trust and emotional connection. In competitive or threatening contexts, it may strengthen defensiveness, envy, suspicion, or in-group favouritism. One influential study found that oxytocin promoted human ethnocentrism by increasing in-group favouritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. This matters for narcissism because a narcissistic person may not interpret social situations in a warm, secure, cooperative way. If someone already sees relationships through competition, status, shame, admiration or threat, oxytocin might intensify social sensitivity without necessarily creating kindness.
The problem may not be a missing chemical, but a learned pattern
However, if a narcissistic person can change biologically, it’s unlikely to happen through a quick chemical shortcut. A more realistic mechanism is neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change its structure, function and connections in response to repeated experience. In other words, the brain doesn’t stay fixed; it adapts to what a person repeatedly practises.
This matters because narcissistic behaviour isn’t only about oxytocin or any single hormone. It also involves repeated patterns of attention, defence and reaction: protecting the ego, avoiding shame, seeking admiration, dismissing criticism, and failing to emotionally register other people’s pain. Brain-imaging research gives some support to this biological angle. One study found that patients with narcissistic personality disorder had reduced grey matter volume in the left anterior insula, a brain region linked with emotional empathy. The researchers also found that grey matter volume in this region was positively associated with emotional empathy, suggesting a possible biological link between narcissism and reduced emotional resonance with others.
This doesn’t mean a narcissistic person is biologically doomed. If repeated behaviour can strengthen certain patterns, then repeated new behaviour may also strengthen different ones. Therapy, perspective-taking, emotional regulation, accountability and compassion practice can all be understood as forms of behavioural training. Over time, practising these skills may help build more automatic habits of empathy and self-control. Reviews of psychotherapy and neuroplasticity argue that psychotherapy can influence the brain by using repeated emotional and interpersonal experiences to promote neural change.
But this is where the main obstacle appears: the person has to want to change. Narcissistic traits often protect a person from admitting fault. Grandiosity, defensiveness and projection can make criticism feel like an attack rather than useful feedback. This creates a paradox. The people who may most need to become more self-aware are often the least likely to believe they have a problem. Harvard Health notes that many people with NPD don’t think anything is wrong with them and often seek treatment for other issues, such as depression or substance use, rather than for narcissism itself. Clinical literature also describes treatment challenges in NPD, including ambivalence about change, cognitive distortions, help-rejecting behaviour and difficulties in the therapeutic relationship.
So the answer to my original question is yes, but only indirectly. A person with narcissistic traits probably can’t biohack themselves into kindness just by taking oxytocin, a peptide, or a supplement. Oxytocin may influence bonding, empathy and social reward, but narcissistic behaviour isn’t a simple chemical shortage. It’s a learned and protective pattern involving self-esteem regulation, entitlement, shame, admiration-seeking, emotional avoidance, poor affective empathy and repeated interpersonal habits.
The more realistic route is neuroplasticity. If someone becomes genuinely motivated to change, repeated psychological work, such as therapy, accountability, perspective-taking, emotional regulation and compassion practice, may gradually alter the biological patterns that support their behaviour. This is where the “wanting to” paradox becomes important: narcissistic traits can make change difficult because grandiosity, defensiveness and projection may protect the person from admitting they have a problem in the first place.
Final Thought
Biohacking may support the conditions for change. Better sleep, stress reduction, exercise, mindfulness and healthier relationships may make someone calmer, less reactive and more capable of empathy. But there’s no strong evidence that oxytocin, peptides, supplements or any single biological intervention can directly turn a narcissistic person into a nicer one. At best, biology can make change easier. It can’t do the moral work for them. The most powerful “biohack” may not be a substance at all, but sustained self-awareness and repeated practice in seeing other people as fully real human beings with feelings.
Comments