Biohacking is one of the top buzzwords right now. People like Dave Asprey and Tim Ferriss, who through their books and podcasts shared pioneering biohacking ideas, popularized the term.
Nowadays, especially in technological circles, improving your performance is a must. When you don’t optimize your sleep, take supplements, and do specific physical exercises, you’re likely to lose your competitive edge.
As one of the writers on this blog (who spent over $200K on biohacking) said: “We are (complex) robots. Robots can be tuned and improved.”
This statement rings true for many technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, poker players, sportspersons and even students who want to increase their productivity, health and performance by the means of biohacking.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the best (and most straightforward) ideas in the biohacking department. I implemented most of them myself, and they changed my life for the better in many ways.
Simply Take a Cold Shower (Or an Ice Bath)
If you’re into biohacking at all, you must have heard about Wim Hof, also known as “The Iceman.” This modest Dutch guy holds 26 world records, including the one for the longest ice bath (1 hour and 52 minutes), climbing Mount Everest in his shorts and running a full marathon without a drop of water in the Namib Desert.
In a recent interview on “Impact Theory” by Tom Bilyeu, The Iceman said that we grossly underestimate the amount of control we can exert over our minds and bodies. He claims that by using his method, you can decrease inflammation, have more energy and never get the flu again. Besides specialized breathing techniques, he recommends taking at least one cold shower a day (and an occasional ice bath).
Photo Credit: Flickr / CC 2.0 — Wim Hof is one of the top biohackers on the planet.
Go Full Keto and Drink Coffee with Coconut Milk and MCT Oil
“Going keto” is about inverting the traditional nutritional pyramid and enjoying a diet consisting mostly of fat (70 percent), a bit of protein (25 percent) and a negligible amount of carbohydrates (5 percent). The aim is to switch your organism from carb dependency and let it get energy by consuming ketones (byproducts of breaking down fat for energy).
This type of diet has been studied extensively, as it offers many impressive health benefits. These include:
● Weight loss
● Increase in “good” cholesterol
● Reduced sugar and insulin levels in your body
● Lower blood pressure
● Increase levels of energy and mental performance
● Improvement in brain disorders, including epilepsy and Alzheimer’s
As you can imagine, there’s more to it than eating only fat. It’s about eating the right fat as well as combining the diet with intermittent fasting.
One thing that may help here is a caffeinated concoction famously developed by Dave Asprey, who dubbed it “bulletproof coffee.” Instead of eating a normal breakfast, you can blend your coffee with two tablespoons of coconut oil and one tablespoon of MCT oil (a concentrated compound derived from coconut oil). This mixture will keep you alert for hours and prevent hunger like nothing else.
Infographic Credit: Flickr / CC BY 2.0 — A quick breakdown of the foods you can eat on a ketogenic diet.
Take Care of Light and Sleep Hygiene
In today’s high-achievement-oriented culture, it’s easy to overlook sleep as a waste of valuable time. Nothing can be further from the truth. Getting seven to eight hours of bedtime is essential to mental performance.
That’s why biohackers work hard on optimizing every minute of it. Many top performers use the Oura Ring, a high-tech sleep tracking device to see how much time they slept, in which stage of sleep and how this changed over time.
Other ideas for improving your sleep include blacking out your bedroom to help you produce melatonin (the sleep hormone) and using blue-light blocking glasses. These simple glasses, which cost $20-$50, will block the blue spectrum of light emitted by LED lights and computer screens. In turn, you’ll be able to fall asleep more easily.
And when you wake up, you can turn on one of your light-therapy devices to help you wake up. There’s much more to sleep-optimization than that, but these are the basics worth keeping in mind.
Now let’s look at two examples high performers who use biohacking every day to outperform their peers. I hope their stories will inspire you to start experimenting more with your mind and body.
Jason Koon — Biohacking and $22 Million in Poker Earnings
Biohacking infiltrates all kinds of discipline, including online poker. The human brain consumes around 20 percent of all of our energy, more than any other organ, and “firing” signals throughout millions of neurons is not an easy task. The activity, especially in the prefrontal cortex is vastly increased during demanding mental tasks. That’s why many poker players look at ways they can improve their brain machinery to outwit their opponents.
One of the pioneers in this department is Jason Koon, who through his participation in live as well as online poker tournaments gathered over $22 million in earnings. He’s not even in his mid-30s yet, so he must be doing something right. Koon has been focused on maximizing his mental performance for years. In 2017, he even organized a biohacking seminar focused solely on improving the game of poker.
Rick Roll — 5 Ironman-Distance Marathons in Under One Week
Biohacking continues to permeate the world of sports, and many top athletes use it to complete extreme feats of endurance. One of them is Rich Roll, one of the top biohackers in the world, who completed the EPIC5 Challenge. It means going through a triathlon five times in under a week, hopping from one exotic island to the other.
And that’s only one of the achievements on Roll’s resume. What’s even more impressive is that he’s following a strict vegan diet, which demonstrates clearly that you must follow keto or paleo diets to reach top performance.
What are you going to do about it?
As you can see, there are many ways in which you can take your performance to the next level, with the use of biohacking. It doesn’t matter if you’re into crushing your opponents during the next bout of Texas Hold ’em, an online FPS game like Counter-Strike or a business project that’s going to change your industry: the simple tricks mentioned in this article will help you improve.
Do you have any other biohacking routines you’re using on a day-to-day basis? Please share them in the comments below.