What is Biohacking? 7 Biohacks to Get Started and Get Results Fast
| By Jonathan Roseland |
I'm not a doctor, medical professional, or trained therapist. I'm a researcher and pragmatic biohacking practitioner exercising free speech to share evidence as I find it. I make no claims. Please practice skepticism and rational critical thinking. You should consult a professional about any serious decisions that you might make about your health. Affiliate links in this article support Limitless Mindset - spend over $150 and you'll be eligible to join the Limitless Mindset Secret Society.
A hacker is someone who wants to gain complete control of the system they are dealing with - be it technological or social.
A biohacker, therefore, is someone who wants to gain complete control of their own biology.
We live in excitingly novel times when we have made quantum leaps in understanding, testing, and controlling our biology. At a time when many of the leading minds in medical science and technology believe that the first immortal human has already been born and you can get your personal DNA genotyped, it is not unrealistic to say that you can have total control over your biology.
Biohackers have a couple of common goals:
- Significant gains in productive energy and focus to get things done. Adding more productive hours to the day and more productivity to those hours.
- Boosting Serotonin and Dopamine, the feel-good Neurotransmitters, sustainably.
- Improving recall, accuracy, short, and long-term memory along with the learning process.
- Avoidance of chronic disease, cancer, and age-related cognitive decline.
- Training Executive Function for better discipline and self-control.
- Decreasing the quantity of sleep while increasing quality.
- Effective stress management.
- Personal experimentation, self-quantification, and measurement beyond what feels good.
- Biohacking should be high leverage: a minimum of effort, time, or money spent will yield significant results that are in some cases sustained.
- Many biohackers are also Transhumanists who have the lofty ambition of living indefinitely.
While biohackers look at the big mind-body picture and many are holistic health practitioners, there is definitely a focus on cognitive health, balancing Neurotransmitters, promoting Neuroplasticity, empowering a highly productive mindset, and strategies that are going to produce results relatively quickly.
Cost of Biohacking: As you can see below there are many highly effective biohacking activities that only cost your time (Free!) but like in the rest of life you get what you pay for. A daily investment of $2-$3 pretty standard.
Perpetually return conscious, lifehackers report an excellent ROI as biohacking usually doubles or triples their productivity at work, in business, or their careers.
Get Started! These 7 steps towards becoming a better you deliver impressive results fast, sometimes in as little as 30-60 seconds, along with positive long term effects on your mind and body:
Memory Systems
Memory systems are the original human technology. 2500 years ago orators and politicians used the loci technique for memorizing speeches; each section of the speech correlated to a room of the speaker's house. Check out this 4-part video course on how to remember people's names permanently using memory systems.
Results: Today they are still surprisingly useful for learning technical data, foreign languages, and a wide variety of social and business situations along with benefiting long-term memory, skill acquisition, minimizing absentmindedness, improved productivity, and improved social life.
Time to Results: 5-7 Days
Cost: Free
Nootropics
Or "smart drugs" are supplements that biohackers take to increase all domains of mind power, some are very powerful and scarily close to NZT-48 from the film Limitless (minus the $800 price tag and almost dying!) A Racetam supplement will kick in with a powerful productivity buzz in about 30 minutes whereas some Nutrecuiticals don't even create a noticeable effect you can feel but instead maintain the faculties of the mind. The Mind Power Marketplace on LimitlessMindset.com is a great place to start researching what Nootropics might best fit your goals.
Results: Productive energy, focus, stress management, confidence in social situations, lucid dreaming, and anti-aging properties.
Time to Results: 30-60 Minutes
Cost: $20 - $100 Monthly
Toxin-Free Coffee, MCT Oil & Intermittent Fasting
A seriously delicious synergy of toxin-free coffee and coconut-derived MCT Oil.
Intermittent fasting is the practice of going 16 hours a day without food (which might sound like an eternity to the uninitiated). The top biohackers in the world choose to skip breakfast (also a great lifehack for increasing productivity) in lieu of a cup or two of toxin-free Coffee spiked with some potent MCT Oil which (you have to try it to believe it) will put you into a higher performance ketogenic state and make you forget hunger for up to an additional 6-7 hours.
Results: As the most healthy coffee in existence, toxin-free coffee does a lot of great things for your mind and body; minimizing stress, protecting DNA from cancer-causing free radicals, and providing an abundance of antioxidants.
Time to Results: 15-30 Minutes
Cost: $20 - $50 Monthly
Dual N-Back Brain Training
A cognitive training game for Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone which increases the RAM of your conscious mind (as demonstrated by 3 major University studies) by forcing you to keep track of expanding amounts of data. You can download an unlimited demo of the Dual N-Back software here but it doesn't give you good tracking of your results and gains.
Results: The leading Dual N-Back app on the market, Dual N-Back Pro actually guarantees a 10-15 point IQ increase after 20 practice sessions, Dual N-Back training has been demonstrated in multiple studies to have transfer effects improving your problem-solving abilities and short term memory. My personal experience has been that Dual N-Back training increases will power and attentional control during times I'm cycling off Nootropics.
Time to Results: 10-14 Days
Cost: $29
Personal Genotyping
Originally sequencing the human genome took over a decade and billions of dollars, fast forward to today and you can get a profoundly informing snapshot of your own DNA in exchange for a spit sample and around $200. Personalized genetics is inevitably going to become a definitive part of modern medicare, better to get it working for you now as opposed to letting it work against you in the future.
Results: 23 and Me was, in a landmark case, muzzled by the FDA, they cannot make health recommendations based upon your genetic data. All they provide is the raw data and an ancestry report. You'll need to do some research yourself or hire a professional to help you understand your genetic data. Thanks again for all the help big government!
Why is it that some people can have three drinks a day till they are 95 yet other people doing the same thing drop dead at 45 from Esophageal Cancer? Personal Genotyping tells you exactly what diseases have the best genetic chance of killing you.
Time to Results: 2 Weeks
Cost: $199
Body Language Reprogramming
Body language auditing is for people who realize that emotion follows motion, minute by minute. Replace the following negative body language with positive:
Results: Body language is one of the domains of personal development where faking it until you make it really does work. Conscious body language management imbues a positive mindset, confidence in social situations and stress management,
Time to Results: 30-60 Seconds
Cost: Free
Meditation
For thousands of years, the art of directed thought has been recognized as a tool to build a strong mind that has the powers of focus to get things done and is impervious to distraction and negativity. You're going to want to start with 10 minutes a day and work your way up to 20 minutes daily. Meditation isn't really something you want to figure out on your own, you'll want to start with guided meditation, the smartphone app Headspace is great for this.
Mediation with the Heartmath emWave2 takes this to the next level; a device for training heart rate variability. Your state of mind (whether it's stress, excitement, or focus) is tied directly to the variability of your heartbeats. The emWave2 provides you direct feedback on your heart rate variability so you can train yourself to physiologically change your state to meet whatever life demands.
Results: Heart rate variability is one of the strongest correlates between heart function and mindset. confidence in social situations, stress management, anti-aging. Meditation practice is a long-term Biohack, doing it won't change your mindset much by tomorrow or next week, but done consistently it will make you a much cooler cat 2 years from now.
Time to Results: 10 Sessions
Cost: Free
Diet Hacking
Bruce Lee said:
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."
As hard as it may be to get rid of sugar, wheat products (especially white bread), gluten, corn syrup, and high-fructose corn syrup, and processed carbs. Download the Limitless Mindset Brain Power Diet Guide for more specific information.
Results: Hacking away (removing) the elements from your diet that poison your brain with micro neurotoxins, fog your mind, and put your body through blood sugar crashes will make you feel happier, more energetic, sleep better, the list of benefits goes on.
Time to Results: 1-2 Weeks
Cost: Free to +$200/monthly. I start with free because strictly following a simple brain power diet saves me quite a bit of money. The cornerstone of my diet is a daily coconut, which costs about a dollar and is an excellent source of fat that powers my limitless lifestyle for 5-10 hours. Although, a proper organic diet can become quite expensive if you're doing all your shopping at whole foods or eating out at organic restaurants several times a week.
Time Commitment
A fair warning, feeling great while being more productive has lead many biohackers down an obsessive path of self-improvement and experimentation that can be time-consuming. However, your initial time commitment depends on how aggressive you are with your biohacking...
- Taking Nootropic supplements: a few extra moments to take some capsules in the morning.
- Toxin-Free Coffee & Intermittent Fasting: Making the coffee blend in the morning takes 3-5 minutes, however skipping breakfast can save anywhere from 5-30 minutes.
- Memory Systems Training: In the beginning, you will have to devote 5-15 minutes daily to creating associations but after a few weeks they will become automatic and hardly take time or effort to come up with. I prefer to practice memory systems by learning foreign language vocabulary, which I spend 15-20 minutes a day doing. Once you start using memory systems you realize how much time you used to waste with moments of human absentmindedness. Ready to try it out? Start with this 3-hour audio course on memory systems.
- Cognitive training regiment 30 minutes daily: 20 minutes meditating + 10 minutes on Dual N-Back or emWave2
A net time gain:
It's really important to note that for the majority or biohackers these activities result in a net time gain as opposed to net time cost. Why? Biohacking decreases the quantity of your sleep thereby increasing the number of productive working hours you have in a day to accomplish your goals. A nice side effect of enhanced cognition is that you will find yourself streamlining your day and removing inefficiencies that cost you time.
Finally...
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