Before You Start Biohacking...Set The Foundation for Success...
Every day people in my Facebook Group (Biohacking Superhuman Performance) reach out, asking about peptides and other biohacks to solve a health issue. My answer is almost always the same: are you addressing the foundation of the issue first? While peptides and biohacks can often give you an edge and help you overcome healing hurdles, you have got to do the work if you’re going to get optimal results —sadly, there’s just no way around it. The following foundations are critical for performance, health optimization, and longevity in ways that biohacking simply cannot replace.
Test, Don’t Guess
Biohacking takes into account individuality—this is the basic premise that everybody is different and what works for your BFF might not work for you. To know if something is working, track your results. Get ready to measure, journal, and quantify. Whenever you try anything new, be open to the possibility that it may or may not work for you. You are as unique as a snowflake, and hence, so are your results.
In my practice, I require all of my clients to have a biometrics tracker such as Oura ring, Biostrap, or Garmin. I also use lab tests such as bloodwork, gut, genetic, and hormone tests to create their health snapshot. To optimize diet, it is important to track both the input using tools like Cronometer and the output with labs and biometrics. Collect data at your baseline and again once you make changes, so you know if those changes take you in the right direction.
I integrate all of these pieces of data as an epigenetics-based health optimizer. Look at your genes to understand what your genetic tendencies are. Your genes are set in stone, but it is epigenetics that decide how and if those genes manifest. Epigenetics can be both internal and external environmental factors—your lifestyle, nutrition, microbiome, stress levels, exposure to nature, and toxins...all of these influence your genetic expression. By coordinating your genes with your labs, symptoms, and history, we can understand your current epigenetic state. Symptoms are due to your epigenetics, which are strongly influenced by the four foundation factors in this article. Taking all of this into account, I devise a targeted and personalized protocol to shift your epigenetic state towards the outcome you desire..
One Change at a Time
Your body is a perpetual science experiment. If you truly want to find out what works for you, commit to trying only one thing at a time. It may take longer but be patient because in the long run, this will save you a lot of time and money. This applies to anything new that you introduce, from lifestyle interventions to supplements and peptides. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is introducing a bunch of new things at once—it makes it virtually impossible to know what’s doing what or what you are reacting to. After all, how you feel is the cumulative effect of everything you put into your body. Remember to take one step at a time, while remaining curious and open.
Optimal Health and Performance Foundations
1) Sleep and circadian rhythm
Sleep and circadian rhythm are two of the most important things for optimal health. Whether you are working on brain fog, fatigue, weight loss, hormone imbalances, or anti-aging, getting enough high-quality sleep is essential.
It is important to emphasize quality over quantity here. High quality sleep means you fall asleep within 15-20 minutes, go through the four phases of sleep easily, and also get enough deep and rapid eye movement (REM). Ideally, you have few, if any, disruptions in your sleep (1,2). Subjective measures of sleep quality include whether you need an alarm clock to wake up and how much energy you have in the morning. It goes without saying that people find that they feel much better waking up from a shorter night of high-quality sleep than from a long night of poor-quality sleep. That said, the general rule of thumb is that most people need around 6.5 -7.5 hours of sleep each night to perform their best.
To optimize sleep quality, it’s important to reduce exposure to blue light in the evening and take the time to wind down before bed. My sleep article includes many sleep tips to help you optimize your sleep.
Deep sleep is the most physically refreshing sleep (3), which tends to be the first thing to go if your sleep habits are suboptimal. Too much blue light exposure before bed or eating too late can disrupt your circadian rhythm, reducing deep sleep. Also, caffeine too late in the day blocks adenosine receptors, which can inhibit sleep drive and reduce deep sleep, even if you can fall asleep just fine.
Nowadays, you can easily and objectively monitor your sleep and morning heart rate variability (a measure of stress level and restfulness) with a device like the Oura ring. In the morning, your data uploads to an app on your smartphone, giving you valuable feedback on how effective your sleep improvement hacks were in positively affecting your sleep quality and recovery.
If you find that you wake up often or if you know that you snore at night, it might be time to speak to your doctor about getting screened for sleep disorders.
2) Stress
Chronic mismanaged stress, or a hyper-activated stress response, can be your kryptonite. Just like poor sleep, this can contribute to hormone imbalances, gut problems, chronic pain, and weight gain (plus make a mess of your sleep)
Aside from day to day stressors, I see many people who develop health problems within a year or two of a major stressful life event—a direct effect of the toll that extreme stress can take on our immune system and physiology (4).
In addition, research now shows that childhood and transgenerational traumas (ie traumatic events sustained by a parent can be passed down to their unborn children) can cause a hyper-activated stress response that can significantly contribute to health issues (5,6).
The good news is that we now have many options to tone down the stress response. Much of this has to do with how you perceive stress in the first place. Studies have shown that an individual’s perception of their stress is more impactful than the actual level of stress they are experiencing—reframing our stress as a positive or even neutral force can greatly modify the impact it has on our mental and physiological response to it (7).
Other great tools for dealing with stress include meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, and neurofeedback - all of these can ultimately increase your stress resilience and help you balance your nervous system even in the face of difficult situations.
3) Nutrition
We all know that for our body to work well we have to eat right, the tricky bit is that there is no one diet for everyone although there are universal truths, such as:
The importance of following a low glycemic diet to minimize spikes in glucose and insulin which have been shown to be extremely harmful to health (8)
Eating sufficient protein (roughly 1gram/lb of ideal weight), especially as we age, to ensure we maintain and build muscle mass to support metabolic, cognitive and physical vitality for the long term
The absolute necessity of consuming sufficient healthy fats to fuel energy, brain, and cellular function
Avoiding processed foods and excessive sugar.
That said, there are nuances that can be gleaned from your genomic blueprint to help to tailor what this will look like for you so that you can adopt the diet that enables you to thrive, be it Paleo, Keto, Carnivore, Mediterranean, or some combination of these. Your genetics and epigenetics have a big influence on what macronutrients and micronutrients your body needs right now, but the real magic happens when you layer this information with your lifestyle and current health status.
For example, your genes might say you have a high risk for insulin resistance and hence to limit carbohydrate consumption, but if you are athletic, you may paradoxically thrive with more carbohydrates in your diet than you might think and be able to offset that tendency. That said, if you get injured or go through a period of forced inactivity, knowing this, you would titrate your carbs down temporarily and save yourself the misery of packing on excess weight and the accompanying metabolic disruption.
4) Movement, Posture, and Exercise.
When I say movement, you might think exercise. But movement and exercise are not the same. The human body was designed to move throughout the day, not to sit in a chair for hours on end. Getting enough movement in your day is vital for all aspects of health, from proper blood flow to getting enough oxygen to your brain (9).
A detail that often flies under the radar (especially for people who have jobs requiring them to sit for long periods of time) is posture—your posture affects your mental state, cognitive function, and your internal organs (10,11,12). Poor posture and lack of movement won’t only cause pain but also lead to suboptimal health.
Exercise is also vital to optimize energy, sleep, metabolic health, and, of course, body composition. A properly constructed program can help you achieve these goals without requiring you to spend hours a day at the gym—HIIT training, smart resistance training...all of these can be done in less than an hour and yield the results you are after. But remember that studies have also shown that exercising for one hour every day does not mitigate the harm of being sedentary all day (13).....so you need both.
The good news is that once you are aware of these, you can build a routine around it. Use a standing or treadmill desk. Take walking or movement breaks throughout the day. Build short exercise breaks (20 squats, 10 jumping jacks into your workday). Get regular bodywork like massages to relax and ensure good quality movement. It won’t take long to experience the benefits of these on your health metrics, cognitive function, sleep quality, stress levels, and energy.
The Dynamic Picture
Your needs for sleep, stress management, nutrition, and exercise will change as you age, and your lifestyle and health status evolve. Time of the year may even influence them. You may need more sleep, more vitamin D, and less carbohydrates during the colder months, for example. It is crucial to remember that remaining flexible and open to change over months and years is the ultimate secret to success. Our bodies are ultimately masters of adaptation—so doing the same things year after year is unlikely to keep generating the same results. The secret sauce is mixing things up with clarity and intention—whether you are working with a coach or keeping track of your own shifts in state and performance, know that keeping things fresh and changing your routines based on your goals and results is the key to success.
Other Biohacks
These other biohacks work as hormesis—the low-dose stressors that make you stronger. They have anti-aging properties. Applied properly, they can and will improve your health, sleep, stress resilience, energy, and overall performance.
Fasting (both intermittent and longer term)
Photobiomodulation (red and near infrared)
Infrared sauna or heat exposure
Cold therapy
Herbal supplements
Breathwork
These biohacks act as natural signaling molecules that are normally present in your body. But at higher doses, they can be leveraged to support your health goals or push past a healing obstacle.
Molecular hydrogen
Peptides
Oxygen therapy
Brown’s Gas
Nutritional supplements and neurotransmitter-increasing nootropics
Pulsed electromagnetic frequency (PEMF), Float Chambers, Vibration Plates and other interventional therapies can also promote a healing state in your cells and tissues.
Yet another category of biohacks, such as electromagnetic field (EMF) modulators and blue light blockers, also help shield you from the harmful effects of modern lifestyle things.
This covers the foundations of what I think biohacking should entail and how I guide my clients on their journey to optimal health and performance. This is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a pretty good start. Start with the basics. Track and collect data as much as possible. Commit to changing one thing at a time, adjust the dosages accordingly. Know that not everything is going to work for you, in the end, your results are going to be the combined effects of your genes, your epigenetics, your lifestyle choices, and of course, biohacks.