5 Advanced Biohacking Techniques

Now that you have mastered the basic steps in biohacking it’s time to amp it up. There are truly endless possibilities when it comes to biohacking. This is because biohacking involves making daily changes that improve your wellbeing by doing whatever needs to be done to get to reach your ideal health and performance goals. The following five biohacking techniques to advance your journey will help get you on track.

 

Get a Blood Test 

 

Getting blood tests is essential to biohacking. It is the best way to know what is truly going on in your body before your body even has a chance to inform you that there is something wrong. Blood tests help identify the areas you need to improve from getting enough vitamins to managing your cholesterol to improving overall organ function. Each year you should test your blood sugar levels, cholesterol, vitamin levels and get a complete blood count. Notice any areas that are not in the optimal range then improve them by changing your diet and by adding supplements when needed. 

 

Advance Your Nutrition 

 

Advance your nutrition by starting the elimination process. Do not make the mistake of eliminating everything from your diet all at once though. Start with one area and work your way through each day or each week. This way you are sure to accomplish your goals. Plus, it makes it easier in the long run to make slower changes. A good place to start is by eliminating sugary drinks. Once you are feeling really encouraged drop sugar all together. Eventually, you will want to eliminate sugar, processed foods, and unhealthy fats. You can do this by replacing them with healthy fats, two servings of fruit, grass-fed, antibiotic free proteins and vast quantities of vegetables. 

 

Get Outside

 

Getting outside and embracing Mother Nature is a great way to improve your mood, health, and overall well-being. This is because it forces you to get moving and soak up vitamin D from the sun. Vitamin D is essential for optimal bone growth. Vitamin D deficiency is linked to breast cancer, obesity, depression, andcardiovascular disease. Studies have shown that vitamin D deficiencies are becoming very common due to people being indoors more. The best way to get Vitamin D is from the sun. Start by getting at least fifteen minutes of sun a day. Use this time to go for a walk and avoid sitting down. According to a study by Harvard Medical School, being too sedentary is linked to early death. May as well get moving while you’re soaking up those rays.

 

Meditate 

 

Free your mind of stress by starting your day off with meditation. Find a quiet place to sit and close your eyes. The way you choose to meditate is up to you. You can let your thoughts run free or focus on your breathing. The goal of meditation is to find your inner calm and silence your mind from everyday stress and concerns so that you can go about your day in a positive frame of mind. Start with five minutes a day and see how it improves your daily life. Find a balance that you feel is optimal. Meditation hacks your brain and can lead to increased productivity, reduced stress, and even help curb unwanted cravings. 

 

Boost Your Exercise Routine

 

Now that you have tracked your daily exercise it's time to boost it up a bit.  Find areas that you feel that you are slacking in and implement new exercises to improve those areas. The best way to biohack your exercise routine is to do high-intensity interval training or HIIT. HIIT improves muscle tone and helps improve brain function at the same time. 

 

HIIT is simply alternating bursts of vigorous exercise with a short active rest period. For example, a high-intensity interval training routine could be one minute of sprinting with thirty seconds of walking or one minute of jumping jacks with a thirty-second walk to rest. 

Keep these techniques in mind throughout your journey. These advanced biohacking techniques will lead you to overall greater health with a better attitude and more productivity in your life. 

 

4 Simple Ways to Get Started With Biohacking

Do you have a desire to improve your overall health? Mind, body, and soul? Then biohacking is exactly what you need. Biohacking is making and experimenting with different changes to reach optimal health. The goal with biohacking is to have the increased energy while improving your productivity so that you can be your best self. 

Although it may sound complicated, it’s quite easy to get started. Here are four simple ways to get started with biohacking.

 

Identify Areas That Need Improvement

 

The very first thing you need to is to identify the areas you feel you need to improve. Do you feel like you get enough sleep every day? Do you need to lose a few pounds? Or maybe you just need better time management skills at work or with your social life. Whatever it may be, take a mental note or write it down. This way you know where to start and it won’t seem so overwhelming. The great thing about biohacking is that it is all about your individual path to overall wellbeing; no one else’s. 

 

Track Your Sleep

 

Just like most people in the world, more than likely you are not getting enough sleep. Sleep is one of the most important things for optimal health. Poor sleep can wreak havoc on your immune system and cause unneeded stress and anxiety. Not getting enough sleep can also lead to making poor decisions when it comes to diet and exercise. Lack of sleep is also linked to mental fog and underperformance. Studies show that lack of sleep increases your chances of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and depression. 

 

Track your sleep each night and make sure you get at least eight hours every night. Just remember, if you still don’t feel like you are getting enough with eight hours you can increase it until it works for you. Always keep track so you know exactly how much sleep you are getting each night so that you are aware if you need to improve or not. A great way to stay on track is to use a Fitbit.

 

Track Your Diet

 

Chances are high that there are areas that you need to improve when it comes to your diet. Before you do anything major, write down in a journal or download an app on your phone, like MyFitnessPal, to track your diet each day. Do this for about a week so you know exactly what areas you need to attack first. While you track your diet take notice of any negative reactions experienced from the foods you are eating. Maybe you have sensitivities to foods you are not aware of. Take note so you can rid these foods from your diet first. 

 

Ultimately, you will need to eliminate from your diet sugars, processed foods, and any foods that are causing sensitivities. A diet high in veggies, healthy fats, and quality protein is your best choice. Dave Asprey, the founder of bulletproof coffee, raves about biohacking and created a great diet plan to follow called the Bulletproof Diet. 

 

Track Your Exercise

 

Take notice of how much exercise you are currently getting each week. Invest in a Fitbit or tracker so you can track your steps and the overall number of calories you are burning each week. You maybe be surprised that you don’t get enough exercise each day. Exercise is known to increase energy, promote better sleep, increases your confidence and self-esteem. Exercise also contributes to weight control and prolongs your lifespan. Once you have a general idea of what your daily activity is going to be, find areas that you feel will be easy to improve first such as getting 15,000 steps in each day.

 

Take these four simple steps and to get started with biohacking and improving your quality of life. As you can see, the term may sound overwhelming, but biohacking is actually very simple when you break it down and start slow. Track your sleep, diet, and exercise and use that information to improve your quality of life and your journey to overall wellbeing. 

 

3 Ways to Make Sure You Get All the Sleep Your Brain Needs to Stay Healthy

It seems like insomnia is a modern epidemic. Whether you deal with insomnia or you are chronically sleep-deprived, it’s likely that poor sleep is affecting your performance.

 

Sleep deprivation feels terrible. You will have noticed that if you’ve had a bad night’s sleep, you feel sluggish, heavy, and slow, as though you’re trying to walk through syrup. You’re clumsy and confused, you drop things, and nothing seems to go right.

 

As well as making you feel bad, a chronic lack of sleep can have physical effects on your brain. Sleep deprivation impairs your ability to process and store memories and can even increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Two proteins associated with Alzheimer's, beta amyloid, and the tau protein, increase with chronic poor sleep. There is some evidence in laboratory tests on mice that sleep helps to clear these proteins from the brain. 

 

The good news is that there are things you can do to improve your sleep health to keep your brain in tip-top shape.

 

1. Find Out Your Own Best Sleep Levels

 

Everyone has their own individual sleep needs. Famously, British politicians Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher needed very little sleep, but only getting four or five hours a night is not recommended for most people. Whether you need seven hours or ten, find out what is enough sleep for you. 

 

Enough sleep means waking up without needing an alarm, feeling rested and energetic, and not needing coffee to get you through the day. 

 

2. Improve your Sleep Hygiene

 

Studies have shown that the hour or two before bedtime has a powerful effect on the quality of your sleep. Schedule in some proper downtime, and stop using blue light-emitting devices like smartphones, computers, tablets, and television an hour or so before you plan to go to bed. Read a book, take a relaxing bath, or listen to calming music—or all three—instead. 

 

3. Don’t Lie There Trying to Sleep

 

If you can’t sleep after ten minutes, get out of bed and do something else. Lying in bed, getting stressed because you can’t sleep is a recipe for poor sleep and insomnia. You’re also likely to start brooding, mulling over problems or running over the events of the day. 

 

Get up do something relaxing like reading or meditating until you feel sleepy. It’s okay to do this more than once, even multiple times. You’re trying to train your brain to think of bed as a sleeping place, not a thinking place. 

 

Improving your sleep will help you to feel calmer, be more productive, and may lower your risk of Alzheimer’s later in life. 

 

5 Tips on How to Manage Your Energy Levels

The varying degrees of your energy level can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Sometimes you have to have the energy to complete a task or activity and other times you seem to have the most energy when you’re trying to relax. If you can learn how to manage your energy levels effectively, you can move ahead rather than lag behind.

 

Here are some tips about how to manage your energy levels so that you’re ready for anything – any time.

 

1.  Determine the times you’re most energetic. Some people are more energetic in the mornings and others are night owls. You should be able to determine from past experience which time of day you get more done. Those are the times you should schedule the most harrowing or mind bending of tasks.

2.  Identify what drains you of your energy. Be honest about this assessment. When you know which obstacles and situations keep you from being the best you can be, you can do what it takes to minimize them or eradicate them from your life.

3.  When you do have energy is it negative or positive? If you have lots of energy, but your output is all about negativity, you are likely in a constant reactive mode rather than a positive, active mode. Negative, but energetic people never seem to have enough time to get things done.

4.  Use your energy to make headway, not merely survive. We all have increasing demands on our time. The way that we meet it determines whether we go through life just barely getting by or having the energy to advance. Quit rushing through in survival mode simply to get things done. Choose performance over immediate solutions.

5.  Be consistent in the way you handle situations. When you experience energy highs and lows, you may find yourself reacting to situations according to your energy level. If you’re energetic, you can be positive, but if you’re lethargic you could react in a totally negative manner. Try to be consistent in your reactions and it will help your energy levels to be consistent.

 

Thomas Leonard, a highly successful financial planner and business entrepreneur says that time is an illusion – “There’s no such thing as time management. There’s only activity management in the time we’re given.” How much activity you get done in that allotted time is directly responsible for how energetic you are.

 

Make your activities into priorities according to your energy level. Performing low-energy tasks at times when you’re least energetic and high-energy tasks at times when your energy level is highest can help you meet all the demands and expectations and still have time to relax and enjoy life.

 

Energy Management vs. Time Management

You’ve likely heard the old adage, “Life is a marathon, not a sprint.” If you’re trying to manage your time effectively without paying attention to your energy management, you may end up with sprints rather than finishing the marathon of life.

 

Experts are now saying that productivity and success have more to do with how you manage your energy than it does with time management. As business entrepreneurs, we often try to do everything that gives us more time.

 

Eating healthy, staying fit, spending time with our children and connecting with others all take time and we do have to schedule some of our pursuits. Whether we have the energy for those pursuits is a problem that’s often overlooked.

 

Trying to adhere to certain times to manage everything can leave us all exhausted so that we’re not even able to relax and enjoy ourselves when we’ve “scheduled the time” for it.

 

The alternative to managing your time is to manage your energy effectively. It works by taking time for recovering from those lengthy sprints you take so you can finish the marathon with ease rather than anguish.

 

Here are some tips for managing your energy effectively:

 

·    List how you like to rejuvenate yourself. Make a list of what makes you feel refreshed, more creative and lifts your mood. Writing them down will help to remind you about the benefits of these uplifting activities. For example, watching a great series or show you’re following on television, sipping a cup of tea and listening to music can be very rejuvenating to your energy levels.

·    Double the time you usually take for breaks. Don’t stick to a time table when it comes to reviving your energy level. Take an hour rather than half an hour and have fun with whatever you’re doing.

·    Reward yourself for every goal reached. Do you have lots of projects and it seems you’ll never finish them to be able to relax and enjoy yourself. Break those projects down into parts and reward yourself after you complete each one – rather than waiting until the entire project is finished.

·    Make frequent recovery stops. While you’re on that mile-long sprint, you may feel the need to stop and renew your spirits and your energy. Do it! You’ll feel so much more like completing the marathon and you’ll be happier at the finish line.

 

Managing your energy is a much more effective way to get through life rather than putting time limits and making schedules for everything. Your inner energy thermostat doesn’t pay any attention to the time table you’ve created. Instead, make your energy the most important factor in the long marathon you’re up against. 

 

Enjoy Good Health by Managing Your Energy

When you’re not managing your energy properly, you’re likely to experience emotions such as anger, frustration, exhaustion and other emotions that can compromise your health.

 

When you know how to manage your energy and enjoy an abundance of it your emotions will be connected, passionate, peaceful and positive. The outlook you get when you have energy to be productive and enjoy life can make a world of difference in your present and future health.

 

There never seems to be enough time to get things done, so we exist by multi-tasking on the run. For example, you may be eating a sandwich, driving a car and talking on the telephone all at once at any given time of the day. You may have gotten done what you had on your ‘list’, but you’re probably exhausted at the end of the day.

 

Personal energy management techniques can help produce a more natural energy and one that’s healthier for you. When you focus on the physical ways to produce energy, it serves you better than trying to get things done using ways that leave you mentally and physically depleted. 

 

Here are some simple ways to enjoy better health by managing your personal energy:

 

1.  Get rid of energy drainers. An energy drainer might be in the form of a person or a task. Assess the people around you and distance yourself from those who leave you exhausted when you leave their presence.

2.  Dance. Take a lesion from children -- move your body to some funky rhythms and reenergize your body and mind. Just a few minutes of dancing around the room will give you some much needed positive energy.

3.  Learn and practice a ‘healing’ art. Energy healing sessions such as Tai Chi and Reiki are especially great for renewing the energy levels of your mind, body and spirit so that you feel better and enjoy a healthier lifestyle.

4.  Discover what makes you happy. You may not be able to do what makes you happy 24/7, but you can rejuvenate your body and mind by engaging in those activities on a regular basis. You may enjoy crafts, cooking, reading, watching or playing sports. Do what makes you happy and enjoy better health.

5.  Nourish your spiritual side. Take some time out of every day to nourish your spirit by a number of ways. You can commune with nature by gardening or walking or even just sitting in a garden listening to the sounds of nature. Take time to meditate and search through your soul until you feel rejuvenated.

 

Many times, we forget that keeping healthy isn’t just about diet and exercise. A positive outlook and surrounding ourselves with positive energy by managing our energy wisely can do wonders for our health.

 

Make Optimum Utilization of Time

Let’s say that you’re an entrepreneurial app developer. You’ve released apps in the past that have been highly successful, as well as a few duds. Now it’s time to work on your next project.

 

Problem is you have too many ideas and no idea which to work on first!

 

So, we’re going to apply the concept of “kaizen” in a unique way to answer that question, and then see how the same approach can be useful in other areas of life.

 

So, kaizen means “improvement” and the idea is that you’re employing small changes on a continual basis in order to add up to big impact. It’s about focussing on the small details in order to make your workflow more efficient. 

 

In our case, that is going to mean asking what the most efficient course of action is, by again asking what the “smallest” things we can do are.

 

The aim should be to pick out the app ideas that are the quickest to make, but have the highest chance of earning the most money.

 

So, if you have an idea that you think could change the world, but it will take you years and years to get it off the ground, then you should forget that one. The risk here is simply too high: what if you spend all that time and you aren’t successful?

 

Likewise, though, if an app idea is quick but is unlikely to find an audience… what’s the point? From a business perspective at least, this doesn’t make any sense.

 

So, pick the option that has the highest chance of the most success, and that involves the least work and effort. In a short amount of time, you can drastically increase your income and if your predictions were wrong, you can’t waste too much time or effort upfront.

 

How does this apply elsewhere? 

 

It’s simply a matter of picking the most efficient options to focus your efforts on.

In exercise, this might mean picking exercises that offer the most physical benefits but involve the least amount of work and effort. 

 

In finance, it might mean cutting out the expenses that would have the biggest impact on your income, but the smallest impact on your lifestyle.

 

By looking for low risk, high yield choices throughout your life, you can maximize every aspect of your lifestyle and achieve a whole lot more.