What is Biohacking and How Do You Get Started?

What is Biohacking. You’ve probably heard about biohacking, at least in some capacity in recent years. It’s been popularized by experts like Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, Jack Dorsey, dr. Mark Hyman, just to name a few, providing the greater population with tools, techniques, and emerging technologies with the goal of improving your overall health and well-being, and lengthening your lifespan. So, what is biohacking in the first place, and how do you get started? 

What is Biohacking?

Biohacking refers to implementing tools and means to improve your health, boost your performance, and increase your longevity. They are completely personalized and individualized as you, yourself, are both the object and the subject of biohacking interventions. The main reasoning behind this revolutionary movement is that we have the power to activate and deactivate our genes, boost our health, and slow down aging. 

Some of the most popular biohacking techniques include wearable trackers, intermittent fasting, cryotherapy, breathing techniques, bulletproof coffee, and meditation, and they’re meant to help us DIY our own health and well-being, fighting off infections and diseases, improving our metabolic flexibility, and helping us become somewhat superhuman without superpowers. 

Biohacking events and conferences around the world have attracted thousands of people to learn how to hack their own health and longevity and live as healthy as possible for as long as possible. The latest cutting-edge research has been emerging day after day after day, and we’re finding out all the incredible things our bodies can do and are meant to do to stay vital, vibrant, and alive for a long period of time. 

Most Popular Biohacking Techniques

Some of the biohacking techniques fall in the extreme folder as they include implanting chips in your body, transfusions of plasma from young donors, and even trying to manipulate and edit your own DNA for muscle enhancement purposes. These are only at their infant stage and years and years of research need to be concluded to yield any real results. They are also incredibly expensive and therefore only available to a selected few, which is why we’d like to exclude them from our article. 

However, there are some biohacking techniques that hit close to home and can be surprisingly easy to implement. Here are the five most popular biohacking techniques you can get started with today and start hacking your own health and longevity. 

Intermittent Fasting 

Known as time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting became popular in recent years due to the incredible research results which showed improved metabolic health and insulin sensitivity, lower cholesterol, and blood pressure readings, reduced adiposity in visceral fat, and enhanced brain cognition. It also has the ability to enhance the effects of cell autophagy, stimulating your body to regenerate and renew its own cells. 

There are plenty of different intermittent fasting techniques, and they all revolve around the so-called eating and fasting windows. Some of the most popular include:

• 16/8 – a fasting window of 16 hours, followed by an 8-hour window in which you’re supposed to eat all of your meals
• 5/2 week split – five days of intermittent fasting and two non-fasting days (could be consequent but don’t have to be)
• OMAD – only one meal per day
• 24-72 hour fasts – longer fasts usually done once per month or quarter.

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey is one of the most popular biohackers and proponents of intermittent fasting, apparently following the OMAD rules and only eating every 22 hours. He says it’s his only way of dealing with stress and staying healthy.  

Red Light Therapy

This biohacking technique exposes you to red and near-infrared light in order to help improve your health and well-being. It’s a non-toxic, non-invasive, and completely painless therapy that involves heat as your body recognizes its effects as such. One of the most popular ways of getting exposed to red infrared light is in an infrared sauna, and it has shown to be incredibly beneficial in reducing inflammation and pain, as well as helping stimulate a better detoxing function of your liver and kidneys. 

It also plays a huge role in reducing the appearance of wrinkles, acne, and even scars. Sarah Turner, a red light therapy expert explains how red light helps the skin regain its integrity, build up collagen, and fight inflammation which reduces breakouts and prevents premature aging. 

Bulletproof Coffee

If you’ve never tried putting grass-fed butter in your coffee, you’re in for a treat. Dave Asprey, one of the biggest biohackers of today has built a fortune and a massive following after founding the Bulletproof coffee revolution. For over a decade now, people have been putting spoonfuls of butter into their coffees every single day, and all because of its incredible and scientifically backed benefits. 

Studies show how bulletproof coffee plays a huge role in helping your body turn fat into fuel, suppressing appetite, promoting lower blood glucose levels, increasing clarity, improving focus, and more. And it’s all because of his powerful formula of grass-fed butter and MCT oil that’s known to power up your ketones and help you burn fat more efficiently. 

Cryotherapy

Putting your body in short, extreme cold conditions can shock your body but also help lower inflammation, reduce pain, and improve fat burn. It also plays a role in reducing migraine intensity, improving anxiety and depression-related symptoms, and even improving skincare conditions as it boosts the level of antioxidants in your cells. 

Breathing Techniques and Meditation (Wim Hoff)

That breathing techniques and mindfulness meditations can have a tremendously positive effect on your physical and mental health comes as no surprise, but you may not be completely aware of how powerful these biohacking techniques can be. They’re also completely free and can be done anyplace, anytime. 

For biohacking purposes, we’ll focus on one special breathing technique called the Wim Hoff method. This revolutionary method is simple, yet so effective. It includes 30-40 deep inhales followed by short and powerful exhale bursts. After the last exhalation, you take one big inhale, let the air out, and hold your breath for as long as you can before you need to inhale again. 

The focus is on deep and rhythmic inhales and exhales which create an inner fire, alerting your nervous system, and stimulating changes in various physiological responses. These short, voluntary stress responses caused by powerful exhale outbursts help you become better adapted to everyday stress, building resilience. It’s like a breathing adaptogen. 

Final Thoughts

Biohacking is just a term that defines a vast variety of tools you can utilize to help you regain control over your own body in order to optimize all of its functions. New techniques, supplements, and even tech tools are becoming available every day, and with the amount of stress we all deal with on a daily basis, they are definitely worth exploring.