Biohacking Techniques To Upgrade Your Entrepreneurial Life

Biohacking is a growing phenomenon, which involves biological & technological techniques, aimed at finding the optimal performance.  According to Google Trends Chart, biohacking is a growing trend that is set to change the way we take care of our physical and mental health.  It’s a pretty broad domain includes a whole range of biologoical and technological tools, from “body-hacking” – body modifications like getting an RFID implant, to simple breathing exercises to strengthen your immunity & nervous system, depending on how far one can go with hacking the biology.

“By perceiving your life as a system and seeing it through a lens of data you will be able to recognize the changes that lead to improved productivity and wellbeing.” – comments Teemu Arina, curator of Biohacker Summit.

There are a lot of resources you can tap into depending on which area of life you want to upgrade, and a lot of new technologies that would assist you with that. Below are some ideas of how biohacking can be applied in a daily life without turning into a cyborg.

Sleep.

Getting quality sleep is one of the best things you can do for your health and optimal performance at work. Sleep is an anabolic state during which the body replenishes its energy storages, regenerates tissues and produces proteins. There are various proven methods backed by research that you can try in order to improve your sleep quality. Those may include sound and light stimulation, blocking out blue light from laptops & mobile devices, 4-7-8 breathing exercise and more. In addition, you can help your body to fall asleep naturally by avoiding stimulants like caffeine and alcohol before going to sleep and taking supplements like tryptophan that support the body in the production of melatonin. Getting good quality sleep reduces the stress of running a company and long working hours.

Nutrition.

We are all aware that a bowl of salad with steak is much healthier than a slice of pizza with soda. However, nutrition is not as black and white as it may seem at first glance, for instance, in the controversial case of fats vs. sugars. The effect that food has on us varies depending on the quality of the ingredients, the processing methods used, as well as individual factors. Your productivity is determined by what you eat, so eat well for tomorrow, not just for today. In order to get the most out of eating, adopt nutritional principles and strategies to apply in different situations; maintain a healthy balance of various ingredients; consider various food preparation methods; support your microbiome with superfoods and probiotics.

Exercise.

There’s the number of studies that show that people who exercise regularly have lower risks of heart disease, diabetes and depression. Exercise also enhances the immune system and improves brain function. The best way to introduce exercise in your daily life is to choose an activity you enjoy. Either it is yoga, swimming, dancing or cross fit and high-intensity interval training, it should be done in a fun and enjoyable way. Put your exercise routine into your schedule and stick with it. There’re plenty of activity trackers in the market, which would measure your performance and give the overview of your exercise data.

Mind.

“The energy of the mind is the essence of life.” – Aristotle. Too much stress can result in many physiological changes significantly affect your mental and cognitive performance. However, dealing with stress can be much easier if you learn warrior breathing techniques or make meditation your daily practice. Meditation has been shown to improve the ability to deal with and recover from stress and regulate emotions and your mood. It is important to remember that your mind can be trained just like your body. For example, you can improve your brain function by learning how to juggle. A new study from Oxford University found that learning to juggle may cause certain areas of your brain to grow, and proved the actions involved in juggling lead to “changes in the white matter of the brain”.

Work.

Imagine you could be 100 times more effective and get all your work done in one hour. According to productivity expert Ari Meisel, that is well possible if you know your prime time. The prime time is the 90 minutes time of the day when you are most productive. The key is to know when exactly that time is and apply it in your work. Here’s how you calculate your peak time: you measure your energy level for at least 3 weeks and observe the time when it spikes. Your “biological prime time” is the time of the day when you have the most energy, and therefore the greatest potential to be productive. Upgrade it with ergonomic furniture and green walls to increase your performance and improve well-being in the workplace.

Quantified self.

Currently, the market is full of various measurement devices and apps that help you to better understand your performance. You can use Muse and alike headband devices to measure your brain waves during meditation, Emfit and Beddit to monitor your sleep quality and get a better understanding of your sleeping patterns, Jawbone, Fitbit and Misfit for tracking your workouts, MyFitnessPall for calculating calories, The Way of Life for goal setting, Pomodoro timer for productivity and much more. Simply speaking, there is an app for measuring just about anything.

Body hacking

The idea of moving RFID chips from your pocket to your hand is pretty straightforward, but fundamentally it transforms the concept of interacting with and experiencing the world.  The RFID chips have data storage unit. It has a unique identification chip on it so in theory, you should be able to open doors or access your personal computer with it or unlock your phone. Then there are much bigger things like in health care if you have a certain disease or you’re taking medication & you’re abroad in some kind of accident, the paramedics at the scene could basically scan your chip & immediately see what kind of disease you have & what kind of medicine you can or cannot have.

There’s plenty of studies, techniques and hacks on the internet on how to upgrade your life, however, communities are most interesting to look into. Reading up on what’s being done is one thing, but getting in touch with people who have done experiments, who can show you their data, & whom you can work together with & do experiments with – that can help you out! There are communities such as Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland and Biohacker Summit where you can learn about biohacking, upgraded living and superhuman performance.