Biohacking for Beginners: 5 Free and Easy Tips to Boost Your Energy and Support Whole-Body Health

Use these 5 tips to hack your health and jumpstart your journey to whole-body wellness

Biohacking is a hot topic nowadays. But if you’re new to the health world, you might be wondering if biohacking is as expensive, niche, and unnatural as it sounds. 

We have to admit that the term biohacking sounds a bit funny, right? How does one hack their own body? Does it require paying someone in a remote basement to do something sketchy on a computer? Is it high-end and techy? Is it… illegal?

Nope! Biohacking is quite amazing, and lots of biohacks are safe, easy, and totally free.  And—even better—my favorite biohacks will boost your energy, support a healthy gut, and jump-start your immune system so you can get healthy and stay that way. 

What’s not to love? Here are five free ways to tweak your terrain so you can start feeling better than good.

What is biohacking?

Before I share some of my favorite free biohacks with you, let’s take a minute and revisit what biohacking actually is and what it definitely is not. 

Don’t let folks overcomplicate this for you. Biohacking is simply the process of making meaningful and impactful changes to your lifestyle to encourage your body to work more efficiently so you can achieve good health. 

Biohacking is not pushing yourself too far, engaging in dangerous practices, or finding sketchy loopholes to get healthy. 

Let’s be clear on one thing: there are no magic instant formulas that will get you healthy and keep you healthy. But, achieving health and happiness can come easily if you practice a few simple principles. Some of them are so easy that we refer to them as hacks; they feel like cheating but they’re not. 

Biohacking practices are natural and safe, and many biohacks are about incorporating small but effective practices into your daily lifestyle. 

Biohacking can lead to tremendous benefits like:

• Decreasing your risk of developing a disease that you’re genetically predisposed to, 
• Optimizing bodily functions to achieve whole-body harmony, and
• Helping you achieve physical, mental, and emotional wellness. 

There are plenty of ways to go about biohacking to increase your energy, mood, metabolic flexibility, and general wellbeing. 

But, for me, two of the best and most effective ways to practice biohacking include: 

1. Reducing inflammation so your body can run efficiently and effectively, and
2. Supporting your mitochondria, the powerhouse organelle in every single cell in your body. 

If you can do these two things, you’re giving yourself a tremendous headstart. You’ll be primed for good health and happy days. 

Biohacking Tip #1: Write down your gratitudes

Whether you’re brand new to biohacking or a seasoned pro, this one’s for you. Practicing gratitude is simple, costs zero dollars, and has a profound effect on your health and wellbeing. 

If you hear about gratitude constantly, but that’s only because it works. Regularly recognizing the things you’re grateful for has the power to improve your outlook and your relationships—both with other people and yourself. 

And this isn’t just something we say because it sounds nice. Gratitude practices have been scientifically linked to positive moods and optimistic attitudes, two things that are hallmarks of emotional wellness. 

In one study, a team of two psychologists, Dr. Emmons of the University of California at Davis and Dr. McCullough of the University of Miami, asked participants to write a few sentences down each week. One group wrote about things they were grateful for and the other group wrote about daily irritations or displeasures. After 10 weeks, those who wrote about gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives. They also exercised more and had fewer visits to physicians than those who focused on sources of aggravation.[1] 

The key to a gratitude practice that works is consistency. Your routine doesn’t need to be hard, exhaustive, or take more than a few minutes. I can’t stress that enough. 

Want to borrow a quick and easy gratitude practice? Write down five things you’re grateful for each morning. Just five. Do this for thirty days. It’ll become one of the best parts of your day; I promise. 

Biohacking Tip #2: Start a meditation practice

Meditation is another practice that folks talk about a lot. You hear about this one everywhere. Your friends, coworkers, and even your favorite news anchors probably talk about meditation and breathwork to reduce anxiety and promote calmness. 

But maybe you’re not sold. Maybe you secretly think the benefits of meditation are a bit overblown by mainstream media. 

Here’s something I want you to know: meditation has been shown to reduce the harmful effects of stress. When we recognize stress as a chronic toxin and widespread problem that leads to many serious diseases and disorders, anything that naturally helps us avoid stress should not be taken lightly. 

Reducing stress can lead to positive outcomes like reducing inflammation, boosting immune cell count, reducing immune cell aging, and even influencing gene expression. 

There are preliminary studies that also find an association between meditation practice and levels of melatonin produced by the pineal gland. This is profound when we consider that some studies cite the influence of melatonin on breast and prostate tumors.[2, 3] 

This one is no joke, people. Meditation is another free biohack. Think of mediation as a multi-vitamin. Do it every day and it’ll pay dividends. Like all good things, a little bit goes a long way here. 

Biohacking Tip #3: Practice intermittent fasting

If you’re new to fasting, I’d like to make an important distinction for you: Intermittent fasting is not starvation. Starvation is something that happens for an undetermined amount of time and it’s typically out of your control. 

Intermittent fasting, on the other hand, is very much a choice and it is very much something you’re in control of and willing to do. Fasting has been a part of religious, spiritual, and health practices across the globe for centuries. 

Scientifically speaking, fasting has been linked with improved blood pressure and cholesterol levels, improved blood sugar control, decreased levels of inflammation, metabolic flexibility, and weight loss.[4, 5, 6, 7]  

And—as if that wasn’t enough—a test-tube study shows that exposing cancer cells to several cycles of fasting is as effective as chemotherapy in delaying tumor growth.[8] 

If you’re interested in getting started, you might begin by going four hours without eating. You can work your way up from there, but plenty of folks start small. 

If you experience hunger pangs during your fast, it’s okay. Feeling suddenly and overwhelmingly hungry just means you have a little bit of work to do as you become more metabolically flexible. 

Keep at it, ditch the processed sugar and carbs, and work lots of plants and fat into your diet to optimize your metabolic processes. 

Biohacking Tip #4: Sweat it out

Yep. Good old-fashioned sweating is a serious biohack. Sweating is an important detox function that can help your body flush everything from small toxins to heavy metals. 

Sweating has been linked with increased energy, healthy weight, improved mood, and good sleep. It’s an effective way to rid your body of bacteria and toxins, such as BPA chemicals found in plastics.[9] 

Luckily, you don’t have to be an ultra-marathon runner to break a good sweat. Lifting weights, doing yoga, or practicing calisthenics are great ways to get your blood pumping and your sweat glands working. 

Exercise is, of course, free free free. But if you want to speed up the sweating process, use a sauna. 

I recommend purchasing a Sunlighten sauna. They’re fitted with powerful infrared lights that penetrate your skin and encourage a host of health benefits like natural anti-aging, detoxification, pain relief, and muscle recovery.  

Biohacking Tip #5: Tend to your sleeping habits

The power of sleep is immense. We are incredibly sensitive to our natural sleep cycles as dictated by day and night rotations. We’ve known this intuitively for centuries, and now science is proving that sleep has tremendous benefits for the body. In fact, in 2017, circadian biologists won a Nobel Prize for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms. 

We’ve also seen studies that prove how graveyard shifts impact health. Night-shift workers have some of the highest incidences of diabetes and cancer.[10, 11] 

Primarily between 11 pm and 3 am, key digestive and detoxification processes take place in your body. If you’re awake at this time, you’re interfering with important clean-up functions that keep you healthy. To be safe, I recommend getting to sleep by 11 pm so your body can get to work.  

Practicing good sleep hygiene is entirely cost-free. But, if you want to turn your bedroom into the biohacking oasis it should be, consider upgrading to an organic mattress, light-blocking curtains, and be sure to turn your phone on airplane mode when you go to sleep at night. 

The topic of sleep is so important that there’s a whole chapter dedicated to it in my book The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. Click here to buy the book and learn more about how to reduce your risk of cancer or support your body through the cancering process. 

What are some of your favorite free biohacks? 

One important aspect of biohacking is that it’s individual to you. Biohackers tend to experiment (safely) with their bodies to see what works and what doesn’t. I always say that my body is a living laboratory. Make yours one, too, and discover which practices are best for you. 

If you’ve been chronically ill or you’re not sure how to biohack safely, you should work with your doctor or healthcare provider. If you’re in need of a trained professional, contact one of my metabolically trained consultants to talk about how biohacking can help boost your energy, increase your immunity, and give you big results. 

Now you know some of my favorite biohacks. But, I’m dying to know: What are some of your favorite free biohacks? Let me know in the comments or hop on to our Facebook page and tell us there: @TheMetabolicApproachtoCancer.  

*The advice and/or products on drnasha.com are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or illness. Further, the information in this article is not intended to replace the recommendations of your healthcare provider or physician. Please review references cited at the end of the article for scientific support of any claims made.

References:

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12585811/
2. https://europepmc.org/article/med/10332925
3. https://europepmc.org/article/MED/22018935
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17929537/
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5394735/
6. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17374948/
7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26374764/
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3608686/
9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3255175/
10. https://oem.bmj.com/content/73/4/262.short
11. https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/95/11/825/2520258