Strange as it may seem, you can hack the human mind. Most times, when we mention hacking, our mind goes to sci-fi movies and someone trying to hack into a secured database to either free a prisoner or try to empty an account. Yes, we’ve all been there. It is not easy to believe that biology could be hacked, however, because we don’t find it easy to believe doesn’t mean it is far from the truth.
This is where it starts to get interesting. To hack your biology, you don’t need to ping any location or crack some firewalls. All you need is to follow the normal routine except that you are doing it more consciously. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look at what bio-hacking entails.
Bio-hacking is not about high-tech. It is simply taking charge of your health with the everyday concepts and routine that we often ignore and pay little attention to. While many are of the opinion that hacking involves a slight improvement in their diet and exercise, the question that always surfaces is whether that’s all there is to hacking.
Engaging in routine exercise to stay on top of your game is a sure way to start, but it sometimes streamlines the entire concept of bio-hacking. What you need to understand first of all is that bio-hacking is a process. An understanding of bio-hacking as a process establishes the fact that it is a journey. Like every journey, it cannot be achieved in a day.
What is bio-hacking?
Bio-hacking is a scientific and biological process where an individual uses self-experimentation to gain mastery of the mind, body, and life. Not just gaining control, bio-hacking involves upgrading every aspect of your life for better efficiency. For example, drinking bulletproof coffee is one of the ways that you can hack your mind.
To put it in simpler terms, bio-hacking is a process of changing your environment for your inside so that you can have more control over your biology. Look at it this way: You take a cup of coffee to prevent you from sleeping. Before taking the coffee, you feel drowsy and swing your head in all directions, jerking awake at intervals. But what happens after taking the coffee? You become alive to what is happening in the environment around you. You can achieve this without running an expensive experiment on yourself.
So, it then follows that the best way to become alive to the things that go on around us is to change ourselves from the inside out. At this point, we need to be careful not to confuse bio-hacking with routine exercise. Calories in and calories out is not bio-hacking.
The best approach to bio-hacking is to reject the idea that all you need to optimize your mind is to eat less and participate in some routine exercise. Although it’s a good way to start, you must be ready to do some tinkering, manipulate some variables, and experiment with biology. The do-it-yourself biology behind bio-hacking is one of the coolest things about it. Surprisingly, you might already be doing it unknowingly.
Types of bio-hacking
1. Nutrigenomics: This is the process of changing your biology with the food you eat. By trying out different food types and their nutrients, you can optimize your mind.
2. DIY biology: Most people carry out this type of bio-hacking by conducting personal experiments on their mind and body outside of a controlled experimental environment.
How to achieve mind optimization?
Mind optimization is not rocket science. With a little bit of dedication and seriousness, you can hack your mind. Some of the simple yet effective ways of doing this are:
1. Create a positive routine
You need to understand those positive routines are like structures needed for self-improvement. In your bid to build positive habits, you need momentum that will see you through days when you will feel like throwing in the towel. This way, you will be able to set your priorities right, eliminate procrastination, manage your goals, and ultimately optimize your mind. When you can make your routine into a habit, you will require less effort to carry them out repeatedly. One thing that you should bear in mind is that there is nothing wrong with trying out new things provided that it works for you. By creating consistent and regular patterns with new habits, your mental levels increase.
2. Stay positive
Although we hear it a lot, it is sometimes easier said than carried out. Automatic negative thoughts, also referred to as ANTS, preoccupy the mind and the interesting thing is that it takes little effort to think negative thoughts. The best way to put your mind positively is to keep simple thoughts that you can work with. You might even decide to say them aloud once in a while. This will help you to stay focused and will keep your mind in a healthier state.
3. Read a book
Another excellent way to optimize the mind is to read a book. You might be surprised at how much reading can re-engineer your mind and increase your brainpower. Not only does reading help you relax, but it also helps to break through some dominant mind barriers. To implement, you can start with something as small as a chapter of a book per day. Not just any book but a book of choice.
4. Biohack your nutrition
Nootropics are found in nature, food, supplement form, and they are used to positively alter cognitive function. Individuals have discovered over the years that they can bio-hack their minds by simply changing what they are eating. For example, you need to check your sugar pattern and go with some healthy fats. You might also need to try out elimination diets to find out your level of food sensitivity.
● A good diet helps in brain memory optimization, and surprisingly, it doesn’t cost much. Some of the diets you can introduce to your daily nutrition include egg, salmon, sardines, avocado, walnut, blueberries, broccoli, dark chocolate, and pumpkin seeds.
● You can correct what is lacking in your regular diet with some supplements. Supplements that are rich in omega 3 fatty acids and vitamins, for example, are known to improve brain function. Thus, you can mix your diet with such supplements to increase your advantage.
● Fasting: Fasting helps to balance insulin levels, regulate hormones, and aid weight loss. Surprisingly, by trying fasting, you can regulate hormones that send a signal to the brain when you are hungry. Thus, you can eliminate eating if you want to, or decide when you want to eat.
● Not junk: Do not consume too much processed food. Instead, fight domestication by connecting with the wild side of nature. Drink more water, expose yourself to more sunlight, and just fall in love with the outdoors.
5. Prioritize sleep
Though it may look like common sense to sleep, it’s not always a common practice to sleep. During sleep, your brain consolidates long-term and short-term memories. By implication, without sleep, your brain cannot carry out this function effectively. To bio-hack your sleep for mind optimization is to get rid of unhealthy sleep patterns. Light pollutions and constant stimuli can alter the hormones responsible for sleep. Being deliberate about your sleep could be the game-changer that your mind needs for full optimization.
6. Physical exercise
Biohacking your muscles sure have a lot of physical benefits. What many don’t know is that it can be of so much benefit to the brain. Exercising improves your focus, increases energy, reduces stress, and improves mental acuity. At this point, you need to be able to draw the line between shortcutting your way to health and attempting to get optimum results within a short period. Just like tweaking a dose of coffee to find out which dose works best for you, you can tweak the normal exercise routine to find out which can help you achieve the desired result in a short time.
7. Focus on your environment
Bio-hack your environment by paying more attention to what needs your attention. You need to start paying attention to environmental aspects like the temperature, pollution levels, air conditions, and stop leaving it until when you are sick or when you are trying to heal. By adjusting to external conditions without traveling out of your home, you get a grasp of what is going on around you and this can influence your mind in a big way.
8. Learn around positive people
When you spend time with positive people that challenge you, you can perform a complex task with so much efficiency. Your social network has a way of playing on your mind, therefore, you need to be deliberate about the people you have around you. By learning new and positive things, you can make new neural connections that are necessary for memory and brain optimization.
Bio-hacking is a process, an art, and a science. A positive trend that is designed to reflect healthy practice targeted at dissecting biology and how we can thrive with what is around us. The big idea is that we have what it takes within and around us to re-engineer our biology. Like all good things, you should be careful how much you stretch yourself. Since the concept is new, there are still some aspects that are still not quite clear. Hence, be careful not to push your body to untold limits and make the changes one step at a time.
