Biohacking Primer: A Guide Of First Principles For Optimizing One’s Life

Whether we realize it or not, we are all biohackers in the broadest sense of the word. Perhaps the difference between those of us who identify with this label and those who don’t, may only be a matter of intent and the degree to which we quantify and experiment with new hacks. So where is one to start when they cross this valley into conscious action? What follows is a guide of principles that I have developed through trial and error on how best to approach this process of change.

Why Is This Necessary?

Of course it would be easier to just tell you what I’ve experimented with, what’s worked for me, and what you should avoid, but where would that get you? Sure, some of the things I do may generalize to you, but to ultimately reap the largest benefits from biohacking, one must take responsibility for their own journey while learning and sharing with like-minded others. Your goals and priorities in life are unique to you, thus the idea that you could copy someone else’s regimen and get the results you desire is highly unlikely.

Where Do I Start?

With an overwhelming amount of biohacking choices, how should one narrow down where to begin? There are a lot of areas that have a plethora of products to help you create the illusion of progress. Biohacking goals can also conflict at times, so chasing many things without a clear plan will spread both your financial and time resources thin, on top of the burnout that this can cause. For me, there are two starting principles that I use to identify what to focus on:

1. Pareto Principle: Sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule, this principle is absolutely critical in deciding where to biohack first as so many people miss the mark and end up picking something that’s sexy (we’ll get to marketing below), easy, or touches on a problem but not in a way that is close to optimal. Examining your life through the lens of largest marginal improvement will help to identify the problem area you want to biohack and help to prioritize where to start if multiple areas are identified.
2. Pain Principle: This one is more self-explanatory. What areas of your life are causing you the most physical or emotional pain? I use “physical pain” as a broad term that includes ways that you are sabotaging your own health, not just physical pain that you currently feel. Similar to the Pareto principle, chances are the area you identify that is causing the most pain is going to have an outsized effect on your life, and improving this problem will most likely carry a larger benefit.

An area that intersects principle 1 & 2 would be a strong first candidate. If you have more than one, go with the one you think you can achieve most effectively as this will help in building momentum for future problems to biohack.

Root Principle

Once you have identified an area of your life to hack, you must be cautious in recognizing whether you’re attacking a superficial aspect of the problem or the heart of the problem. A trivial example would be someone who has trouble sleeping that tries to improve their sleep by eliminating blue light before going to bed and regulating nighttime temperature. These are great hacks, but if you’re smoking meth it’s probably not going to help that much. Roots matter.

Subtraction Before Addition

“How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” — Jerry Colonna

Once you have identified a goal and the root of the problem, the next question to ask is whether the problem can first be solved by subtraction rather than addition. There is something psychologically gratifying about experimenting with some new chemical, app, or device that makes it far more seductive than removing something from our lives, and the marketing of many biohacking products certainly doesn’t help.

Subtraction, similar to the root principle, forces you to build a better foundation by removing the products or decisions that are impeding your goal. Masking these with a new product will have a diminished return at best, and usually will not be the most effective solution. Subtraction is also useful for measuring effects of new exogenous substances by limiting the amount of interactions between decisions and/or products. The greater the amount of substances or decisions, the exponential increase in potential interactions and difficulty in discerning singular effects. If you’re paying good money for a product, it’s best to define how you can measure if it’s working or not. Which brings me to my next principle…

Quantification

Unless you want to throw darts randomly at the next new biohack and continue to do that aimlessly, you must figure out a way to track the new hacks that you are trying and whether you are noticing an improvement. How will you know if it’s working? When will you stop if it’s not? Is your quantification measure reasonable for what you are trying? Quantification can be both art and science when it comes to biohacking as there are many hacks that biohackers try that may lack clinical trials, or rely heavily on anecdotal data and individual perception in such a way that there is no collectively agreed upon result. Whatever the case may be, you must accept that uncertainty and imperfect information are part of the process. It’s okay to track your next biohack with a measurement that you end up refining later on. The important thing is that you get in the habit of tracking some aspect of your new biohack.

Adherence: Systems > Willpower

Congratulations! Now that you’ve identified the area you wish to biohack, have identified how you will do it, and how you will quantify it, now you must ACTUALLY do it. This may require willpower to ultimately adhere to your objective. Willpower is an incredibly powerful resource that we all possess to different degrees. But it is finite. How we spend this resource throughout the day is different for everyone, but it does get spent. When trying a new biohack that requires willpower, I have found that the best way to increase adherence is to design a system around the new hack that requires as little willpower as possible. For example, I used to be addicted to sugar. I couldn’t go a meal without eating candy, pastries, cookies, you name it, because I wouldn’t feel full without eating a ton of sugar no matter how much I ate of other foods. When I first embarked on low carb and ultimately keto, it was incredibly hard at first because I would see the sugary food in my house or on a menu at a restaurant and the psychological battle to resist became increasingly taxing. So to help combat these temptations, I stopped buying sugary products and limited the restaurants that I went to. By eliminating sugar from the household and increasing the activation that it would take to get immediate gratification, I raised the bar of difficulty just enough to avoid caving in. Through time and habit it became easier to resist sugar, but that initial structured system was critical. In short, know thyself. If you can preemptively identify pitfalls to adherence for your chosen objective, try to think of ways to automate or circumvent the risk of not following through. Other techniques that generalize really well are accountability partners and positive/negative reinforcement techniques. Try them all and see what works best for you.

Too Much Of A Good Thing: Minimum Effective Dose (MED)

So you found something you like and want to do it all the time and take it to the extreme. Well, before you do that, think of this principle. Even if doing more of whatever your new biohack is won’t harm you (which probably isn’t the case as a general rule of thumb), as biohackers we are always conscious of time, so unless it’s not taking more time and not harming you by taking more, apply the MED. This is especially true when dealing with substances that have limited human research or potentially dangerous side effects. You can always take more, but your corpse can’t always take less.

Other Tips:

Science Is A Process With No Destination

“When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?” — John Maynard Keynes

Embody and be enthusiastic about the biohacks that work for you, but avoid dogma. Research constantly improves or overturns conventionally accepted practices. The last thing you want in this situation is an overactive ego that can’t listen or consider that a new, potentially better way now exists. Be open to change and weary of fanatics.

The Different Levels Of Shit Peddlers

Something that is not talked about enough in the biohacking community is the amount of deceptive, if not downright dishonest, companies selling products in the space. Below is a list of different categories of tactics to look out for when deciding what product to try after using the principles from above:

• Outright Shit: Most people are pretty good at spotting these claims. Anything that promises immortality or losing 100 lbs with one pill is a scam at best. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is.
• Social Proof: This one is a little more subtle and has proliferated in recent years. It typically happens when a company tries to piggyback off of the good reputation of another respected biohacker or company (via social media endorsements, podcasts, etc) in the hopes of having their product reinforced as legitimate. Unfortunately, no one gets a pass. If these friends really cared, they’d hold the founder to the same standard of scientific rigor. Endorsements count for very little, especially when financial incentives are involved. There are no social substitutes for real science.
• “I don’t care what the studies show, it works for me” — This is a nuanced response to deal with. My rule of thumb when someone says this is to look deeper:

1. Is this a placebo effect? If so, is it worth the money to pay for it?
2. Does the person telling me that it works stand to gain anything?
3. How much scientific literature is there? In this case, if there are many decades of studies all pointing to the same conclusion and the person telling you the contrary is a sample of one, take that into account. Conversely, there are circumstances in which there is a genuine lack of published studies or the studies were used for people with specific conditions or used for different applications. Use your judgement here.

• Does the math work out? Let’s say you found a product, are satisfied with the science, and ready to try it. You go online and see many brands with significant differences in price. Use caution here. Sometimes the cheapest brand is fine, but in other instances it is not and can result in inferior and/or harmful products. As a good rule of thumb, avoid products that don’t do third party testing. Also avoid products that are manufactured or imported from countries in which legal action could not be enforced, there are no equivalent FDA standards, or where rampant corruption makes any equivalent standard meaningless. Be diligent here as some companies will try to obfuscate where the product is coming from by saying they are “based in the US”, “distributed in the US”, or some other deceptive claim to promote a sense of trust. Think back to incentives, if an international company can sell you fake or diluted products without consequence, why wouldn’t they?
• Product Medium: Different products will have one or several methods of ingestion that have varying levels of bioavailability. The science may support the use of the product, but if every study was done intravenously and someone on Amazon is selling tablets for the same product, will it give you the desired effect? Every substance is different.

Doctors

Regardless of your opinion about doctors, we have to acknowledge a few facts about the current healthcare system and providers:

• There is a severe lack of nutrition education in the medical curriculum that has been well documented for over a decade.
• The system has been built on treating sick people, not optimizing those who are already considered “healthy”. With the exception of really great primary care doctors, integrative health docs, and those with certain specialties that are genuinely interested in optimization, this is the rule.

We cannot hope for most doctors to get caught up on all of these topics in health optimization and nutrition that interest us, especially with the accelerating pace at which information is proliferating. The point of saying all of this is that, barring one of the doctor exceptions above, you’re going to have to take the initiative to improve your health, especially if you’re already considered “healthy” or want to improve an area in which your doctor is under informed.

And One Final Note:

Be human and enjoy life. Stress is by far one of the greatest cumulative risk factors for optimal health span, so if you’re doing a crazy diet or other hack that makes you absolutely miserable, take a step back and consider the trade-offs. I have found the most beneficial and sustainable changes to be incremental, so take it one step at a time. Lastly, gratitude and optimism have to be the most underrated and free biohacks that go a long way over the course of one’s life. If all you can implement are these two things, you’ll be light years ahead of most people.