My mission is helping leaders create a life-changing relationship with time and energy. This relies on radical self-awareness and understanding how you uniquely operate to unlock peak performance.
After 15+ years working with top entrepreneurs around the world, I’ve experimented extensively with biohacking techniques – from intermittent fasting to mindfulness.
When you learn how to listen to your body, you'll often find patterns in your body's response. Today’s article will help you decode your own patterns.
Keep reading to discover powerful biohacks for boosting your energy.
Tune Into Your Body’s Signals
We each have innate biofeedback mechanisms informing us when we’re aligned – or out of alignment – physically, mentally, energetically, and in terms of our body composition. Too often, we override these signals in favor of “pushing ahead” .
I’m as guilty of this as anyone. Earlier in my career, I worked 60-hour weeks fueled by caffeine, adrenaline, and stubborn determination. I convinced myself the “hustle” was mandatory for success, and that I’d rest and sleep sometime in the future.
The truth?
While I manufactured the motivation to drive my productivity, my body violently pushed back. I remember feelings of heat and tightness in my neck and chest – like a feeling of compression. It was almost like hands were grasping around my neck.
Now, that could’ve been a blockage from accessing my intuition, or a sign of stress. It certainly was a sign of nervous system elevation impacting cognitive function. At the time, I simply ignored it.
I battled inflammation, adrenal fatigue and continuous exhaustion. My immunity tanked and while I rarely got sick, I wasn’t feeling healthy or vibrant.
It finally clicked that I wasn’t honoring my body’s wisdom and right mindset. I had to stop asking, “How can I force myself to produce more?” Instead, I asked, “What does my body need right now to perform optimally?”
If I think about the way I operate now, it is all about trusting that my gut and my heart always know what's right for me.
Here Are A Few Things To Consider When Biohacking For Your Own Optimization:
Hydrate Consistently
In the hustle of daily life, it's easy to neglect hydration. Lack of hydration leads to foggy thinking and tiredness, hampering mental performance.
Drinking at least a gallon of mineral water daily can significantly enhance cell function, improve cognitive performance, and boost energy levels - an approach to biohacking recommended by medical professionals and backed by science to combat the aging process.
Minimizing diuretics like coffee, which can dehydrate, is also beneficial. Even just reducing caffeine intake by half can boost energy, improve sleep, decrease anxiety and improve overall health.
Minimizing diuretics like coffee, which can dehydrate, is also beneficial. Even just reducing caffeine intake by half can boost energy, improve sleep, decrease anxiety and improve overall health.
Tips to Optimize Hydration:
- Carry a water bottle and set drink reminders on your phone
- Consume electrolytes from real foods to replenish cellular minerals
- Eat water-rich fruits and vegetables like cucumber and watermelon
- Experiment with Celtic sea salt sole (recipe here) and electrolyte concentrates
- Monitor urine color to track if you’re hydrating adequately
Proper hydration ensures your energy and productivity don’t lag when engaging in mentally demanding work for extended periods.
Incorporate Mini-Meditations and Deep Breathing
Embracing audacious goals and taking action is valuable, but so is taking time to rest and recover to optimize health. Mini-meditations can be a powerful tool for grounding and gaining perspective, especially during overwhelming moments.
Even 5 minutes of focused deep breathing can reset the neural pathways, refresh perspective, and sharpen focus.
This enhances energy, immunity, and stress resilience - a mental performance boost. It's also a time when you might come up with your best ideas.
Mini-Meditation Tips
- Set phone timers to reminder you to take focused breath breaks
- Find trigger points to meditate, like waiting for coffee or between meetings
- Take 60-90 seconds during bathroom breaks to center yourself
- Practice box breathing: equal counts of inhale/hold on full/exhale/hold on empty to trigger relaxation response
- Close your eyes whenever possible to rest senses from constant inputs
Regular mini-meditations and breathing sessions enrich your day with improved mental clarity, creativity, and emotional stability.
Invest in Enough Sleep
Productivity fundamentals: Sleep is a non-negotiable, not a luxury.
Wearables like an Oura ring or Apple Watch can be a game-changer for accountability so you get at least 7+ hours of sleep each night can improve cognitive function.
Optimized sleep habits lead to abundant energy, sharp focus, and high productivity.
Quality Sleep Tips
- Block blue light and caffeine past 2 pm to support circadian rhythm
- Create an evening wind-down routine preparing your body for rest and well-being
- Set a regular bedtime allowing 7+ hours in bed nightly
- Use blackout curtains and set bedroom temperature low (68 to 70 degrees) to improve blood flow and regulate body weight - a biohacking approach
Make sleep a priority, and you set yourself up for excellent creative work, improved cognitive function, and a fulfilling life with positive effects - a key aspect of biohacking.
Manage Your Energy
The people we surround ourselves with affect our energy and play a pivotal role in our energy and performance. Our energy is significantly influenced by our social interactions.
That’s why it's crucial to recognize “energy givers” and “drainers" in our lives and observe our body's response. Just like we need to monitor our physical self, we must be mindful of our social environment for emotional and mental rejuvenation.
Every conversation and interaction can either charge or drain our batteries.
It's about making conscious choices with who we spend our time with. This awareness has led me to be much more selective, favoring interactions with clients, friends, and groups that support my well-being and energy levels through biohacking.
This shift towards understanding how different relationships impact your energy is pivotal.
Sometimes, the biggest biohack is to separate yourself from a group for a while and see what happens.
Energy Management Tips:
- Spot and avoid energy drainers: Notice who makes you feel tired and try to spend less time with them.
- Find energy boosters: Hang out with people who make you feel good and boost your mood.
- Set boundaries: It's important to say no sometimes and keep away from situations that drain you.
- Value alone time: For many, especially introverts, quiet time is refreshing. Do things that recharge you, like reading, meditating, use a gratitude journal, or physical fitness activities like a gratitude walk to regulate blood sugar levels.
- Think about your social life: Reflect on how interactions affect your energy to better manage who you spend time with.
By paying attention to how people affect our energy and setting boundaries, we can keep our energy up and perform better.
This smart approach to managing our social circles is a key part of keeping our lives balanced and successful with biohacking.
Listen, Then Optimize
We each have unique physiologies, backgrounds, and circumstances shaping our needs. This means identically “healthy” strategies can produce radically different results.
Standard advice often overlooks our own biology and unique biological processes when it comes to biohacking and human enhancement.
Start instead by tuning into your body for insight. Experiment to discover what makes you run at 100%. Track your diet tweaks, activity changes and monitor how your rest affects your thinking, effectiveness and experience.
Leveraging Wearables
Wearable technology like WHOOP bands, Oura rings, and Apple watches all provide highly specific biofeedback on indicators like heart rate variability, sleep performance, and activity analysis.
I've been an avid biohacker for the better part of the last 10 years, and my experiments have evolved from simple to very complex.
Having this 24/7 insight informs lifestyle tweaking for energy optimization.
Here are a few tips/ideas to get you starting with tech:
- Use wearable devices to uncover personalized biofeedback
- Record food/supplements in tracking apps to learn your unique correlations
- Analyze heart rate variability patterns for custom targets
- Note symptom triggers and relief mechanisms you discover
- Share data with practitioners to personalize protocols
Wearable technology and tech trackers let you listen to your body with far more sensitivity. This allows you to dial in the precise inputs and behaviors that help you operate at 100%.
The time I've invested in tuning into my biofeedback pays dividends daily in my energy levels, immunity and output. I've uncovered dozens of unconventional tricks custom-fit for my body - including genetic biohacking - leading me to peak performance despite intense workloads.
This input is what my physiology needed. Yours may need something entirely different for your body's health and well-ness.
Your body has genius insights on what it requires to operate at its best. By learning your body’s “language” through careful tracking and personal experimentation, you’re able to make changes that enable an optimized life through biohacking and physical fitness.
You’ll have the power to sustainably share your gifts at a world-changing level.
My invitation is to start listening.
Want to Dive Deeper Into Boosting Your Productivity While Balancing Wellness?
If you're eager to learn more about how to boost performance without sacrificing your wellness and work-life balance, and if you're curious about how to effectively harness technology in this pursuit, then check out my course Work, Your Way: Master Your Authentic Working Style for Peak Productivity in 2024.
This course guides you through the process of discovering and refining your unique working style to maximize your productivity and achieve a harmonious work-life balance.
Check out the course today and start your journey to peak productivity and wellness.