OK, OK – biohacking sounds freaky. I get it. We see the word biohacking, and we think of high-tech physical modifications and cutting-edge pharmaceuticals. But biohacking is much more of a layman’s wellness tool than we realize. So let’s break it down, and then I’ll get into some of the ways I incorporate biohacking into my daily life.
Dr. Melissa Young, an MD on the Cleveland Clinic’s Functional Medicine team, describes biohacking as “the art and science of maximizing human performance by hacking our biology.” In this podcast about biohacking, she goes on to explain that biohacking is really about making intentional changes to our lives. Whether it’s environmental, dietary, emotional or otherwise, any intentional shift in how you care for your body or mind could be considered biohacking. And really, there is no clear-cut definition for biohacking because it can refer to so many things that you might already do on the daily.
As for me? You could call me something of a biohacker… Which is a fancy way of saying I’ve made a lot of intentional changes to my health and wellness in the past few months. I’ve struggled with my mental health for a long time (courtesy of my ADHD!), and I had a D1 crashout in October. I decided enough was enough; I didn’t want to feel like an anxious trainwreck every couple months. I wanted to find a sustainable way to work on my mental and physical health.
Before I even hopped onto this biohacking train, I signed myself up for therapy again. I needed something that could be a stable, non-negotiable way to manage my mental health. I take medication for my ADHD, so obviously, I see a doctor regularly for that. But a lot of my symptoms are more abstract (and I have a hard time managing them in relationships), and I felt like therapy could give me better coping methods than crashing out every two-to-four months.
While I got back into therapy, I explored my physical health trends. I’ve been a gym rat since high school, and while that hasn’t changed, my consistency and motivation ebb and flow based on how I’m doing mentally. A lot of people use the gym as a way to manage their mental health.I do love working out and I know it helps my mental health when I go frequently, but when I’m struggling, I don’t want to go. So it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. If I don’t work out, my mental health suffers; if my mental health is suffering, I don’t have energy to work out. That’s something I’m still working on, but biohacking has helped me tremendously with it.
In my pursuit of finding a way to be more consistent with my physical health, I read up on diets. Dietary changes are a huge method for biohacking, by the way, so I was intrigued. My diet has largely been influenced by where I’m at in life – if I’m living at home, in a dorm, in my own apartment, traveling, etc. I would say I live a bit of a hectic life, so it can be challenging to maintain a consistent diet. (Meaning: 90% of my diet was Goldfish and pasta.) As I learned about the biology of food and mental health, I decided to make some changes. I was living on my own with the ability to cook, so there was really nothing holding me back.
With a focus on whole foods and protein, I picked up the basics: Greek yogurt, fruit, ground turkey, rice, spinach and egg whites. To be fully transparent, this isn’t an accurate picture of my diet all the time. It’s the 80/20 rule. Mostly good, whole foods, but I still love my Goldfish here and there. That being said, changing my diet has had tremendous effects on my physical health. I’ve always struggled with feeling tired through the day and getting those midday slumps, but starting my day with a protein-rich breakfast has seriously changed the game.
And I know it sounds cliché. It’s one of those things where everyone always says eating better will make you feel better, but no one ever wants to believe it. Then you do it, and it works, and it’s kind of annoying that it works because it sounds so simple. That’s biohacking for you – it’s annoyingly simple.
Along with my diet, I changed my sleep schedule. This is still an uphill battle for me as a notorious night owl and a woman with a crazy schedule. For the most part, though, I’ve been on a grandma sleep routine: asleep by 9 p.m. and awake by 5 a.m. I tried to make myself be up at 5:00 every day when I first started all of these changes, but I figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t sustainable for me. And that’s part of all this, right? Everyone’s bodies are different; we can’t all be the wellness superstars who wake up at 5:00 every single day. I found it’s much more doable if I stick to 5 a.m. wakeups a couple of times per week and let myself sleep in later the rest of the week.
It’s all about balance for me. There are definitely nights where I have too much work to do and can’t go to sleep before midnight, so I make those my days to sleep in. Sometimes, the 5 a.m. alarm goes off, and I just need an extra hour of sleep, so I give it to myself. It is a hard balance between listening to your body and being disciplined, though. I’m still working on that.
My physical changes made it much easier for me to biohack my brain, which was the goal of all of this. I wanted peace. My dedication to all of these physical changes, as well as some uncontrollable changes with work and school, made me a lot busier. That was actually a good thing for me. Now, being too busy can certainly be bad and stress-inducing, but I was in a position where I had too much time to spend watching Reels. I was able to cut out a lot of time on social media and focused that time on learning about my body and its needs. Part of my job is social media, so I can’t escape it, but I think limiting it has genuinely had excellent impacts on my brain.
There are plenty of other ways to biohack, and you can certainly go down a rabbit hole into them like I did. Some are more legitimate than others, but a lot of what you’ll find is just people trying to learn about biology and figure out what it is that their body actually needs. That’s what I find so interesting and compelling about biohacking. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution or a magical cure to everything. You have to put in the work to learn about your body and its needs and make changes from there. It requires effort, but biohacking is one of the simplest ways to improve your mental and physical health.