This is part two of a two-part series on biohacking. Part one is available here.
Summary. If you’re looking to adapt biohacking practices into your daily life, you may want to integrate the use of human augmentation tech into your routine. This piece breaks down:
- The best biohacking devices on market
- How neurofeedback technology can be used to bio-hack
Estimated read time: 3 minutes
Lately, more and more biohacking devices are popping up on the market purporting to improve and enhance your life. Janet Coleman, a health expert with The Consumer Mag notes that while a lot of people are interested in biohacking, they want to be careful with what they choose.
“You hear a lot of things that sound too good to be true, and a lot of the devices I see out there sound like snake oil.”
To help sort the wheat from the chaff we’ve asked biohacking experts to tell us the devices they recommend to friends and family:
Biohacking Devices Recommended by Experts
- Oura ring: regulates and tracks an individual’s sleep patterns and the quality of sleep a person gets.
“You can’t measure what you’re doing unless you’re tracking,” agrees Joel Evan, a health coach who has been biohacking for the last eight years. The Oura Ring and Biostrap biometric device are great for monitoring your heart rate, sleep, and heart rate variability (HRV), which is an excellent measurement of recovery, and understanding it better will make you more aware of how hard you should push yourself.
Both devices also give you great insight into your sleep and give you pointers in ways you can become more optimal.
- Blue-Light Blocking Glasses to limit light exposure from screens. Studies have shown that blue light emitted from all of our fluorescent bulbs in our households or found in our televisions and cell phones blunt melatonin production by up to two hours. When your melatonin secretion is thrown off, it will intrinsically throw off your normal sleep cycle. If we’re looking at our phone right before bed, we are now prolonging melatonin from being released by up to two hours. Many biohackers solve this problem by wearing blue-light blocking glasses at least two hours before bed if they’re going to be in an environment with “junk light.”
Truedark glasses limit light exposure from screens
- Tens pads: These are pads you put on your back, and they send electrical pulses through your body to help alleviate back pain.
- Helmets: The Fisher Wallace Stimulator has been shown to help with depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Thync is used for energy and relaxation.
- Bulletproof Brain octane oils can raise the blood level of ketones, giving a boost of energy and power.
- Qualia supplements are designed to improve your cognition, longevity, energy, immunity, and sleep.
- Alitura skincare has many benefits like anti-ageing, brightening the complexion, detoxification, blemish removal, and hydration.
- Infrared sauna: With a sauna, you get the following benefits: detoxification, improved cardiovascular health, improved gene expression, reduced inflammation, improved cognitive health, improved hormone/metabolic function, and increased endurance.
Moderate sauna users (2-3 times per week) are 22% less likely to experience sudden cardiac death, and frequent users (4-7 times per week) are 63% less likely to experience sudden cardiac death.
Evan recommends the Therasage single-person sauna because it’s portable and can easily be collapsed and moved if need be.
“It also allows me to have my hands outside of the sauna to multitask, jump on health coaching calls, make phone calls, or update my social media,” says Evan.
- Neurofeedback Devices: New neurofeedback technology on the market, such as Narbis smartglasses, track the wearer’s brain activity and then uses that data to determine if they’re distracted, at which point the glasses’ lenses darken, or focused, which causes the lenses to clear.
By monitoring your brainwave activity using electrodes (EEG), neurofeedback, a form of biofeedback, rewards healthy brainwave activity over unhealthy activity, with implications for a wide range of conditions including attention disorders like ADHD, and mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. It can also be used to enhance normal functioning, improve overall mental performance, and restore calm and focus.
Biohacking Varies from Person to Person
There is no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to biohacking.
“Biohacking is a different journey for every individual since we know there is a bio-individual component to all aspects of health,” says Renee Belz, M.S., a Certified Nutritional Consultant who has been biohacking for 20 years and co-host of The Biohacker Babes podcast.
Also known as citizen, or DIY biology, everyone has different reasons for biohacking.
“Some do it because they do not feel well and want to go beyond traditional medicine to address their health concerns, others want to explore unconventional ideas and to have full control over their bodies, and some do it because they want to try to halt the aging process as an attempt to live a longer and healthier life,” says Shagoon Maurya, Founder of counseling service, UrSafeSpace.
These days, biohacking options can vary wildly and may include everything from an app that helps you breathe better, to detox technology that requires an hour-long stay at a state-of-the-art lab facility, notes Joel Jackson, co-founder of Lifeforce, a digital product leader who specializes in modern, cutting-edge health brands designed to optimize performance for those in mid-life.
“When we combine different biohacking techniques, it can lead to a significant improvement in your overall health,” believes Maurya.
Biohacking is a combination of peer-reviewed science with the individual’s blood data to deliver ultra-personalized nutrition and lifestyle recommendations. These recommendations target general factors that improve the quality of life, in addition to special biomarkers such as cholesterol or glucose levels which are strongly related to aging.
Parting thoughts
Finally, while there might be a few different definitions of biohacking, it really comes down to manipulating your brain and body in order to optimize or achieve performance outside the current realm of medicine, says Gabriel Nunez, a Scientist with Consumer’s Health Report.
And when it comes to self-improvement, even if you don’t want to spring for an infrared sauna, it’s good to know there are plenty of options out there now to help you hack what ails you.
