"That which does not kill us makes us stronger." - Friedrich Nietzsche.
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It's sad that most people never truly understand how amazing their bodies are
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and what they're capable of.
I've trained with somebody who's held their breath for 22 minutes underwater.
I've also trained with somebody who's climbed Mount Everest in shorts and shoes.
These are incredible things. You can't achieve those things
without knowing what you're truly made out of.
Ever since my childhood I've been interested in how humans have managed
to adapt to different kinds of stressors.
Cold, heat, starvation, anything that is involved in surviving in nature.
We've managed to spread across the entire globe,
we can live in the desert, we can live in the Arctic,
we can live in the rainforest. That's been one of the biggest reasons
to our success as a species so far.
I started biohacking from a very early age
because I was born with an inherited migraine.
It was that pain that I tried to hack with different interventions:
sleep, diet, medications.
Biohacking is looking at the world and your body as a complex set of systems,
understanding how those systems work and making small iterations and changes
to influence them to be optimal and perform at a higher level.
If you know that you have poor sleep
and that is causing you to feel stressed and anxious,
you are taking interventions in order to improve your sleep
so that you can feel better. You'll take some set of data,
you'll do an intervention and then you see if you were able to change the data.
I started biohacking because I had to take my well-being into my own hands.
It's about learning to understand yourself better, a process that never ends.
Discovering and testing different things on yourself
and figuring out how to live a better life.
My father dies at the age of 65. That's when it clicked for me
to maybe somehow work on my life extension.
That's why I started thinking, maybe I would like to live to 120.
You're not only seeking help when you get sick.
You actually create your resilience to different kinds of challenges
that we are facing as humanity but also in your personal life.
Biohacking can be many things. - All the available tools
that we can use, from nature, science, technology,
from all kinds of possible ways that we can enhance
our self-consciousness, in essence.
Because the more conscious we become about who we are,
the inner state and all the biochemical and physiological processes,
the more we can affect the system by affecting the environment.
Biohackers have existed for thousands of years. Ancient yogis,
Buddhist meditators or shamans who were really interested in the human condition,
what the boundaries are and how to push that with diet, nutrition and movement.
Technically everybody's a biohacker, performing biohacks on a daily basis
whether they know it or not. Drinking coffee in the morning is biohacking.
Caffeine to stimulate you, to wake you up and get you in this more active state,
be alert and show focus. But also if you go to the gym and have a protein shake
to help repair and grow muscular tissue.
If you've ever taken fish oil to improve your fatty acid balance,
if you've ever gone out to the sun to get some vitamin D,
if you've taken a sauna for just relaxation,
then you've done biohacking, changed the physiological state of your body
to achieve a particular goal. - Individually it is a way of living,
collectively it is the preventive healthcare system.
In my doctor's office I saw a lot of chronically stressed burned-out patients.
They were running around from doctor to doctor without getting any help
and they eventually ended up to my appointment. I found out that
the chronic stress was the underlying root cause for multiple health problems.
77% of people experience stress that affects their physical health
48% of people have trouble sleeping because of stress
73% of people have stress that impacts their mental health.
Stress is the No 1 health concern of high school students
I've been a serial technology entrepreneur all my life.
I thought I was living at my peak and putting everything into what I do,
but at the end, when I turned 30 I got a stress-related illness.
I got an ulcer, I got some issues.
The stress begins already from the school.
You have to have great numbers, better grades, you have to perform.
Hobbies are not really hobbies any more, they almost become like a job,
more and more demanding. Even younger people get stressed
and burnouts are actually real even for 20-year-olds.
The roots of the stress are in the culture. - Just go, go, go, go.
Many of us get caught in that trap where we want to out-hustle our outperform.
We have to be productive all the time, take care of your family,
work out, run your business, take care of your job.
It's about doing things too much and too vigorously.
Short-term acute stress can be good for psychology.
Let's say you're working.
Having that mild stress can make you more productive and focused on your work.
When there is too much short-term stress, it can actually become long-term stress.
It can become chronic stress. That is when people don't notice
that they are stressed.
Chronic stress is like a disease or a plague.
That is the number one reason for absenteeism from work,
for burnouts and even leading to many chronic diseases.
If you're not able to calm down your body and mind,
you are also more self-centered.
People who are more stressed have more rumination.
Stress becomes their way of life.
When you are in that mindset that you don't even notice the feeling of stress,
you're not any more mindfully managing your stress.
People are stressed and they don't know how to down-regulate,
how to shift down into this kind of parasympathetic state.
Nervous system.
The autonomous nervous system can be divided into two parts:
the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system.
The parasympathetic nervous system is the so-called "rest and digest".
Your heart rate lowers, your ability to get oxygen in lowers as well
and you're ready to digest food and relax.
The sympathetic nervous system's activated state
can be also described as the fight or flight.
Your heart rate goes up, your ability to take oxygen increases,
your ability to get signals from the environment through your eyes increases.
You're basically running your system in an overclocked state.
It keeps us awake, alive, in survival mode in many ways.
It's just so draining and your nervous system will just eventually
be such a wear and tear on you. - It reduces your ability to digest food.
People who are chronically stressed often have got issues
because they are not spending enough time
in the parasympathetic nervous system's activated state.
Although your physiological organism is not
under any considerable real serious source of threat,
your nervous system is still perceiving the situations
as potential problems and threats.
Amygdala.
The amygdala is one of the oldest parts of our brain.
It's called the fear center for a reason. It controls the physiological responses
to stress, fear and dangers.
For example, if you see a snake, that will activate the amygdala,
which will activate your fight and flight nervous system
and prepare you for rapid action. - The amygdala is essential for survival
because it helps us react to dangers and physical threats much faster.
It helps to mobilize all the resources, gives you the alertness and energy
to escape this harm and get back into safety.
In the modern world, the amygdala can many times be misalarmed.
Social media, news, different fears going on.
Politicians, government, things like that.
If there is a phone alarm, that can also activate your amygdala
and make you more stressed. Or traffic noise.
The more the amygdala gets activated, the more stress responses you accumulate.
If it's too much, too excessive times the amygdala gets activated,
then the stress can become chronic. - It's important to train our nervous system
to be in and out of this arousal state.
It's not to not feel the stress, it's how to unstress
when you feel stressed for a longer period of time.
Look at a dog. If you hear a knock on the door, the dog wakes up.
It's aggressive, fight or flight, wants to know who's there.
A second later, once it understands there's no danger, it goes back to sleep.
Other creatures are much more adept at switching states
much quicker than us. They can switch everything off, be back at resting,
in that "rest and digest". Humans, we're not so good at that.
Humans of the past faced primarily stressors of survival.
Nowadays our stress is slightly different, associated with sleep deprivation,
working too much, social media and environmental pollution.
However, not all stress is bad.
In fact we need some stressors to stay optimal and healthy.
For example, exercise and working out are fundamentally stressful to the body.
We're breaking down muscle tissue and releasing stress hormones.
But after we've recovered from it, we actually get stronger.
On the other hand, a sedentary lifestyle makes us more fragile
and increases the risk of many diseases.
So how can we leverage stress to our advantage
and collaborate with it to become stronger and healthier versions of ourselves?
Stages of stress.
Stress can be divided into three different stages.
First there is the stressor, which can be emotional,
physical or even mental.
It's very useful to analyze and become aware
of what is actually causing me the stress.
Many people don't even know that. They are in a high stress state all the time
and they think for example that they are working too much.
But in reality there is some sort of background noise in the workplace
that is causing their nervous system to be hyperalarmed all the time.
It can even be a person. It can be your working poster.
It can be the air quality in the workplace or the travel to the work.
There are so many different stressors. The next stage is distress.
We have physiological response, emotional response
and it can also affect social functioning.
This is where people normally become aware that something is not in balance.
In this stage, the most important thing is the stress management.
The final stage is the burnout. The stress has become so prominent
that it causes very-very clear symptoms
which are deteriorating your immunity, your mood.
You become anxious or depressed.
This final stage of stress is the hardest to manage.
Anyone who feels stressed out or burned out should stop and assess the situation.
What are the sources of stress, how are they affecting you
and if you can somehow transform them. - What is stressing you out?
What causes your mind and body to be hyperalarmed or in a bad mood
or just in a fight or flight state? If you can remove that, remove that.
If it's a loud noise in your office, wear noise-canceling headphones.
If it's about air quality, ventilate the room more or get some room plants.
If it's bad ergonomy, you need to improve the ergonomy.
If the stressor keeps appearing in your life
then the stress will always be there. - If you have sleep issues, you cannot rest.
Your fight or flight nervous system is all the time active.
And then come the problems: heart palpitations,
anxiety, depression, cardiovascular issues, higher blood pressure and so on.
All these signs are kind of like an alarm for people:
"Hey! Stop! Take it easy."
If your body says "I'm stressed, take a break",
then we should have the courage to take that break.
Stress does have a direct impact on our physical health and bodies,
however a lot of stressors in our environment aren't physical.
More often than not, they're mental and imagined.
This kind of psychological stress can be as harmful as physical stress itself.
Imagined or real?
The brain cannot really tell if you are imagining something
or if it is happening in real life.
It actually doesn't matter in what situation you're in,
whether you are in an ice bath, whether you are playing sports,
whether you are writing a Facebook message and someone didn't like it
or has a bad comment. Stress is manifested in the body in exactly the same way.
Imagining a threat in your head lights up the same regions in the brain
as experiencing it in real time does. For example,
I'm sure you've seen a horror movie. It increases your heart rate,
you get anxious, it releases stress hormones and it feels real, but it's not.
At the same time your body perceives as if it is real and treats it as a threat.
And this all actually boils down to the cellular level.
Your cells are not responding directly to the environment,
but they respond to the different neurochemicals and biomedical messengers
that you are releasing into your bloodstream.
If you get stressed and release thing like cortisol and adrenalin,
your cells will react to that environment.
Stress management.
When you learn how to control your mind and your emotional responses
and your nervous system's reactiveness,
you naturally build more resilience to stress.
Stress management is a learnable skill. There's a split second in every moment
to decide how you react. If you practice something
like meditation or breathing techniques, take a deep breath before every action,
it enables you a few seconds to change the way how you respond,
to be less reactive.
The frustration can be the actual thing that damages you,
not the thing that somebody cut you in the traffic or a queue.
It's your emotional response. Emotion does not always have to lead to behaviour.
Let's say something is frustrating you or making you angry.
Feel that emotion and realize that this is making me upset
and just let it go. - Better stress management is better response.
It's all about how you respond to the e-mails and demands of other people
and especially demands that you set for yourself.
"It is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it." - Hans Selye.
Adapt & survive.
Every adaptation in the body is a result of necessity.
If you don't use it, you lose it. For example, let's take muscle.
If you were to be hospitalized and you aren't able to move your muscles
or exercise, then eventually those muscles will begin to deteriorate.
One of the funniest ideas I've picked from Arthur Haines and Daniel Vitalis
who are these nature-based philosophers, they coined the term
"homo fragilis", the wise, but fragile human being.
I remember, even in my school books we had this future human.
We'll be very thin, we don't need muscle mass,
we just need a lot of hair in our face to filter the bad quality air we have.
A very dystopian picture of this almost alien-like being
that we are sort of becoming. If you look at a human being
from let's say the paleolithic era, it had a much stronger bone structure,
much more muscle mass, more nutrient intake.
Physiologically we've been actually domesticating ourselves.
And that's kind of the core idea:
if we really want to build the resilience and stress buffers and all of these,
we need to really mimic many of the aspects of our lifestyles
that have been evolving for a very long time.
Because our modern environment is quite different from our ancestral environment,
we don't really experience the same stressors as we did in the past.
Most people don't fast, they don't experience the cold nor the heat.
That's why we may lose some of our ability to tolerate those stressors.
The body's constantly trying to find this state of efficiency.
That's why it's so important to keep those pathways open,
that's why we do those kinds of positive stress like expose ourselves to the cold,
like fasting, sauna, a physical workout, lifting weights, things like that.
If we don't keep those pathways open,
the body doesn't have a use for those and it diverts the energy elsewhere.
The ability to adapt is essential for survival
because the environment is always going to be challenging us in some way
and exposing us to various stressors.
If we think about decades back, we had very different means for survival
or skills that we needed. We actually needed to survive
with hunting food and learning to build a shelter.
In today's society we don't have to worry about survival that much.
We have food everywhere, we have shelter
and all of these hedonistic pleasures that we can go after.
It's more about the question of staying healthy and happy during our lifespan.
Dopamine.
Our modern environment is quite different from our ancestral environment,
but at the same time our bodies are still the same bodies we had in the past.
We have this evolutionary jet lag.
We have these primal bodies, but we live in a modern world.
This can cause some incoherence.
It's so convenient to just drive through and order the burger.
It's so easy to scoop a few candies in the bag, weigh it off and out you go.
There's fast food all around us. We might feel sad
or we might want some comfort food, reach for the sugar, reach for candies.
These might make us feel good, feel happy, alert or alive,
hyperactive for a little bit of time, but there's always the crash.
And then what are you gonna do? Go back and find the same thing again.
You want to chase the dragon of that high, that emotional feeling.
The reason why we like sugary things, chocolate and sex
is that it gives us a feeling of reward and releases this dopamine.
That's actually why we have so many sick people today.
They find bad behavioral patterns and are trapped in those vicious cycles.
The dopamine, the chocolate, the smartphone, those are not the issues.
The issue is our inability to control our behaviour.
It's almost like the set of skills that we need in today's society
is reverse that of those that we needed decades ago
when we actually had to have the dopamine to go after these things.
Now we have to use more of these sort of cognitive inhibition skills
that every time we see a food queue or social media announcement
that we won't be rushing to them. Because this will create a stress loop.
Every time we get something we feel like we need to respond to that.
What kind of cues are actually leading to the habits, for you to get the reward?
Becoming aware. Let's say you see a friend and you immediately think,
okay, let's grab a beer or something like that.
Or you go into a certain place which has a certain smell,
like the smell of a cookie or something like that.
And you immediately... You don't even think. Let's take the cookie.
When you learn to see and be mindful about these different cues,
you are actually being able to change these, if you would like.
I like actually biohacking in general,
because it's not like ideology, religion or philosophy.
It's like a toolbox and there's this community of biohackers,
they just bring all the tools in this one box
and you can take whatever tool you want out of this box.
You have this friend's pizza party, beer party.
You don't kind of restrict yourself because you know you have tools available.
You eat this pizza and drink this beer, which is of course no good for you,
but because of friends and socializing you still do that.
So, what I do in these cases, family gatherings and things like that,
I know that Mondays are always the empty days for me.
And I know that I can recover by doing this.
Also adding to the fasting, Wim Hof breathing technique
that optimizes your immunity, your healing processes that already happen.
Combining those two things is so powerful that you really can allow yourself
to indulge into these unhealthy foods from time to time.
I consider lifestyle as a kind of system. I apply that system 90% of the time.
10% of the time I just go with the flow.
If I go out with friends and they have beers
I join them and I drink a beer. I drink a glass of wine, maybe two.
If you apply the rule of 80-20 or 90-10, then you can enjoy all the moments in life
and go back the next day, applying your system again
so that you still stay healthy and can enjoy life.
Eating habits.
We have been taught that we should eat multiple times per day
to keep the metabolism up, so to speak.
Breakfast, AM snack, lunch.
PM snack, dinner, bedtime snack.
But what it actually does is spiking the blood glucose and also the insulin
multiple times per day. You can think it like this:
the more often you spike the blood glucose and the insulin,
your body eventually becomes resistant to it.
The same thing also happens when you have multiple stressors throughout the day.
You secrete cortisol and the receptors actually receiving the hormones,
they become resistant. They are like: "Uh, enough of this."
And then you need to secrete even more and more
and this is kind of a snowball effect which eventually can lead to diabetes
and also chronic stress. - Before someone develops diabetes,
they usually live years with prediabetes. Prediabetes is a serious health condition
where blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough yet
to be diagnosed as type II diabetes. It's more common than you would think.
For example, more than 1 in 3 Americans have prediabetes.
Different foods affect blood sugar levels differently.
For example, simple sugars and carbs will spike your blood sugar levels much more
than proteins and fat. You can check each food's glycemic index
which tells you how the food impacts blood sugar levels.
The higher the number, the bigger the impact.
Generally it's a good idea to aim for lower glycemic index foods.
Instead of always taking the banana, go with less sugary like the green kiwi.
That's a better option.
Instead of eating a huge amount of fruit, go with berries.
Changing your eating habits is as crucial as changing the actual food.
Let's say you have a hamburger and a Coke.
It takes you five minutes, a thousand calories, boom!
You don't even realize you have some so-called "food" in your system.
When you're stressed out, your body is more prone
to storing the calories that you eat as body fat,
because the stressed out response is going to shut down digestion.
So the longer time you actually spend with the food,
the better the digestion also works. Take at least 20 minutes for the eating
and do not use laptop or watch TV and stimulate yourself,
but concentrate on eating. Be mindful about eating.
Time restricted eating.
If you talk about the nutrition and the diets in the whole world,
there is only one thing that is common in all continents,
every religion, every population.
It's fasting. Exactly this part where you don't eat.
The first thing people think about when they hear "fasting" is starvation.
Truth of the matter is that it's very hard for humans to starve
if they just skip breakfast because we carry thousands of calories
in our adipose tissue all the time with us
and in order to reach the starvation state we would have to fast for days,
even weeks. - Back in the old days the hunter-gatherers running around
and maybe they're successful, maybe they find the kill, find the meat,
but what happens in between, if they're unsuccessful?
Humans are actually able to survive without food for long periods of time.
Fasting has helped humans to survive before we had access to
supermarkets and refrigerators. In fact, during evolution,
individuals whose brains and bodies functioned well in a fasted state
were successful in acquiring food, enabling their survival and reproduction.
If you're not used to any form of intermittent fasting, you will experience
higher levels of hunger and discomfort when you do skip a meal.
It's not necessarily caused by the fasting or the skipping of the meal.
It's just caused by your body's inability to tolerate this type of a stressor.
If you were to practice fasting on a regular basis,
you would build up your body's ability to tolerate this kind of stress response.
You will also become more robust and stronger
against various nutrition-related stressors.
During the fasting time you actually heal your body.
You actually increase your potential, you get stronger,
you get mind focus. There are lots of benefits that you get
just by fasting for let's say 12 hours, 16 hours, 20 hours.
Maybe even 5-7 days. - Fasting is another example of these hormetic stressors
that in moderation and small amounts will elicit a positive response in the body.
In addition to the health benefits, intermittent fasting is also practical
in this modern society where we're surrounded by food all the time.
It's especially useful when traveling, when you don't have access to quality food
you can just skip a few meals and say to yourself
that you are doing some fasting and getting some health benefits from it.
There are many types of fasting, but they all follow the same principle
which entails restricting the eating window.
The easiest way to start is delaying breakfast or having an early dinner.
Micronutrients.
One of the key nutrients your body uses to deal with stress is magnesium.
Magnesium is important for regulating the autonomous nervous system
and relaxation as well. But the problem is that stress depletes magnesium
by activating the sympathetic nervous system and on top of that,
we don't get that much magnesium from our food either
because of soil depletion, erosion, food processing and eating a poor diet.
The amount of micronutrients in the foods have been downward trending
for the past 50 years and actually even accelerating in the past 15 years.
Most people are needing extra magnesium.
They're not necessarily highly deficient, but they're functionally deficient
which means that they're not getting the optimal amount for their bodies.
This is not something that you can just scan yourself and feel you lack it or not.
You have to do the lab tests.
The first step is to go with eating whole foods, not processed foods.
Not foods with a long label of different ingredients.
Go with foods that are nutrient dense.
That is the best way to fix any deficiencies in micronutrients.
Liver is like a natural multivitamin.
It contains most of the vitamins and minerals your body needs.
Another good example is the egg yolk.
Gut health.
What we did to our environment we pretty much did to our intestines.
I think one of the biggest problems for our gut health
has been all the processed food. We often think about those just as like,
well, there is probably a bit too much sugar or carbohydrates.
But we don't think at the level of, are you feeding the bad bacteria in your gut
or are you basically... If I'd have a soil,
and I'm a farmer, I love that stuff, like hands-on, thinking about
how do I enrich this soil so that I can plant seeds there that are strong
and have vigor and all that. If you think about your gut as this soil,
and you're basically throwing just like shitty pesticides and all that in there.
You're pretty much getting very weak plants.
So that's kind of the metaphor:
we haven't thought about many semi-unhealthy foods
at the level of, how does this sweetener for example affect gut bacteria?
Does it feed the good stuff or does it feed the bad stuff?
And I remember one of the classic studies was
this one professor who fed his son just a McDonalds diet
and he basically cut out 40% of the bacterial diversity from his gut.
That just gives you the idea to keep in mind
that when we go a bit deeper from the macronutrients, protein and carbs
into a world of bacteria, then you need to start thinking about
what else is in the food that's affecting the soil.
If we feed that soil with more life, that life expresses itself with more complexity
and that complexity means more neuroconnections, more new ideas.
I think it's fascinating that we are going in the right direction at least.
We're not simplifying it into specific ingredients
that are anti-inflammatory for example and supporting high performance.
We are basically looking at diversity and how that supports resilience
and your health and connectivity to the environment around you.
There are many ways that you can be more connected with your local food supply.
For example, go to the farmer's market and buy produce that grows in your region.
Or go pick some mushrooms and berries in the forest.
Growing your own herbs and plants at home is also a pretty good alternative.
Environmental stress.
Most people today are living in city environments.
We basically lost something that can be considered in medical terms
as homeostasis: that you are in a healthy balance
with different aspects and systems in your environment.
In a modern environment, people lose that balance.
They lose connection to themselves and to the very immediate environment.
They lose connection to their true nature as what it means to be for example human.
This is what causes many of the imbalances that lead to chronic disease.
Often when people go camping, they're like astronauts going to space.
They have all this gear. Backpacks full of things,
camping gear, all kinds of survival gear.
As if they had lost a connection to their true selves,
that they actually are a part of nature.
We are so disconnected, so alienated from our true nature
that we need all this protective equipment to keep nature away from us.
If you spend some time in nature, step-by-step you start to learn
and see that you need less and less equipment and things.
That the environment can actually fulfill everything you need
in terms of food, shelter and survival.
But very few people nowadays know how to do that.
People often forget many of these principles,
but when they get to a crisis like a pandemic or a lockdown,
that is when they suddenly want to be in nature,
that is suddenly when they want to learn to be self-sustainable,
that's when they suddenly want to learn to hunt
to gather their own wealth from nature.
Your environment dictates the default state of your mind.
The more time you spend in a particular environment, the more used to it you get.
For example, if you've never been in a noisy city before,
at first it's gonna be pretty stressful and create some anxiety.
But after a while you're gonna get used to it and you barely even notice
all the noise, the bright lights, traffic and all the other distractions.
If you take a wild animal from its natural habitat and put it into a zoo,
what we want to do is of course give kind of the proper nutrition
that the species eats in its wild environment
and kind of hack the environment to suit its needs.
Now we've done that as human beings.
We've been living indoors for quite a while
and we still have this innate gravitation towards the environment
we grew up in for literally a few hundred thousand years at least.
So I think that's itself very stressful.
Spending time in nature is relaxing. A lot of people can attest to that.
As humans we've evolved to be in nature most of the time.
It does have a direct effect on our physiology as well as our psychology.
Research has found that this kind of "forest bathing", as it's called
has many health benefits. It lowers stress hormones, relaxes the mind,
lowers inflammation and oxidative stress and other similar benefits.
Forest bathing enhances human natural killer cell activity
and expression of anti-cancer proteins.
Once you escape the city environment and you go to a forest for example,
you're actually exposed to a wide variety of different bacteria,
fungus and so on in the air. That supports your immunity
and stimulates it in a beneficial way.
Everything is very sterile in the modern environment.
We're afraid of pathogens, bacteria and viruses.
But the truth is that we need those things, we need the bacteria,
because our bodies are made of trillions of different non-human lifeforms.
They help us to digest our food, produce energy and keep our immune system strong.
Immune system.
We have two immune systems. One is the innate immune system,
the one that we're born with. The second one is the adaptive immune system,
the one we build up throughout our lifetime
based upon what exposure we experience and what lifestyle habits we have.
So imagine, we are living in a very sterile environment.
We use a bunch of chemicals, detergents and disinfectants all the time.
We may end up doing ourselves a disservice
by weakening our adaptive immune system.
Everyone knows that trees and plants help us to breathe.
They produce oxygen for us, but they also have other quite beneficial effects
in terms of secreting essential oils and all the particles into the air
that we can inhale and that in turn can strengthen our immune system
as well as improve our respiration. We need to kind of expose ourselves
to these kinds of ingredients, as our immune system needs to adapt to them.
If we were to completely avoid all different viruses, pathogens,
bacteria and ingredients, our immune system would get weaker in a way
because we don't get the reference experience and the exposure.
In a city environment you have to bring nature into your apartment,
for example, you can use air-purifying plants and filtration technologies.
You can use essential oils and red light panels and so on
if you don't have access to direct sunlight.
Most of the biohacking tools, funnily enough, are kind of band aids
to try to mimic those very comforting and calming effects
that we grew up with, evolutionarily.
Most of these technologies are beneficial for a modern man
living in concrete environments, but once you escape that concrete jungle,
you don't need a lot of these technologies
because you can be already in your natural habitat.
"The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient"
"while nature cures the disease." - Voltaire.
Productivity.
You have to understand that your best work happens when you are healthy,
alert and ready to do what you need to do.
If you are tired, sleep-deprived or not a nice person to be around
because you're so stressed and reactive, you're not going to do your best work.
The way to find balance between work and health
starts by understanding that most growth doesn't happen
when you stimulate something.
When you go to the gym, your muscle doesn't grow when you stimulate it.
It grows when you are resting.
Similarly, when you learn something, when you read a book,
the stimulus, what happens in that situation, is not what leads to learning,
but it's actually when you sleep. In a similar way, the most effective work
is a result of adequate recovery. - I'm always saying to people,
work hard, rest harder.
So it's not only about looking at how you interact with your tools,
about having a standing desk or a saddle chair
or an ergonomic keyboard and the monitor at the right height and level.
You also look at how you recover, how you sleep, cognitively.
Productivity hacks.
People have built up different protocols and tools
like the Pomodoro technique where you're aiming to work
20 minutes focused on one thing or one task at a time.
What is key for getting as many moments of focused attention in your work day
is actually the breaks that you hold between those sessions.
The problem is, there is only a certain amount of information our brain can hold
before it gets tired. The same applies to running and lifting weights.
You need to take a break and recover.
If your brain is constantly simulated, if you're constantly working and thinking,
you're focusing hard, then it's not going to allow all this information to set in
and you're going to get tired eventually.
Sometimes the most productive thing you could do is take a break.
Instead of just sitting in front of your computer all day long
you have a break where you get a little bit of movement,
change the environment, look at a completely different thing.
Focus on the horizon or on the short distance. Move your body a little bit.
That often actually leads to more creative ideas to come up.
Most people think of high performance culture and work in terms of
putting as many hours of effective time in as they can,
but many studies in the last few years have noticed that people get more done
and they are more productive if they do less, but more effectively.
Sweden is shifting to a 6-hour work day.
Finland's Prime Minister suggested a 4-day workweek or 6-hour days
I usually only work like 5-6 hours per day.
Efficiency is doing things in an efficient way.
Effectiveness is doing the right things. It's not about the hours you put in,
but the way how you do those hours that matters.
Flow state.
Humans are performing at their best when they spend more time in a flow state.
What happens is, your prefrontal cortex that analyzes what you do
shuts down and you just lose yourself, you lose sense of time.
You're just so focused on the work you do. - You're not distracted by anything else,
you're not doing any social media while creating content, writing
or creating a presentation. You are blocking out things.
The key here is ultimate mastery of mindfulness and meditation.
Meditation increases the capability of being focused on the present moment
and being totally immersed in what you're doing.
The hippocampus is the learning center of the brain.
It's an area that activates every time you learn new information
or you memorize something. Meditation increases activation in the hippocampus
and helps you to consolidate the memories you have learned.
I still remember the day that I realized
that I have never lived in the present moment.
That was kind of a shock. We actually have this "now" moment.
I've been either in the future or the past or thinking about the future
or rushing things to get to the next thing.
So learning to be in the now and being mindful about your own life is the key.
Then you can extend that into meditation practice. It's not just for women.
Meditation.
I started thinking about my nervous system and my stress levels
in every concept in my life. How can I reduce stress accumulating in my body?
One of the biggest things that really aided me with migraines was meditation.
If you just imagine a threat,
you will alarm your nervous system and get that fight-or-flight state.
Likewise, if you just imagine a nice calm beach
or the presence of your loved ones or a positive moment,
your brain will react to that as if it were happening.
We can see a correlation between the years of meditation and amygdala size.
In some studies, those who have meditated for a long time have a smaller amygdala
which means that by default they are less reactive to external fear signals.
Create more space between your thoughts and your reactions
and you can actually become aware of different kinds of thoughts you have.
They are not necessarily your thoughts, just thoughts torturing you a little bit
and then they go away. If you are not attaching to these thoughts
you become more free. - Meditation alters brain structure and function
and can help in managing the nervous system and stress responses.
How quickly you can change your emotional state,
how well you can be present for your family and coworkers
or just be present in the life, that needs a little bit of effort.
The quantification is not that obvious.
Not like muscle growth that you can actually see.
The modern idea of exercise with gym memberships and so on is flawed.
Movement.
If you think of the modern man and how we work nowadays,
we sit long periods of time in front of our computers.
We're basically physiologically and biomechanically in a form
that is not natural and doesn't come naturally to us.
Office workers spend too much time at their desks, experts say.
Average 8,6 hours per day.
If you are inactive for long periods of time during the day,
what happens is your lymphatic flow doesn't move.
When you look at the human body, the heart is a pump
that pumps nutrients, blood and oxygen all around the body.
The lymphatic system doesn't have a pump. It requires some kind of movement.
It requires you to use your body and your skeletal system
and some gravity also, by hitting your feet on the ground.
That is key for making sure that your body is functioning optimally.
Those people who are metabolically active throughout the day
but don't incorporate any specific movements or exercise
or hobbies into their day are healthier and have lower all-cause mortality
compared to those who are stagnant and don't move 8-10 hours per day
and after work they do all their exercise in the evenings.
Sitting all day and then going for hard exercise
isn't the best way of going about it. You should want to focus more
on doing lower intensity exercise and movement throughout the day.
Like walking. It's one of my favourite forms of moving myself,
it doesn't put that much stress on the body and you can recover from it faster.
It's very important to have these regular movement breaks
throughout the day, spread out.
A term that has been used about this type of exercise is "grease the groove".
Instead of going to the gym for one hour a few times a week
you're actually incorporating a few minutes of exercise throughout the day.
Some people run on a treadmill when they have online meetings.
Some people are doing stretches while in an online meeting.
Walking in a forest in uneven territory is better than just having walks.
Basically, making it slightly more difficult to move,
to use your physical environment like our original ancestors did,
that is probably the best thing to think about
when thinking about movement in the workplace.
How can I move in my working environment and do things that our ancestors did
in an environment that was not built like modern concrete office environments.
Not 10,000 steps a day but 500 or 1000 steps an hour.
Don't take elevators, take stairs and walk.
You don't have to go to the gym, just carry your groceries home.
Detox.
In a city environment, if you get exposed to environmental pollution,
tobacco smoke and so on, you may want to consider using nutritional supplements
and interventions that speed up removal of some of these sources of pollution.
You get heavy metals, different chemicals and toxins accumulating in our fat tissue.
Sweating is one of the primary detoxification pathways of the human body.
You can speed up extraction of potential pollutants
by sweating and using traditional means like a sauna.
There's a couple different types of fat. There's the stored fat, white fats,
like excess energy in the body. That's what we walk around with.
Your body conserves that so we can maybe use that later.
Brown fat is something that's stimulated at about 14-16 degrees.
Brown fat breaks down white fat stores and uses that as energy.
This is why you can grow more and more accustomed to the cold temperatures
and you can regulate your own temperature a lot more efficiently.
Cold exposure.
What happens when you go into the cold? You can train your nervous system
to get more flexible.
The cold water is always the same. The only variable is you.
Your mood, your state can be different on a day-to-day basis
but in the lake or the Baltic sea, the temperature remains constant.
The cold is a more righteous kind of thing. That's why it's like a mirror.
It shows you who you are on that particular day and moment in time.
When you go into the cold, your body kind of gets the signal
that you are going to die. You are really going to die.
It's controlled stress. When you apply slower exhale than the inhale,
you actually train your nervous system that even though outside is cold,
you still are in a calm position, a calm mode.
Once maybe doesn't help. Twice, it helps already better.
If you apply that regularly, you get stronger.
I started to do cold exposure because of my Finnish colleagues.
They have these little rituals, Christmas parties and things like that.
Every year they would ask me to come to the sauna, which was okay.
Once you get used to taking your clothes off with Finnish people it became okay.
But then, everywhere you have a sauna you you have a body of water.
I couldn't escape it. They were always interested to see the Australian guy
go into the cold water. After about three of these parties
I decided that okay, I'm going to show these guys that I can do this.
I made every mistake in the book, but I learned very quickly
and when that next Christmas party came, I was ready to go.
I kind of got in there and these guys were filming me with their Nokia cameras.
They were amazed that the Australian guy can do it now.
The joke became a little less funny when they realized
they had to beat the Australian guy in the cold and outdo his time.
I like to push my boundaries, be it a dip in the ice water
or a very hard sauna session. Something that feels uncomfortable.
When you overcome the uncomfortableness, that makes you feel that you're alive
and you've actually accomplished something.
Cold exposure has so many unique benefits.
You can become more resilient towards the cold and different temperatures.
I started to realize that also I wasn't getting sick.
My immune system was being boosted by this.
I haven't been sick for 9 years since I've been doing this in Finland.
Research shows that winter swimmers have higher levels of glutathione,
the body's main master antioxidant system.
Whenever you are practicing cold exposure, your body up-regulates its defense system
and boosts the immune system. - I know if I eat candy or something,
I regret it 20 minutes later
and then I don't want to do it for another month, then maybe I'll do it again.
Cold exposure is something that keeps drawing me back.
It's just this amazing feeling that you can kind of feel inside your body
and it's sort of like trying to escape.
I had so much success with it
that I even decided to build my own ice bath at home.
Each morning I jump into my ice bath and after that you feel amazing.
With cold exposure, if you're going out for an ice bath
or if you're going into nature, you only need to go two minutes once a week.
That's all you need to do to get this full effect
where the brown fat's being produced and you're getting these happy hormones,
your immune system is being rebalanced and reset during this process.
It's only two minutes. It's very possible, very easy.
Every single time I go into the water, I experience the same cold.
It's just that I'm okay with it. It's important to understand
that being cold is just a feeling,
it's just a signal that your body sends to your brain
telling you it's dangerous to be there.
But if you take it just as a signal that tries to communicate something,
same with fasting, if you get this starvation, this hunger,
it's just a feeling, just a signal that tries to tell you:
to survive, you need to eat. To survive, you need to get out of this cold water.
So just take it as a signal. Maybe just step aside
and ask yourself: how do I feel in this moment?
Try to do this objective assessment of your whole body
and you will love it.
"There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen." - Rumi.
Everyone is more or less very aware how our thoughts affect our bodies.
We can feel the butterflies in our stomach when we are nervous.
On the other hand, often times when you eat shitty food
you might not realize how much it affects your mental state.
Because of course the vagus nerve and everything communicates all the time,
your body and your brain are interconnected
and that's what we're trying to crack and hack in the biohacking community.
There are a lot of signals coming into our brain in terms of thoughts
because of the financials, because of relationships with other people,
because of the job and many different things that are on your plate.
To-do lists are very long, so there is no time to stop
and think to yourself, to scan your body, to understand what's going on.
So it's easy to actually confuse those two things.
Like for instance, gluten. I know that gluten is not good for me
because when I go to my mother's and she makes a pancake
out of the normal wheat, I eat two pancakes,
my stomach feels like I had eaten a hundred pieces.
And that's the difference, I know. Usually I would have thought
that I just ate too many of them because I like them.
Now I eat two and I feel the same thing.
Maybe it's gluten, maybe it's my leaky gut or something like that,
But to be able to understand signals that your body is trying to tell you,
you need to stop. You need to pay attention.
You need to step aside and ask this question: how do I feel?
It's one of the best ways to get back to the connection with your deeper self.
Quantified self.
What's interesting with biohacking, why do we use a lot of gadgets and tools,
it's because technology made us weak and technology may a little bit help
to make us strong again and understand ourselves better.
We have some incredible technology that can guide us, give us information,
tell us what's happening inside our veins, what the condition of our blood is.
But at the end of the day, that's just a guide. You have to listen to it.
You can use that as a way to understand yourself and your own systems.
If you're looking to improve your health through self-tracking,
the best way to start would be measuring your sleep.
You will see how exercise, food and lifestyle choices affect your sleep.
Another great tool is a continuous glucose monitor
which tells you how metabolically flexible you are
and how your body reacts to different kinds of foods.
Sleep.
So in a nutshell it doesn't really matter
how hard you train or how well you eat, if you sleep like shit.
Stress and sleep are closely linked.
Stress can adversely affect sleep quality and duration
while insufficient sleep can increase stress levels.
Both stress and lack of sleep can lead to physical and mental health problems.
Sleep is like a building block and the first and most important biohack
for controlling stress levels and the nervous system.
During sleep, there are actually many processes going on in the body.
The first hours of the night you get more deep sleep
and later in the night you get more REM sleep.
During deep sleep the brain is detoxifying from harmful substances.
If you don't get that deep sleep, there will be more toxins in your nervous system
which obviously keeps the nervous system in a higher stress state.
If you want to gain muscle mass and gain strength,
you need to have a certain amount of deep sleep.
In deep sleep you actually grow.
During REM sleep the nervous system is recovering.
If you don't get REM, your nervous system is so much more reactive the next day.
One night of bad sleep is not a disaster,
but when you have another one and another and then it's actually chronic,
everything changes. Your metabolism changes.
You crave more glucose, sugars and carbohydrates.
You make bad decisions, it's harder to concentrate
and the quality of life is much worse.
For old people, lack of sleep increases the amygdala hyperreactivity.
If you don't sleep, your nervous system gets even more alarmed.
I know that way too well.
Let's say I had a full 24-hour shift in the ER, I was working all night.
I was really like... "Donuts!"
I was craving this highly satiating junk food.
The sleep deprivation messes up normal physiological mechanisms.
Different techniques can be used to help with insomnia.
To fall asleep faster, learn how to progressively relax all your muscles
so that you get into deeper relaxation and change the brain activation
so that you get into deeper brain waves.
"Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health. When sleep is deficient,"
"there is sickness and disease. When sleep is abundant,"
"there is vitality and health." - Matthew Walker, PhD
I reduced my work load dramatically, I switched my job to an easier one,
no night shifts. I began sleeping more, spending more time in the bed,
having more relaxing time. - The problem with sleep is that
when you don't wake up during the night it doesn't count as good sleep.
Lots of people think that they sleep well but they really don't.
That's where technology has a role to play because if you're not measuring,
you're not tracking, you're not getting that data, not seeing the real situation,
then you'll never actually know. With technology we can make small adjustments
on a day-by-day basis and improve the quality of sleep.
Things like sleep hygiene, the temperature of the room,
what's the half-life of coffee and caffeine in your system.
You can adjust these things in real time and you'll see the results
through the technology, through the data, through measuring.
I'm using all kinds of tracking technologies
to track how my nervous system and sleep quality is doing
and even in a city environment, although I might feel rested
and my data looks okay, when I go to nature,
there's a distinguishable difference in the way how I feel
and how recovered I feel after a good night's sleep.
It also reflects on the data. I get lower heart rate,
I get higher heart rate variability, I get more deep sleep
and also lower blood pressure when I'm in nature.
And I don't need any technology to feel that. I can feel it with my body
much more directly than in a city environment
where I might need technologies like this to tell me how I feel.
There's a few components here. You're less exposed to EMF
so there's less interference with your brain wave patterns
and your physiological processes. And the other thing that happens
is also your body temperature drops much more during nighttime
because it is in sync with nature. In city environments
we are basically constantly in tropical environments,
around 24-25 degrees Celsius, but in nature there is natural variation.
When you go to sleep, your body temperature naturally drops
and when environmental temperature drops alongside your body temperature,
that is what we are actually adapted to. That is what is good for us.
You can also drop your body temperature artificially
by using mattresses that are moving away heat from your body.
In my home I actually use a device
that is cooling my body with the mattress by circulating cold water in it.
Another thing I would do is avoid eating too late in the evening
because when you eat something, that is highly metabolic activity.
Your body converts nutrients into energy and it's a thermogenic process
that increases your body temperature as well.
Melatonin is a hormone that we often relate to sleep.
It also has other effects. It's not just that it promotes sleep,
but it also improves recovery. Your body increases its recovery rate
when you have melatonin circling in your system.
What you don't want to do is delay melatonin release in the evening
by being exposed to artificial sources of light.
Artificial light.
In the evening you should dim the lights, go more towards the red light,
the natural sunset light and not have any bright lights,
especially not blue light because it's blocking melatonin production.
Blue light is not your enemy, but the amount of it
and what periods of time you get it. In the morning hours you want blue light
because it helps you synchronize your biological clock.
Circadian rhythm is where all of our organs, our body and the systems inside it
are in alignment and in accordance with nature and our surroundings.
The circadian rhythms control almost all aspects of our physiology,
starting with the metabolism, digestion of food, hormones and cognition even.
We actually have this clock. Usually the alertness is highest
in the morning and the mid-morning.
You have your best reaction time about 2-3 PM.
Your strength and power is highest at about 4-5 PM.
And so on. Different kinds of systems are active at different points in time.
Probably the best example of the circadian rhythms is the diurnal rhythm
of cortisol, the stress hormone, and melatonin, the sleep hormone.
In the morning when we wake up, cortisol is supposed to give us energy
and energize ourselves for the rest of the day,
whereas in the evening, melatonin is supposed to make us drowsy
and promote better recovery for the night ahead.
The best way to synchronize your biological clock
is to have really bright lights in the morning
and the best way of course is sunlight, the natural light.
When you don't have that, you're going to have problems.
In Finland in wintertime it's kind of hard to get the natural light
because it's very dark in the morning. - I might use something like a blue light
in the morning, like a daylight lamp or glasses like this
to give my brain the signal that now it's day. The earlier I do it, the better.
If your body's circadian rhythms are aligned with those of the environment
then it's easier to stay healthy. Your body experiences less stress
and less information. - Now in the evening,
you don't want to be too exposed to blue wavelengths of light
but you want to actually block it and get more of the longer wavelengths
that are related to sunset.
If you are the kind of person who stays up much later than others
then that's the result of your habits and lifestyle
and not necessarily the result of your genetics or physicological blueprint.
If you were to go to nature, like for camping,
you would hit this reset button for your circadian rhythms.
Chances are you just fall asleep when the sun goes out
and you wake up with the sunrise.
When the rhythm of your day and your life gets messed up,
everything gets messed up. - Misalignment with the circadian rhythms
is going to promote disease. Shift work is actually considered a carcinogen.
It's essentially because of this misalignment from the circadian rhythms.
There is a lot of research showing that disrupted circadian rhythms
can cause many imbalances and chronic diseases in the body.
However we don't need to become cavemen in order to stay healthy.
Here are a few easy tips of how to keep your circadian cycles aligned.
Go outside, expose yourself to daylight, consume food when the sun is out,
install blue light reducing apps and sleep in complete darkness.
Longevity.
Imagine you are in a supermarket and you have a budget: 50 euros.
You walk around and you see there are no price tags on all the goods.
But you get those goods in the basket and you go to the cashier.
The cashier says: "Sorry, you have goods here for 100 euros."
That's a problem. It's the same with health. If you go out with friends
eating pizza and drinking beer and being up all night long,
you know it costs you something. And it will cost you something.
We know the end result is such that in Latvia,
the average lifespan is 75, but healthspan is 55 years.
Imagine what happens in these 20 years. People live in misery,
walking from one doctor to another, popping pills
and living a really bad life. It's only because they didn't know the price tags.
What amazes me is each time I talk to other people
I discover that there is a disconnect between what they do with their body
and what they expect from the body.
One way or another, they are not aware
that it's just the one body you get.
You should do with that one body all your life.
If you damage your body during your lifetime then you know for sure
that you have problems when you get older.
When you take care of that one body you get from the start
and you give it the right maintenance and the right input
then you can expect the right output and be healthy for the rest of your time.
I don't need to become 180 years old.
That's not necessary for me. For me it's all about healthspan.
I want to stay healthy as long as possible and then drop dead.
"In the end, it's not the years in your life that count."
"It's the life in your years." - Abraham Lincoln.
Sense of purpose.
The reason why people are burned out, more than 70% of people feel
disengaged or actively disengaged from the work that they do.
This is on one hand. On the other hand
people's own life goals, the meaning of life
are not properly set for themselves. - I've never seen anyone have a burnout
when really doing something they're so passionate about.
Helping big corporations make more money doesn't give me that purpose in life.
The moment that I decided to change my career it changed my life completely.
Us people are not stagnant like trees. We have legs, we can move around.
Therefore we can also transform our personality and character
so we can become a new person. We don't have to stay the same person
we were in the past. We can constantly keep evolving.
You can change your job, your lifestyle, your environment.
You can always change.
It's not easy. Some people will say, there's a mortgage I have to pay,
all kinds of loans, I need the money.
I had a family and a lot of expenses as well,
but I can tell you that it's worth the risk.
The high achievers are very often goal-oriented people.
A few years ago when I was still running marathons
I set my goal to run under 3 hours and 30 minutes.
I prepared myself, went into a ketogenic diet,
I worked on my running mechanics and I actually did a lot of stuff
to achieve this goal. I did. But what happened?
The race was on Sunday. On Monday I was an empty sack
because that was my goal. I fulfilled it.
But it didn't bring me the fulfillment I expected. For the next week or so
I was really-really depressed. I didn't know what to do.
Should I set my goal to 3 hours or something like that?
Eventually all my nice good practices evaporated
because I didn't have this goal ahead of me.
Setting goals and achieving them is great for getting short-term results,
but you should also look beyond those goals.
Instead of thinking how you're going to lose those three pounds
you should think how to stay healthy and fit for the rest of your life.
We need to create these life-meanings, why we do what we do,
so that it brings us forward, so that you can feel that you get better,
you improve and grow as a person, as an individual.
Only then can you avoid burnout.
The amount of things we can control in this world is minuscule
compared to the things we cannot. That can be a great source of anxiety and stress.
Not all people that live in the city have the chance to go nature all the time.
It's nothing to stress about. We just need to adapt flexibly
to the biohacks that we can do in our environment that makes us feel good.
We as human beings have the natural tendency to try to control everything.
We're trying to control our lives, our days. If we feel anxious or stressed,
we immediately try to get rid of it.
But knowing and appreciating that life is ever-changing
and there are always surprises and moments that we don't feel comfortable with
is very important, because that's the only way to adapt to these moments.
If we don't try to push things like uncomfortable feelings away,
we're better able to enjoy every moment.
I've tried to do a lot of difficult things in my life
to remind myself that these kind of stressors or environmental disasters
are not going to go away, they're going to keep happening
and we can't really avoid them. The only thing we can do
is to keep ourselves more resilient, keep ourselves more adaptable
and to prepare for those things in advance.
Even though biohacking emphasizes the holistic aspect of life
and really thinking about every single moment of life, morning to evening,
I think it's really important not to try to control everything
because this can also make you really highly stressed.
It's more about the balance of knowing what's good for you.
Biohacking is supposed to bring you more happiness and health
and mindfulness and ease of mind
rather than creating some rules that you need to blindly follow.
"Uncertainty is the only certainty there is,"
"and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security." - John Allen Paulos.
Humans as a species are so-so.
We are weak, we run slow.
We don't have claws, no sharp teeth. We sort of are not so good,
compared to other mammals for instance.
The reason why we are a dominating species on Earth is our collaboration,
being socially engaged with each other.
One of the reasons humans have survived for so long
is because of our social cooperation. Imagine being alone in nature
or during some sort of crisis or war.
You wouldn't survive for too long if you are alone. We need to stick together.
To be able to maintain this activity that you are aiming for,
to feel better, to do all this healthy stuff, all those biohacks,
pay attention to doing that together with other people.
Because you are easiest to fool yourself and to lie to yourself.
That's why you need somebody else that you don't want to let down.
It's easier to stay healthy with like-minded people.
Even the sleeping tracker, the ring, is like an accountability partner.
Don't be obsessed with data like that. Use it as a trainer, as a coach.
Mentors, coaches, partners, friends, family people.
Everybody. Use them to commit to this betterment of your life.
If a lady gets pregnant, her husband doesn't demand:
"Can you do that in six months?" Of course not.
It takes on average nine months. If you plant a seed, basil or some other herb,
and you want to grow it for your salad,
of course you expect it to grow in three-four weeks,
until you get some leaves and eat it in your salad.
So in nature we are really patient to wait for things that take a long time.
Now, the same goes also for your health.
"Today is the first day of the rest of your life." - Charles Dederich.
If you feel like this is just too much to try to optimize,
you can start with small steps. First reduce using technology in the evening.
That's one step. And then step-by-step, maybe reducing your sugar,
reducing the coffee consumption. Step-by-step, building up to good habits
and making the process easier for you.
The goal is to gain a real mastery of yourself.
Let's say when you wake up, the first thing you do is grab a glass of water,
then go outside for fresh air. That's also a good morning routine.
Even these small things are really effective.
That is the path to self-mastery.
Imagine for instance two spaceships going into space.
The angle of their trajectory is just one degree, barely noticeable.
For a very long time, they are going to fly in parallel,
but they will eventually land in totally different galaxies.
These things affect long-term. Nothing is going to change from tomorrow on
because a one degree angle is a really small one.
You barely notice it, but after some time,
in the long term, you will notice it and everything is gonna be better.
You start the day feeling that you already did some very good things for your health.
I start each morning with 60 seconds of cold shower.
You can extend that period gradually.
Just by taking small steps, you can build it into your life
so that you get used to it. If it's part of your ritual,
you just jump out of bed, you don't need willpower,
you just start doing the right things and each time you can add something else
that you think would be beneficial at this specific moment.
You can take one biohack from the diet,
one biohack from the exercise aspect, one biohack from the meditation aspect.
And sort of really build your own biohack set
that works specifically in your life. - How many people try to fast
because they want to lose weight? That's totally the wrong approach.
You want to optimize for feeling good. Once you start feeling good,
you start recognizing that just to be able to feel good
you need to pay attention to several things at once.
Eating better, sleeping better, moving constantly, training your nervous system,
being surrounded by nice people, having life goals,
financials, everything is underneath that.
If one of those things is missing, you probably won't feel good.
You know, in 70 years we don't have any cell left
that we had previously.
You're actually creating yourself anew all the time.
Why not start now? - You know when is the best time to plant a tree?
It's 20 years ago. You know when is the second-best time to plant a tree?
It's today. - No one is responsible for your health
and no one is interested in your health as much as you are.
In the end, you can consult all kinds of experts,
doctors and specialists and they will say one thing,
but in the end it's you who needs to take responsibility for your own health.
Once you understand that, that's when real change can happen.
English subtitles by Martin Kirotar Interlex Media & Translations