Body & beauty

Rebuild your Body with Biohacking

Tap into your body’s inner workings and become more intuitive than ever before

Have you ever rescheduled a social event because you’re on your period? Or bought red bulbs to replace the iridescent glow of your current bedroom light? If so, congratulations, you’ve dipped your toes into the world of biohacking. Despite its sciencey-sounding name, biohacking isn’t as tech-heavy as you might think. It centres largely around your lifestyle and how you can align your habits and day-to-day living (namely what you eat, when you eat it, and how you exercise), to make you healthier, happier and more productive. In fact, as we find out, some experts think that biohacking can help you become more intuitive than ever.

Back to basics

Recently, biohacking has been a buzzword attached to commercial ventures, such as meal replacement shakes and health testing kits. But, as health and performance coach Angela Foster (angelafosterperformance.com) explains, it needn’t be that complicated. “Biohacking is suitable for everyone and while the technology, devices, and treatments often used within the world of biohacking can be expensive, they’re not absolutely necessary and shouldn’t be used as a substitute for getting the basics right. For example, there would be little point in buying a personal hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber if you haven’t mastered proper breathing techniques first. Breathwork should be your first point of call instead.” One of the best things about biohacking is that many of the principles are free or available at little to no cost. Apps such as Daylio, for example (available free on the app store), where you enter data on how you’ve been feeling during the day, can help you understand what boosts or zaps your energy and what steps you can take to improve it.

Health hacks

“To get started with biohacking, you should look at the key pillars of health and how you can enhance those areas,” says Angela. “Ensuring that you are having good quality sleep, a nutritious diet, engaging in regular movement, getting sufficient sunlight and fresh air, breathing properly and using stress reduction and relaxation techniques are all key foundations of optimising your body and mind. Once you have these in place, you can start to build on more advanced biohacking techniques.” Biohacking our stress receptors can help us develop our flexibility and adaptability in order to quickly and easily recover from challenging situations. “Exposing your body to smaller stressors throughout the week can be really beneficial,” says Angela. “Smaller doses of stress to enhance your function and adaptations, so things such as more intensive workouts, cold showering, and intermittent fasting are good things to help build your body’s resilience.”

Natural rhythms

“If we start paying more attention to what we do, our behaviours and lifestyle and how it affects our health, performance, energy, and mood, we can use things such as wearables and biomarker testing to test, track and tweak our energy and health,” says Angela. “This includes aligning ourselves with our natural cycles, such as our circadian rhythm, or in the case of women, our infradian rhythm.” Take cyclical living for example. By familiarising yourself with your cycle phases: menstruation (your period itself), the follicular phase, the ovulation phase, and the luteal phase – you can tap into when your energy dips and peaks. This can all simply be done by journaling during the different phases of your cycle, recording how you feel as you enter and leave each stage and what you can do to adjust your routine next time around.

Three natural ways to biohack your body

Ditch the tech and go back to basics

1. Connect with nature: Spending time in nature does more than just provide you with your daily dose of vitamin D. Research suggests that it can improve your mood and even increase healing after surgery (scientificamerican.com).

2. Fix your sleep hygiene: Mastering your bedtime is a fantastic way to hack your sleep. A standard bedtime routine should include no phones in bed, avoiding caffeine or alcohol before bed, and a dark bedroom/eyemask if you want to get your best night’s sleep.

3. Fill up on good food and good people: Thinking about the food you eat and your mealtimes in general, can be a great way to hack not just the nutrition side of your life, but the social side as well. Consider not just the food on your plate, but whether you’re utilising the time to have a fulfilling conversation with the people around you at the table.

Biohack bonus

A simple way that many people biohack is by intermittent fasting. A study done in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that fasting is a part of our evolution make-up and can improve our metabolism, lower blood sugar, lessen inflammation and even help clear toxins and damaged cells from our body.