How Elite Entrepreneurs "Buy Time" with Biohacking
| Ⓒ By Jonathan Roseland |
I'm not a doctor, medical professional, or trained therapist. I'm a researcher and pragmatic biohacking practitioner exercising free speech to share evidence as I find it. I make no claims. Please practice skepticism and rational critical thinking. You should consult a professional about any serious decisions that you might make about your health. Affiliate links in this article support Limitless Mindset - spend over $150 and you'll be eligible to join the Limitless Mindset Secret Society.
A buck spent on Biohacking buys you time...
- It enhances your cognition so that you problem-solve better and faster.
- It allows you to reach and maintain true focus, it makes you impervious to costly distraction.
- It fortifies your immune defenses, preventing costly sick days, an especially good idea during the cold winter months.
- It multiplies the quality of your sleep; allowing you to enjoy deeply rejuvenating and restorative sleep.
- It makes you antifragile; it’s the ounce of prevention that saves you from spending a small fortune treating a chronic disease or fighting cancer.
- It’s pragmatic anti-aging, it elongates your health span and lifespan so that you get more time in this world to accomplish the things that matter to you.
Overview
Entrepreneur Biohacking Case Studies
Meditation Tech
Modafinil
Nicotine
Caffeine
Sleep Hacking
Productivity Sprint
Dual N-Back Brain Training
Eyesight Biohacks
Audio Enablers of Focus
Enhance Immunity
Intermittent Fasting
BPC-157 - The Anti-Aging Peptide
C60 Olive Oil - A Super-Antioxidant for Biological Antifragility
NMN - The Epigenetic Vitamin for Smarter Genes
Getting Started
Entrepreneur Biohacking Case Studies
Daryl, 30, Day Trader
Daryl lives in London and after a decade of fruitful Forex trading, he started losing money because of heavy metal-induced cognitive decline. After being unwittingly mercury-poisoned for 6-months by sushi happy hours at a neighborhood restaurant he noticed that he was consistently underperforming and his portfolio was in decline. His sleep worsened and he went through a bout of depression when his girlfriend broke up with him because his libido disappeared. His net worth continued to decline as he was only able to muster an hour or two of real focus a day to research the markets and make trades.
Doctors were useless until he was referred to a specialist who had his mineral biomarkers tested and discovered that he was suffering from catastrophic mercury toxicity. Energized by knowing what the source of his mediocrity was, he spent a solid week reading up on heavy metal toxicity, the best clinical evidence indicated that detox could be accomplished using natural chelation agents, Chlorella, Spirulina, and Astaxanthin which he began taking. After a week he felt a little bit better, his depression was subsiding. He also heard some “too-good-to-be-true” Youtube testimonials describing the fantastic detoxification effects of C60 Olive Oil, which he started taking twice daily. On his 3rd day on C60, he was surprised to feel awful, worse than before, so he looked up C60 and discovered that he was in the midst of a Herxhiemer reaction, the C60 super antioxidant was clawing heavy metals out of his tissues, allowing them to circulate in his bloodstream causing him to feel sick and groggy, but he continued with the C60 as he wanted to be finally free of the toxic heavy metals; he drank a lot of water, went to the bathroom a lot and even visited a sauna to sweat them out. After 5 days of discomfort, he awoke feeling like he was 10 years younger. That week he would make a winning trade, with restored optimism, he dove back into research and day trading. After 4 more months of consistently using the C60 and the natural chelators, he was back to his old self and had made back all the money the cognitive decline had cost him.
Sean, 59, Cryptocurrency Platform Developer
A veteran financial tech web developer, Sean is in the midst of creating an innovative cryptocurrency platform, but he is unwell. He is obese and his doctor is telling him that he’s pre-diabetic. Some concerning signs of arthritis in his hands threaten to render him useless as a developer. He spends 30 minutes daily on the treadmill but he just can’t seem to lose weight.
After getting 23 and Me genotyping done on himself he learns about NMN, the epigenetic vitamin, from a biohacking Facebook community group. He’s impressed by some of the NMN diabetes-related testimonials and the fact that (unlike the pharmaceuticals his doctor recommends) NMN doesn’t seem to have any major downsides or side effects, it just feeds the body the NAD+ molecule that is crucial to epigenetic function.
On the fourth day of taking NMN, he awakes with a surprising amount of energy and zest, he’s pleased with his capacity to stay focused and motivated all day long. His workouts improve also, the days on NMN he can just push himself harder. Over the course of the next 8 months, he slowly but consistently loses more and more weight. At his yearly doctor’s checkup, his physician remarked that he looked years younger and that his pre-diabetic status had reversed.
Diego, 26, English-Spanish Language Teacher and Event Marketer
Living in the very lively ex-pat hotspot Medellin, Colombia Diego does a lot of socializing. By day, he either teaches gringos Spanish or Colombians English, by night he organizes parties and networking functions at bars and nightclubs. Staying out past 2 AM multiple nights a week is really starting to take a toll. Diego is hungover half the time. He loses a corporate English teaching contract because he oversleeps one day. He has all sorts of great entrepreneurial ideas to take advantage of and create value with his impressive network of friends and acquaintances but he fails to take much action because he’s just not that focused.
One day, one of his students tells him that he can biohack his hangovers. Which he googles, and Diego learns that supplementing Glutathione is key to mitigating hangovers. He starts taking Glutathione supplements, along with a little activated charcoal every night out on the town, and it works wonders, he awakes feeling well-rested and energized despite his nocturnal activities.
Jean Francois, 36, Youtube Livestreamer
J.F spends a lot of time sitting in front of a computer as he hosts a daily internet show talking about the news and current events. He spends nearly every day outraged by the politics and crazy things happening in the world that he covers. While his Youtube audience grows so does his waistline, internet trolls mock his chubby chipmunk-like appearance on camera. Finally, he decides to make a change, he reviews the state of the art research on weight loss and concludes that he needs to go keto and get into this fasting thing. He begins skipping breakfasts which is at first arduous but he quickly gets used to it and discovers that he’s actually a whole lot more clear-headed, energetic, and verbally witty when he restricts his eating to an 8-hour daily window. He also just has more time on his hands, since he’s not sneaking a snack from the refrigerator all the time. He really starts to lose weight when he takes the fasting to the next level and does a 24-hour fast once weekly. He hears that meditation helps with food cravings during fasting, he tries it and it works! He now makes it a point to spend at least 15 minutes meditating every evening as it allows him to unwind after a long day of yelling at the internet.
As illustrated, biohacking buys Entrepreneurs more of their most precious resource, time. To be more specific, it buys them high-quality, focused, productive time. It crams a 10-hour workday into 8 hours (or less).
A story about burnout...
As a young and impressionable entrepreneur, one of my mentors and friends was this Russian guy, Roman, who got me started in the real estate loan origination business. Back in 2007, the real estate business was booming and Roman, a talented salesman and dealmaker, was making a killing. He had a cool car, fly clothes, a fancy watch, and the means to really party it up in Denver’s nightlife scene. Business was good, but business was stressful and Roman’s stress management strategy was just to work hard and play harder. As the real estate market imploded in 2008, he drank more (sometimes at lunch), smoked more weed, and would score cocaine many weekends. As the real estate business worsened, he needed to work doubly hard when he was arrested for driving under the influence to pay the steep court fines. He wasn't nearly such a fun guy to be around anymore, his drinking problem got worse as he stayed in the mortgage business for several more years which clearly wasn't good for him. He’d become a major pothead, smoking himself silly every night, which rendered him largely unemployable when he was kicked out of the mortgage office where he worked. Finally, out of the hectic loan business he became obsessed with fixing up this old sportscar, he devoted what seemed like about 8 months to rebuilding this ridiculous engine on a 20-year-old $2000 car. The last few times I saw him, we had almost nothing in common. He had totally given up his entrepreneurial aspirations, he wasn't into going out and dancing with girls at nightclubs anymore, he was more into sitting at home and drinking cheap rum while watching TV. It’s a shame that such an ambitious, talented, and hardworking guy ended up such a loser.
The harsh demands of the entrepreneurial hustle plus poor stress management plus vice equals burnout.
The risk in biohacking is that it gives you motivation and energetic fuel to work really hard, to put in long hours but the resulting chronic stress will, in the long term, kill you (or at least your work ethic). Thus a wise entrepreneur employs both biohacks for stimulation and inspiration along with a multi-pronged approach to managing stress.
What follows is 14 high-leverage biohacks, here I expand upon the 10 biohacks mentioned in our article, 10 High ROI Biohacks that give Elite Entrepreneurs an Unfair Advantage...
Meditation Tech
It’s no secret that daily mindfulness practice is a commonality among high performers, entrepreneurs are using biohacking-mindfulness tech to shortcut the years that it typically takes to master meditation. Notably, Heartmath’s HRV devices, which train you in about 10 minutes a day to reach a state of coherence between your heart and autonomic nervous system.
I'll also mention the Muse brainwave-sensing headband, which gives you real-time feedback training you to play your own brainwaves like a master musician playing an instrument. Entrepreneurship educator extraordinaire Pat Flynn starts his days with a Muse session.
Modafinil
Using this anti-narcolepsy drug is kind of like dabbling with the Dark Side of the Force...
- It gives you incredible powers of focus and will keep you very awake for 8-12 hours.
- It’s a powerful cognitive enhancer, a quintessential smart drug, it will make you clever in problem-solving, particularly in doing highly technical tasks.
- There are a number of downsides to using it but many Entrepreneurs still use it regularly because it’s such a potent productivity drug.
A successful entrepreneur friend of mine (who prefers to remain anonymous) once confided in me that he makes about an extra $50K annually thanks to the 20-odd extra hours of work and focus a week that Modafinil empowers.
Nicotine
This addictive little molecule is, for some elite health gurus, like Aubrey Marcus of Onnit, a secret weapon for unleashing formidable focus and creativity. It’s no coincidence that Ayn Rand, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tolkien, and many other great novelists were voracious smokers. Nicotine is a creativity smart drug.
- Of course, you shouldn’t smoke (vaping is also probably not a great idea) - the safest way to consume nicotine is in a 5% or 7% liquid solution. It doesn’t taste great, but a few drops of the stuff will really light up your prefrontal cortex. Deliciously addictive Lucy nicotine gum is a more palatable, but pricier, option.
- It’s a fast-burning Nootropic, its effect lasts only about 90 minutes, for this reason, it’s the Nootropic I reach for to stimulate my productivity in the waning hours of the day. After 5 PM I don’t want to take any more stimulating Nootropics that might mess with my sleep. I can safely do a hit of Nicotine around 7 PM or 8 PM without it interfering with my sleep.
- Nicotine is cheap. Nicotine in PG or VG liquid solution ends up being like a $3/week habit.
- Nicotine is addictive. You’ll get hooked on the stuff, there’s a tendency to develop tolerance and increase the dose. But in my experience, it’s not that addictive, I take regular breaks from Nicotine, I’ll use it for a month and then go off it for a week or two. I never get any nasty withdrawal symptoms from quitting and the cravings are very manageable, as long as the dropper bottle is out of sight, it’s surprisingly easy to resist. In my experience, coffee is more addictive than Nicotine, although, I drink really great coffee...
Caffeine
Entrepreneurs have, since time immemorial, relied on coffee - caffeine is a hell of a productivity drug. The good news is that caffeine is healthy, at least if you’re consuming reasonable amounts of it, less than five cups of coffee a day. The bad news is that most coffee you find on store shelves or served by a friendly barista is toxin-ridden crap; the processing and production of most coffee results in mycotoxins which cause brain fog, anxiety, and a myriad of health problems.
- Choose an organic toxin-free brand, toxin-free stuff tastes better and imbues a clear-headed buzz. If you go to cafes and coffee shops, say NO to Starbucks, choose local cafes that take some pride in their product. Chat with the baristas, ask them what the highest quality bean is that they offer.
- Drink your coffee WITHOUT tasty sugary additives. Healthy coffee tastes good, if you need to add spoonfuls of additives to make it palatable you probably shouldn’t be drinking it.
Sleep Hacking
Sleep really matters; the cost of bad sleep cannot be understated; lack of focus, poor decision-making, diminished immunity, increased risk of disease, and declining health. Yet entrepreneurs often make this crappy deal with themselves; stay up late at night working, rob themselves of precious sleep, then take stimulants and force themselves to work long hours the next day to make up for their low quality of attention and focus. I instead urge you to choose quality over quantity, if you work fewer hours but get awesome sleep, you’ll ultimately get higher quality work done. Some sleep hacks to implement...
- Try to give yourself 60-90 minutes of downtime before bed. Time away from your computer or smartphone doing something that soothes your autonomic nervous system and pulls it out of fight or flight chronic stress mode like reading, writing (the old fashioned way with pen and paper), meditation, conversation, or making love.
- Avoid junk light for 2-3 hours before bed, bright light, especially blue light is the enemy of sleep. Your laptop screen, your tablet and smartphone screens, the light in your bathroom, and the streetlights outside your window are all sending problematic photons of blue light your way that you want to avoid to optimize sleep quality. Install a screen dimmer app, go to the bathroom in the dark, change the lights in your house to soft yellow or red light bulbs, wear orange-tinted glasses that filter out blue light and turn off the lights at night, and use candles to illuminate your room.
- Take an anxiolytic pre-bedtime cocktail. I like tea, here’s what I mix for a hearty sleepytime tea: Ashwagandha (powdered), Chamomile, raw honey, and organic apple cider vinegar. To take my sleep quality to the next level, on top of this I’ll take several hundred milligrams of magnesium and a CBD supplement.
Productivity Sprint
There’s a season for everything and as an entrepreneur, you want to plan your year around several sprints; 30-90 day periods of focused productivity where you abstain from all your bad habits and vices while working towards a medium-term goal; for example, launching a new brand, creating a product or finishing a book.
Self-control generalizes, during the sprint be very disciplined about all the empowering daily good habits; meditation, exercise, writing, affirmations, sleep hacking, waking up early, etc.
Abstain from all the guilty little pleasures that hurt your productivity. Particularly...
- Booze, go off alcohol totally for a month or three (it does make a difference in your mindset and health).
- Orgasms, if you’re a man, you can significantly enhance your motivation and focus by abstaining from orgasms for two weeks or more. If you’re single just stay off the porn sites for a few weeks. If you’re in a relationship you’ll want to introduce your partner to non-ejaculatory tantric methods.
You don’t need to live like a monk forever, during the sprint you can look forward to some well-deserved indulgences.
Dual N-Back Brain Training
You’ve probably seen brain training games and apps advertised and wondered if they actually work, if they actually make you smarter or better at problem-solving. I’ve used almost all of them extensively and there is just one brain-training app that has good evidence supporting its “transfer effects”, the Dual N-Back task.
- It’s demonstrated in clinical trials to improve general intelligence, IQ, and your problem-solving abilities outside of the game.
- I’ve used Dual N-Back for years and it really does exercise your focus muscles, it has improved my attentional control markedly.
- It does upgrade the “RAM” of your conscious mind, training executive function, which has made me a better developer, it’s made me able to keep track of more lines of code and article IDs.
Unlike meditation, Dual N-Back improves your mind relatively quickly, in a matter of a few weeks of brain training 15 minutes a day your IQ will creep up a few points along with your focus and emotional resilience notably improving.
Eyesight Biohacks
Spending hours and hours every day at the computer, as most entrepreneurs do, is awful for your eyes!
- 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look up for 20 seconds at something 20 feet away. Try to set up your desk in front of a window so that you have an excuse to glance up and take in the world outside of your screen frequently.
- Set up an eyesight health screen optimization app on your computer which will optimize your screen’s flicker rate and color balance to something healthier for your eyes.
- Use Visomitin eyedrops daily, this is a special mitochondrial antioxidant that cleans up the excess ROS in your eyes that result from all that screen time. Costing about $20/monthly, Visomitin is a pretty affordable biohack for soothing eye strain after a long day of work and preventing long-term vision degeneration.
- Set up a red light near your workstation, our eyes get strained from too much white and blue light, especially if you’re spending hours at night illuminated by a desk lamp sitting next to your laptop. A red light is a lot easier on your eyes and doesn't disrupt your sleep cycle.
- Try to work smarter, as opposed to working more. Outsource, systematize, and batch process as much as possible to try to cut down the hours spent in front of the computer.
Audio Enablers of Focus
Focus is the major challenge for the modern entrepreneur; many of us work on the internet and the internet is the most fantastic distraction technology in history.
- Music can help a lot with focus and creativity, more specifically binaural beats style audio tracks that play cool rhythmic electronic music. My favorite tool for nootropic music is the Brain.FM app.
- If binaural beats aren’t for you classical music has a sublime effect on focus and creativity. Maybe classical music doesn't vibe with you, if you prefer to listen to hip hop or rock (or whatever) instead listen to the same track or album on repeat instead of just streaming a channel on Spotify or Pandora - prolific authors and artists find that listening to the same music on repeat for hours and hours stimulates their creativity powerfully.
Enhance Immunity
Sickness and illness can cost entrepreneurs significant time, energy, and productivity. The antifragile entrepreneur implements some smart biohacks to ward off illness...
- We get sick and often suffer from seasonal depression during the cold, dark winter months because our bodies need a daily dose of sunlight to absorb and utilize Vitamin D3. During the wintertime, you want to supplement additional Vitamin D3 along with Vitamin A and K2, its cofactors but crucially you need to get some sunlight, 10-15 minutes daily. If that’s not possible, get a UV-B therapy light or a tanning salon membership.
- The anti-aging agents discussed below, C60 olive oil and NMN, optimize both your mitochondria and genes which underlie your immune function.
- Immunity has a lot to do with your sex hormones, especially testosterone. It’s a smart idea to use Adaptogenic herbs often: Rhodiola, Siberian Ginseng, Red Reishi, and Ashwagandha which naturally support your hormones.
- Around the holidays we often get sick because of the over-eating and excess drinking that we indulge in, along with the cold weather and the stress of the season. You can reinvigorate your immune system with a traditional historical biohack, fasting - specifically, a 2-3 day water fast.
If you hate lost productivity because of sick days you'll want to check out my Youtube channel all about Biohacking Immunity...
Intermittent Fasting
Fasting is one of the simpler biohacks that smart entrepreneurs habituate to save time, maintain health and spend more time in a state of deep focus. To do an intermittent fast, skip breakfast, and do all your eating and snacking within an 8-hour window.
The CEO of Twitter sometimes fasts for up to 22 hours a day, which might sound extreme. He finds that it’s a time-dilation hack, at least subjectively it allows him to spend more time lingering in the deep now - reaching heights of productive focus not disrupted by eating every few hours. Jack is not the only ultra-high performer doing this, U.S. Army 4-Star General Stanley McChrystal famously eats just a single meal a day.
BPC-157 - The Anti-Aging Peptide
Bodybuilders and elite athletes refer to this peptide as the Wolverine Drug, because it’s such a potent supplement for rapid injury healing.
- It’s worth the attention of Entrepreneurs because we so often suffer from mild repetitive strain injuries like Carpal Tunnel from spending so much time on our laptops! A one or two-week course of BPC-157 can arrest, reverse, and often cure total tendonitis.
- Entrepreneurs often develop gut inflammation issues because we are under a lot of stress and don’t always eat right, which can develop into costly and time-consuming health issues. BPC-157 is a natural gastric peptide that can often treat and cure gut issues rapidly.
C60 Olive Oil - A Super-Antioxidant for Biological Antifragility
This tasty anti-aging supplement of carbon 60 fullerenes suspended in pure, fresh olive oil is a biohacking tool for antifragility; it mitigates health risks across the board.
- It’s a powerful antioxidant; that cleans up free radicals and detoxifies the body.
- It’s a sleep hack, one of the anecdotal effects reported most often is that it imbues profound, restorative sleep - you can take this to the next level by using C60Supply.com’s C60+CBD olive oil.
- I use Nicotine often, although my research of Nicotine leads me to believe that even isolated, Nicotine may have a mild carcinogenic effect. That’s a (very small) risk I’m ok with because I have a bunch of great cancer prevention habits and I use C60 which some promising evidence indicates is an effective anti-cancer therapy.
What about when biohacking doesn’t work...
You can read endless business books or go to inspiring entrepreneurship conferences and meetups which will make you feel good, but the truth is that they won’t do much to change your life and break you out of your personal history cycles unless you effectively signal to your genes the changes you want to make...
NMN - The Epigenetic Vitamin for Smarter Genes
Nicotinamide Mononucleotide (NMN) is a derivative of Vitamin B3 that feeds you the NAD+ molecule that your genome needs to epigenetically turn on (or off) the right genes at the right time.
- Perhaps you’ve tried some of these different supplements or biohacks and were a bit underwhelmed and disappointed. This may have a lot to do with obstinate epigenetic function. If your genes get stuck, you can throw all the biohacks in the world at them and it won’t make a big difference. NMN is praised by some of the top anti-aging scientists in the world, like Harvard’s David Sinclair, for its effectiveness in feeding our genome the NAD+ molecular cofactor to epigenetic function.
- It’s a mitochondrial support supplement, that empowers the powerhouse of the cell.
- It’s a Nootropic, according to an NMN biohacker survey the majority of the users reported Nootropic effects (enhanced cognition, motivation and wakefulness) and Improved long term memory.
At this point, you might be thinking...
Wow, these are a lot of biohacks! Which should I start with? Can I combine them?
Good question! A few important points...
- The highest-performing entrepreneurs stack biohacks - everything described here has a synergistic holistic effect of empowering your mind and body while making you antifragile - biologically you’ll get stronger and better under greater pressure and demands.
- You may want to run N of 1 experiments to ascertain objectively how things affect you. In this case, you’ll want to isolate supplements or practices and do them alone for a period of a week or a month and track how you respond. Then try something different and see how the results compare. Over time you’ll figure out a few things that work great for you and you can make these things your daily stack of supplements, lifehacks, and empowering habits.
- You may have limited time and budget to devote to biohacking. If so, the two most worthwhile holistic antifragility-fortifying supplements are C60 olive oil and NMN. Nicotine is cheap and a hell of a creativity smart drug. Dual N-Back is the best brain training option.
Finally, you’re invited to join the Limitless Mindset Secret Society, a friendly place online for sharing lifehacks and biohacks for productivity, health, and wealth.
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