What is Biohacking?

Biohacking is taking full control of your biology. If you’ve pursued ways to improve your health, that’s biohacking.

But, it’s more than just putting butter in your coffee every morning or taking a daily vitamin. Biohacking is the desire to understand the body and mind you’ve been given and using everything at your disposal–cutting-edge technology, tools, and science–to become the best version of yourself.

Why Biohacking

Biohacking is the process of making changes to your lifestyle in order to “hack” your body’s biology and feel your best. It's understanding the “why” behind how you’re feeling, thinking, and performing. Knowing the “why” empowers you to not only biohack your body, but to make impactful changes to your overall health and well-being.

Biohackers are individuals who believe in experience-based knowledge. Their mindset is, “Show me the research and then let me try it for myself.” To biohack yourself, make small changes to your lifestyle, giving your body time to adjust and then seeing how you feel.

If your body is a system, it’s got inputs (food, exercise, etc.) and outputs (energy, mood, etc.). Biohackers believe making constant tweaks to those inputs (like, really fine tuning them) can lead to immediate, measurable changes in the outputs. And they generally don’t wait around for a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of a new therapy or approach. They try it, see what happens, and make decisions from there.

With this in mind, the real question you should be asking is...why not biohack?

Biohacking can be as rigid as a regime, or as loose as a personal preference. Some involve scientific testing, like the microbiome kit. Others you can do with the aid of an app, like sleep hacks. The most accessible nutrigenomics and DIY biology.

Nutrigenomics

Nutrigenomics focuses on how the food you eat interacts with your genes.

This popular, although controversial, type of biohacking is founded on the idea that your body’s total genetic expression can be mapped out and optimized by testing how different nutrients affect your healthTrusted Source over time.

Nutrigenomics also looks at how different nutrients affect how you feel, think, and behave.

DIY biology

DIY biology (or DIY bio) is a type of biohacking spearheaded by people with education and experience in scientific fields.

These biohackers share tips and techniques to help non-experts conduct structured experiments on themselves outside of a controlled experimental environment, like labs or medical offices.

If you’re not biohacking, you’re missing out.

Why not Biohack?

Why not take every advantage you can get to stay as healthy as possible? Beside helping boost your mental and physical achievements, biohacking can positively impact your mental well-being too.

By approaching biohacking as a multifunctional tool, you can apply science and technology to your personal biology and reap the benefits across all areas of your life.

Biohacking is something that experts see as a positive trend. Many have seen successes by adjusting their diet and lifestyle to reflect healthier practices. And the idea that each one of us has the power to make the most of our biology is empowering.