Transcription
You don't need to be a millionaire to biohack your body. You just need $200. I'm Dave Asprey and I literally invented the term biohacking and my name is in the dictionary. I spent more than $2 million over the last two decades testing every protocol on the planet. But the most expensive hacks are not always the best ones. The hacks that created the most measurable changes in my life are cheap and simple and anybody can do them. In fact, I still use these hacks every single day.
In this video, I'm going to walk you through some of my biohacking stack. I'll show you exactly what to buy, what your body desperately needs, and how to get all of it for under 200 bucks. When people start biohacking, they usually look for a pill or a supplement right away. And sometimes that's a really good idea because some of the things that are most affordable are most foundational. And it's natural to want something you can just swallow to immediately change how you perform and how you feel. But the biggest and most dramatic changes in your biology might not come from something you eat. They come from your external environment. And specifically, these biohacks come from the place you spend more time in than anywhere else on Earth. Your bedroom.
Most people never stop to think about the sheer amount of time that they spend to sleep. You spend about a third of your entire life completely unconscious in one specific room. And during that time is when your body is supposed to be doing its deepest repair work. It's supposed to be clearing out dead cells, rebuilding muscles, and washing toxins out of your brain. But if your environment is sending the wrong signals to your biology, then the repair work never actually happens. And that damage from a bad sleep environment can build up over time, over the years, over the decades. And it's what makes you weak and tired and anxious and old. You don't want to do that.
I figured this out years ago when I started rigorously tracking my own sleep data. Turns out I was doing some of the right things during the day. I thought I was eating the right foods and taking the right supplements and working out perfectly, but I was still waking up stressed and just completely exhausted, tons of brain fog, and everything felt so off. So, I decided to change something. I didn't change my diet or my supplements right then. I changed the light in my environment before and during sleep. And the difference was really massive. I went from sleeping about 7 or 8 hours a night and getting 5 minutes of deep sleep to going to bed easily in under 3 minutes and getting 90 minutes of deep sleep and 90 minutes of REM sleep in 6 and 1/2 hours. In other words, I went from the worst sleeper to the best sleeper and it made me feel like a completely different human being. In fact, if you spend huge amounts of money on all kinds of supplements and therapies, but you don't have good sleep, you're just throwing money away.
And you can't just snap your fingers and change your entire environment overnight, but there is a very specific and incredibly cheap place to start. And it starts with understanding how your body processes light. And for millions of years of evolution, actually billions of years of bacterial evolution, the only bright light that life ever experienced after the sun went down was moonlight or fire. And maybe the stars twinkled a little bit, but that's about it. Your biology was never designed to see anything brighter than a campfire after dark. So, when you walk into your bathroom at 10:00 p.m. and flip on a bright white overhead light, you're sending a massive confusing signal straight into your mitochondria and then into your brain. Your body literally thinks the sun just came up. It thinks it's the middle of the day and it starts doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It keeps you alert. Your cortisol levels go up. Your stress hormones switch on and your nervous system gets ready for the morning. Your body simply will not shut down because as far as it knows, you still have a whole day of survival to get through.
That's why you need to swap out the bulbs in the rooms you use after sunset. You can buy cheap red LED light bulbs for about $8. Red light operates on a completely different wavelength than white or blue light or any other color of light. When your eyes see dim red bulbs at night, well, your brain thinks the sun has set and it's actually dark because our mitochondria don't process red light, but they actually use blue and white light to communicate with each other. What you want to do is give your body permission to shut things down and red light will do it and darkness will do it. Your cortisol drops, your nervous system stops stressing, and your body naturally starts winding down so you can fall asleep.
Now, fixing those bulbs, just experiencing darkness handles the time before you get into bed, but what gets into your bedroom while you're actually asleep is a completely different problem. Even just a little bit of ambient street lighting hitting your eyelids and your skin is enough to trigger your body into thinking it needs to wake up. So, right around the time you finally enter that deep sleep, when your cells are working their hardest to fix the damage from the day, that little sliver of light from the street lamp outside hits you. And it's the biological equivalent of someone slamming the big emergency button at a factory and shutting down the entire assembly line. The repair work just stops. And this is where blackout curtains come in cuz you can get them for under $30. This will completely eliminate that ambient light interference. So, between red bulbs and the blackout curtains, you're at $45 or $50.
And now you've already eliminated the two biggest external factors that ruin your sleep. But, there's one more thing that had a really big impact on me outside of everything you just heard. It's something I literally don't leave my house without. I don't look at a screen after dark without them. Junk light blocking glasses. Now, there's lots of red glasses that are out there, but the glasses I'm wearing block specific frequencies of light. They're layered filters, by the way. So are the ones I was wearing before. So, blocking blue actually doesn't work very well. Blocking all of the right narrow spectrums of light at the same time is what changes your biology. I invented these. They're called TrueDark.
You know that feeling when you wake up in the middle of the night and you just grab your phone to quickly check the time, and then you lie there for an hour kind of staring at the ceiling, can't fall back asleep. Maybe it wasn't because of the text message you got. Maybe it's because of the bright white blue light from your screen that literally told your brain it's morning. So, you don't have to be scrolling on social media for an hour before bed to ruin your sleep. Even looking at your phone for a few seconds changes the melanopsin sensors in your eyes, which talk to the SCN in your brain, which tells your body, "Hey, it's daytime." That's why just checking the clock on your bright phone screen right before you close your eyes can push back your deep sleep cycle by an hour. That means all the progress you made with the red bulbs and the curtains gets wiped out in about 2 seconds.
I use the TrueDark Glasses that I invented because they're the absolute best on the market. In fact, they're the only ones that block these specific frequencies of junk light. These don't block just blue, they block all of the different wavelengths that my research shows talk to your mitochondria to affect your sleep. You can find entry-level blue light blocking glasses for about $20. They just don't work as well because blocking blue during the day is too much and blocking blue at night isn't enough. You got to block everything. And when you combine these three things, the bulbs, the curtains, and the glasses, you have to buy them once and they work for you every single night. You never have to worry about stepping into biological death trap when you're just trying to get some rest.
Once your sleep is finally working the way it should, the next thing that matters is what you do the moment you wake up. So, now you fixed your external environment and your sleep is dialed in, but the next step is looking at what you're actually putting in your body during the day to keep your energy up. Over the last 30 years, I have tested just about every supplement there is on the market and I formulated some of the top-selling ones. And I can tell you right now, the vast majority of them don't do what they say they do for your biology. But, there's a very specific and incredibly cheap stack of supplements that has a massive and immediate impact. And so effective that I start my day with them every day. And the first one I take every single morning is creatine, but not the way I took it back when I was trying to lose weight in the gym because people usually think about bodybuilders with creatine. We think about these huge guys in the gym trying to pack on muscle mass. It's not about that. Creatine, yeah, helps your muscles, but I don't take it in the morning for my muscles. I take it for my brain.
Let's understand why. You have to understand how your cells actually create energy. Every single cell in your body is powered by mitochondria. By now, every health influencer has been talking about that. Uh I wrote a New York Times best-selling science book about why your brain needs mitochondria. I've gotten really deep on this. And thinking about mitochondria like little batteries or power plants is useful. They do a lot more than that. But we do know that if your cells use up all the energy, your mitochondria can't keep making it, you're going to have less energy. And your body spends a lot of time and effort to make more energy.
What creatine does is simple and really powerful. It acts like a rapid charging station to charge up your batteries. When you take creatine, it allows your cells to make more ATP, more of the fuel of life, more than it would even if you had the healthiest, cleanest diet on the planet. It's a way to get a boost. It's not a temporary energy spike. It's not caffeine. It's not a cognitive enhancer, even though it does enhance your cognition. It is an energy enhancer, and it's real energy, the energy of life. You're making your cells physically better at producing natural energy and recycling it better.
And here's why it completely changes the game for your daily performance. Your brain makes up only about 2% of your total body weight, but it burns up to 20% of your total energy every single day. And the only other thing that comes close is your heart. So your brain is burning through those little mitochondrial electrons at a rate that nothing else in your body's going to touch. And unlike a lot of other supplements, creatine can cross the blood-brain barrier, so the mitochondria in your brain can actually use it. This means it goes straight into your brain and helps your neurons regenerate the energy they so need directly. And when your brain's energy reserves fill up, you can think clearly all day long. When those reserves are empty, well, you have brain fog, brutal afternoon fatigue, just total inability to concentrate, or just emotional reactivity. It takes energy to not be emotionally reactive. So, even on days if you sleep perfectly fine the night before, even if you never went to the gym, which you should, by the way, creatine is still one of the most powerful things you can take just for your brain. And I'm not the only one saying this. There are a thousand published studies going back more than 40 years proving this. It's one of the most tested and safest supplements we found. I started using creatine as a brain upgrading supplement years before it became commonplace because one of my mentors, who wrote the first book on smart drugs many years ago in Silicon Valley, taught me about it. It was never for the gym, it was always for the brain. Take one scoop in the morning and you have noticeably better quality of life for the rest of the day. But, if you take two scoops in the morning, it's even better because that's when it really gets into your brain.
You can also improve your cognitive performance even more by putting your creatine directly in high-quality coffee like my Danger Coffee. If you do that, it raises the plasma level of creatine so much that it goes in your brain better. You could also add an amino acid that's very cheap called L-theanine, which costs about $15, and that's for a month's supply. And you take 1 or 200 mg of L-theanine when you drink your Danger Coffee and something amazing happens. You get more incredible sharp energy from caffeine, and it's in a smooth and calm form that's better for focus, it's less jittery.
But even with the creatine charging your batteries, got your clean coffee, and L-theanine, there's still one major problem with your morning routine. You're probably still burning glucose for fuel all morning long, and it's all you can burn. Cuz when you eat a high-carb breakfast, you get a fast spike in energy followed by a massive drop. Here's looking at you, oatmeal. And by late morning, you're just dragging yourself through your work and craving more sugar just to survive. That's where MCT oil changes everything. Now, you might have heard of MCT oil because when I was running a company called Bulletproof, I made MCT oil into a billion-dollar industry category. Before that, nobody had heard of it. I don't run Bulletproof anymore. I have nothing to do with the company. But, MCT oil is still a good thing. Your body converts it into something called ketones incredibly fast. And ketones are an awesome fuel for your brain. You've heard of the keto diet, probably. And probably you got to go 3 or 4 days without eating any carbs and not that much protein to get ketones, or you could put MCT oil on whatever you're eating. MCT oil won't spike your blood sugar. It can't be stored as fat, and it doesn't give you a crash the way glucose does. Your brain just runs on a steady, clean stream of energy all day long. Even if your blood sugar goes up and down, your ketones are there as a backup fuel. So, put one or maybe up to two tablespoons of MCT oil in your coffee and blend it in. Don't let it float on top. And I do that just about every morning. And the difference in how full I am and how much energy I have in my brain is very noticeable.
So, at this point, you sorted out your external sleep environment. You know what to put in your body during the day to keep your brain energy high. And before the video ends, I want to take you one level deeper. I'll show you the final piece of the foundational stack. And it's got everything to do with how your body ages at the cellular level. Cuz inside every cell in your body, there's an automatic cleanup system that you can turn on. In biology, we call it autophagy. It literally means self-eating, which sounds pretty terrible. But, what it does for you is incredible. Think of autophagy like a microscopic recycling plant that lives inside your cells. When that plant's running, your cells go on a massive search and destroy mission. They scan through your entire body and find all the weak cells, the worn-out energy batteries, all the cellular junk that is sitting there taking up space like a zombie. And they break all that junk down into raw materials. And then they reuse those exact same raw materials to build brand new stronger, healthier cells. So your cells are literally rebuilding themselves from the inside out.
The problem is that for most of us, that recycling plant is completely shut down because of modern diets and constant stress and eating around the clock, well, you don't have any autophagy. The switch has been turned off. So all that damaged material just sits there in your cells creating free radicals and slowing you down. Another word for free radicals is inflammation. And that drags your healthy cells down with the weak ones. And that accumulation of cellular garbage is what aging is at the biological level.
In 2016, a scientist named Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for figuring out exactly how autophagy, the cleanup system, works. And more importantly, how to turn it back on. He discovered that there's a specific mechanism in your body that acts like a parking brake on your recycling plant. As long as that brake is pulled, autophagy can't run. But there's a naturally occurring compound called spermidine that actually releases the brake on autophagy. A month's supply of high-quality spermidine runs about $30. When you take it, it moves the biological roadblock out of the way. So your cleanup system fires back up. Your body finally starts clearing out all that accumulated damage and rebuilding your cells from scratch.
Here's the really important catch that most people miss. This massive cellular cleanup process primarily runs while you're in deep sleep. So if you're not actually getting into deep restorative sleep at night, doesn't matter how much spermidine you take. The recycling plant never gets a chance to fully kick in and do its job. One of the main reasons you're probably struggling to get into deep sleep is cuz you're chronically low on magnesium. Magnesium is such an important mineral. It's involved in over 300 different processes in your body, including sleep. Because of modern farming and food processing, almost all the natural magnesium is gone from the food you eat. So, if you want your nervous system to actually calm down and shift into that deep sleep state, or you want your mitochondria to make the most energy to run your body, you need to supplement magnesium. Specifically, you need a highly absorbable form called magnesium bisglycinate. This is the only form I recommend because it's chelated, which means it's bound to glycine, which is an amino acid that your body needs to support calm all on its own. So, you get a double benefit. This form of magnesium absorbs better than any other. There are lots of brands who sell very expensive magnesium with many, many different types, but if you take glycinate, you're covering the whole base. A lot of standard magnesium supplements cause cramping or digestive issues, also known as disaster pants, because it's cheap, poorly absorbed magnesium. And if you can't absorb it, it's going to come out the other end in a way that you don't enjoy. A properly chelated magnesium bisglycinate avoids all that. And I make one called Magnesium 101 that's exceptionally clean. It's gentle on your stomach and it actually gets into your cells where it needs to be. A month's supply runs about $20. So, check out the QR code for a link to SelfDecode Labs, which is where you can buy Magnesium 101. The specific form that I use is highly absorbable and directly helps your brain get into deep rest.
So, think of it like this. Spermidine turns on the cleanup system. Magnesium glycinate makes sure you actually get into deep sleep where the cleanup happens. Without enough magnesium, you just never get there. The recycling plant never runs, and you wake up feeling like you never actually recovered, no matter how many hours you spend in bed.
So, here's what the entire foundational biohacking stack looks like. You start with your external environment. Red LED bulbs, $10, $15. Blackout curtains for $20, $30, and TrueDark glasses, the only ones that work, are going to be about $79. You buy those three things at once and protect your sleep every single night. Then, you move to the internal fuel. Creatine, about $20 a month. Theanine, $15 a month. And MCT oil, $20 a month. You blend that straight into your morning coffee. And if you want to take it even further, make it Danger Coffee. Now, Danger Coffee does cost more than regular coffee, but each bag has about $22 worth of trace minerals added to it that you would have to buy separately if you weren't drinking the coffee. It's actually a steal. That runs about $24 a month. Those three things keep your brain energy steady and sharp all day long. And finally, you can trigger your deep cellular repair with spermidine, around $30 a month. Magnesium glycinate or magnesium 101 is going to run about $20 a month. You add all that up, and you're looking at about $200. Okay, I might be over budget by a couple bucks, but I'm the guy who invented the biohacking term, so I'm going to give myself a $1 pass or besides, every single month after that it's only about $140 from the lower cost of being on subscription. So, that's around $200 for a complete stack where every single item has a real, scientifically proven, and measurable impact on your daily health. And your daily health, you don't really care about that unless you're sick. It has an impact on your daily energy, and that affects how you feel, what you can do, and how you treat the people you care about.
I never want you to think that biohacking is something you have to work your way up to. It's just about changing the environment around you so that it works better for your body and so your body works better. I don't want you to think there's some sort of advanced elite level of wealth or knowledge you need to unlock before you can start getting real benefits. People have been biohacking since my first post on it in 2011, 60% of biohackers have been women from the very beginning. It is for all humans at all ages because all of us want control over our state, we all want more energy, we all want more peace, and we all want to just feel good in our bodies. And I care about doing it in the least amount of time, with the least amount of money, and least amount of effort that we can possibly do. These are low-hanging fruit and very important biohacks that aren't going to require you to go off and do stem cells or gene therapy or the million-dollar protocols that I teach people about today. They're just cheap, simple tools that work fast and work first. And they're still a core part of what I do every single day because they still work even though I've spent two and a half million dollars upgrading my biology. Your biology requires certain basic things to function the way it was meant to. And you've learned exactly what those things are and how little they can cost. So now it's time for you to go do it. Check out the QR code or link below to get a full list of where to find the stuff. I make some of it. I don't make some of it. I like to make things I can't buy.