Picture a biohacker. You probably see a man with a lot of money and time, an alarm that simulates a sunrise at 4am, seventeen supplements before breakfast and a team filming all of it. No wonder the word has a bad reputation.
For me, biohacking means something much simpler. It's personalising your lifestyle: finding out, by testing on yourself, what gives you the biggest result for the least effort. I've been doing it since 2008. It gave me my life back, and I think it's the best way there is to stay at your best for longer.
Where the bad reputation comes from
The extreme examples get the attention. Bryan Johnson, the American entrepreneur who has said he wants to live forever, documents everything he does online and has spent millions on it. I find it interesting, and it works for him. I wouldn't want to spend my days that way, and I doubt you would either.
Then there are the people who believe one teaspoon of seed oil will kill them, and the ones who sell a single protocol as the answer for everybody. That reputation is the reason the word biohacking isn't on the cover of my book. Some of you would have scrolled straight past it, and I wouldn't blame you.
A better definition
The best working definition comes from Dave Asprey: "Biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so you have full control of your biology." Nowhere does it mention machines or immortality.
The idea comes from computer engineering. A hacker treats a system as something to experiment with, and learns how it works in order to improve it. Here the system is your body and you're the scientist, with access to your test subject twenty-four hours a day.
Most of the choices you make about how you live happen on autopilot. Biohacking means making them on purpose, based on evidence and your own data. The person who noticed they sleep better when they stop eating at 7pm, and made that a habit, is biohacking. So is the person who learnt that two glasses of wine on a Tuesday affect their Wednesday.
Neither of them needs a device or a large budget. My mother is ninety and has never used the word. I call her the original biohacker.
Why it has to be personal
Everybody is different. You have your own DNA, your own environment and your own history, along with your own job, family and goals. Advice written for everyone can only ever be a starting point.
Food is a good example. In a study of 800 people, blood sugar responses to identical meals varied widely from person to person. A meal that suits your colleague may not suit you.
My own history is a malaria drug that cost me eight years. Biohacking gave me my life back, and then my peak performance. Over the years I've tried just about every biohack there is. The ones that worked, I kept, and those are what my book is built on. They're not as fancy as you might expect. Even the ones I keep, I fit to my own body. I use my ice bath when my data says I've recovered, because cold works best on a recovered system. The principles are much the same for everyone, like a recipe, but the seasoning is up to whoever's cooking.
The biohacking cycle
This is the method, and it has four steps. I didn't invent them, and it's so simple I'd be a bit embarrassed to call it a breakthrough.
Outcome. Decide what you want to change, as specifically as you can. "More energy at three in the afternoon" works better than "be healthier".
Hack. Choose one small thing to test, such as a walk after lunch.
Track. Measure what happens. A score out of ten in a notebook is enough to start with. Without some record, you're guessing.
Adapt. Keep what works, drop what doesn't and refine what's almost right. Then go round again.
Not everything you test will work for you. That's the cycle doing its job, because you still come away knowing something you didn't before, and each round gets you closer to what does.
The least effort for the most result
My frustration with a lot of this field is that it makes things complicated, so people are impressed and then do nothing. For me, about twenty percent of what you could do gives you about eighty percent of what you get. That's my rule of thumb, and those twenty percent are the five dials: sleep, nutrition, movement, mind and connection.
Get those basics right before you buy anything. The aim is to make the healthy choice the easy one, so that it happens without a daily act of willpower. I call that healthy by default. I also stick to it only about eighty percent of the time, because this should serve your life and not the other way round.
What else belongs in the definition
How you feel counts as data. Numbers help you see patterns, but they're there to serve how you feel. I don't read a bad sleep score and decide I'm going to have a bad day.
The mind is part of it. I spent years optimising my body and still ran into the same wall. I wrote about that in Does any of this make me happy?
Evidence and your own data work together. Research tells you what tends to work for most people. Testing on yourself tells you what works for you. I want both.
Why I think this is the way to extend your peakspan
Peakspan is the part of your life when you're still at or near your best, and everyone's best is different. Yours might be hiking fifteen kilometres at seventy, or staying sharp enough to run your company. A general programme doesn't know that. The cycle starts from what you want to keep doing, then finds out what your body needs to get there.
It also keeps working as you change. What suited you at forty may not suit you at sixty, and a cycle lets you notice and adjust. It worked for me. In 2008 a psychiatrist told me to learn to live with the damage, and after several years I had more in the tank than before I got ill. That's my result, and yours will be your own. We all decline in the end, but I know of no better way to find out how much of the speed is up to you.
Three things you can do today
Pick one outcome. What do you want your body to do differently in the next three months? Write it in one sentence.
Question one assumption. What have you accepted as fixed about your body without ever testing it? Write that down too.
Run one small test. Choose one change and try it for two weeks, with a daily score out of ten. Then keep it or drop it.
Talk to your doctor before you make big changes to your diet, exercise or supplements, especially if you have a medical condition or take medication, and don't stop a prescribed medicine on your own. If you have symptoms that worry you, get them checked first.
The full method is in my book, More Good Years. Find out more.
Eduard de Wilde has tracked and tested his own biology since 2008. He founded NoordCode and Livehelfi, co-founded the Syntony Institute, and wrote More Good Years. He isn't a doctor, and he sells some of the products discussed in this field. This article is for information and isn't medical advice.
