To “hack” means to gain unauthorised access to a system to be able to modify it and make it work as you want it to. “Biohacking” is hacking your body. Or at least, that’s what the name implies. If you ask us, we’d define it as the practice of using different tools and practices, both natural and artificial, to enhance your physical and mental performance or achieve specific health outcomes such as boosting endurance and slowing down ageing.
Biohacking is a natural outcome of progress in science and technology in a free society. Last week we covered what functional medicine is- how it is an unregulated form of high-end medical care, Biohacking is also an independent unregulated movement. Also commonly referred to as “do-it-yourself biology”, it involves health enthusiasts who take charge of their own health, do their own research and decide to administer health interventions and therapies by themselves. As opposed to having a practitioner guide you in normal medical practice.
Common practices associated with biohacking include diet and lifestyle modifications, taking supplements (a lot of supplements), ice baths, red light therapy, grounding etc.
Top-tier biohackers such as Dave Asprey, Bryan Johnson and Ben Greenfield who’re leading the movement globally, typically have a tightly controlled daily routine involving these practices and therapies at just the right intervals, in the right amounts- keeping their circadian rhythm and other factors in mind. And taking somewhere between fifty to a hundred supplements a day- sometimes even more.
They use advanced diagnostics and wearable devices to track and measure every measurable aspect of their health and optimise it to the fullest. They’re always on top of their bloodwork which they track continuously.
The goal is to maximise human performance. Defying ageing is a common theme in the biohacking space. A lot of these celebrity biohackers have made public claims of planning to live for 150 to 200 years.
Origins Of The Modern Movement
The biohacking movement has picked up significant pace in the last decade. It’s quite a rage in Silicon Valley- for obvious reasons. In fact, that’s where it’s claimed to have originated through the work of Dave Asprey “father of biohacking”, who was initially a Silicon Valley tech worker before becoming a world-renowned health author and entrepreneur. Some sources credit him with the coining of the term “biohacking” but references to it have been traced back to as early as 1988.
“Hackers look at something they want to (access), and they don’t know what it is, but they start poking at it until they get the behaviour they want, and then they gain control of the system by changing the way they get in,” Asprey explains.
Is Biohacking Safe?
Did you drink coffee this morning? Then you’ve done some biohacking today already. Drinking coffee when you’re feeling too lethargic to work, taking a sleep aid or other OTC meds, deep breathing to calm yourself- these are all, by definition, instances of biohacking. Even weight training is a form of biohacking because you’d never be this jacked with normal functional movement.
But it’s true that biohacking can be a risky sport. Obviously, right? Biohacking is an umbrella term for practically anything and everything someone does to alter their biology. What could go wrong? There have been cases of people dying from something as simple as taking one too many servings of a caffeine supplement.
Severe outcomes like that are rare but the risk does increase when you’re going beyond basic diet and lifestyle interventions to include advanced supplementation and biohacking tools.
To improve safety, businesses offering these services need to be more responsible. But more importantly, of course, we as consumers need to be smarter and more careful. Always check for third-party lab testing and research to back up claims of efficacy and safety. The supplement industry unfortunately continues to be very shady. We’re not fans of government regulation some amount of it can be helpful here.
Whether biohacking is safe or unsafe, beneficial or harmful- it all comes down to how you do it. Just like in computer hacking, you have black hat and white hat biohackers, there is a right and wrong way to do biohacking. What is the wrong way? Taking steroids, too many drugs, unverified peptides etc- right up to implanting cybernetic devices and magnetic implants into body tissues- to cite a few major examples. The latter is common with the “Grinder” movement which involves transhumanism as a route to maximising human performance.
Things get even darker when we get into the history of secret government programs across the world that involve non-consenting human participants to achieve very extreme biological outcomes, But let us put the brakes right over here for now.
The good news is that the vast majority of the biohacking movement is a positive and health-promoting one involving holistic health practices that uplift the well-being of your mind, body and spirit. The community largely consists of genuine health enthusiasts who want to get the most out of their bodies and lives.
Conclusion
The culmination of the biohacking movement goes to show that you cannot hack nature at the end of the day. And there are no shortcuts to health and wellness. This is reflected in the lives of top biohackers today who treat their bodies like a temple. They maintain an extremely disciplined lifestyle- eating clean, sleeping well, meditating, and working out regularly. So the right way to hack your body, perhaps, is to not!