Original subtitles

It's kind of sad that most people don't ever truly get

to understand how amazing their bodies are,

and what they're capable of.

I've trained with somebody who's actually

held their breath for 22 minutes underwater.

I've also trained with somebody who's climbed

Mount Everest in just shorts and shoes.

I mean, these are incredible things.

You can't achieve those things without knowing

what you're truly made out of.

Ever since my childhood, I've been really interested

in how humans have managed to adapt

to different kinds of stressors...

Cold, heat, starvation, anything that is involved

in surviving in nature.

We've managed to spread across the entire globe.

We can live in the desert, we can live in the Arctic,

we can live in the rainforest.

So that's been, I think, one of the biggest reasons

to our success as a species, so far.

I started bio hacking from a very early age

because I was born with an inherited migraine.

It was that migraine, that pain that I tried to hack

with different kind of health interventions:

sleep, diet, medications.

Biohacking is looking at the world

and even your body as a complex set of systems,

understanding how those systems work,

and then making small iterations

and changes to those to influence them to be optimal

and perform at a higher level.

If you know that you have poor sleep

and that is causing you to feel stressed and anxious,

you are taking interventions in order

to improve your sleep so that you can feel better.

You'll take some set of data,

you will do an intervention, and then you see

if you were able to change the data for better.

Biohacking for me started, basically,

by understanding that I have to take my health

and well-being into my own hands.

It's about learning to understand yourself better.

It's a continuous process that never ends,

discovering and testing different things

on yourself and figuring out how to live a better life.

My father died at the age of 65.

That's when it clicked for me, to maybe, somehow,

work on my life extension.

And that's why I actually started thinking to myself,

"Maybe I would like to live to 120."

You're not only seeking help when you get sick,

but you actually create your resilience

through different kind of challenges that we are facing

as a humanity, but also in your personal life.

So biohacking can be many things.

All the available tools that we can use from nature,

from science, from technology, from all kinds

of possible ways that we can enhance

our self-consciousness, in essence.

Because the more conscious we become about who we are--

Like the inner state and all the biochemical processes,

it's the physiological processes--

The more we can affect the system

by affecting the environment.

Biohackers have existed for thousands of years.

You can think of ancient yogis and Buddhist meditators

or shamans who were really interested

in the human condition and what the boundaries are

and how you can push that with diet and nutrition and movement.

Technically speaking, everybody's a bio hacker.

Everyone's performing biohacks on a daily basis,

whether they know it or not.

Drinking a coffee in the morning?

That's kind of biohacking. Caffeine to stimulate you,

to wake you up, and get you in this more active state

and be alert and show focus.

But then also if you go to the gym

and you have a protein shake after

to help repair and grow muscular tissue.

If you've ever taken fish oil

to improve your fatty acid balance,

if you've ever gone out to the sun to get some vitamin D

or if you're taking a sauna for just relaxation,

then you've done biohacking in a way

that you changed the physiological state of your body

to achieve a particular goal.

Individually, it is the way of living.

Collectively, it is the preventive health care system.

In my doctor's office,

I saw a lot of chronically stressed,

really burned-out patients.

They were running around from doctor to doctor

without getting any help, and they eventually

ended up to my appointment.

And what I found out, that the chronic stress

was the underlying root cause for multiple health problems.

I've been a serial technology entrepreneur

for all my life,

and I thought I was living at my peak

and putting everything into what I do.

But in the end, when I turned 30,

I got stress-related illness.

I got an ulcer. I got some issues.

The stress begins already from the school.

You have to have, like, great numbers, better grades.

You have to perform, and your hobbies

are not really any more hobbies.

They're, almost, become like a job.

And it's more and more demanding.

Even younger and younger people get stressed,

and the burnouts are actually real, even for 20 years old.

The roots of the stress are in the culture.

It's just go, go, go, go, go.

And many of us get caught in that trap

where we're sort of want to out-hustle or outperform.

We have to be productive all the time.

Take care of your family, workout,

run your business, take care of your job.

It's about, like, doing things too much

and too vigorously.

Short-term acute stress can be good for psychology.

Because let's say if you're working...

having that mild stress can actually make

you more productive and more focused on your work.

When there is too much short-term stress,

it can actually become long-term stress,

and it can become chronic stress.

And that is when people don't notice that they are stressed.

Chronic stress, that's a-- that's kind of like

a disease or a plague.

That is the number-one reason for absenteeism from work,

for burnouts and even leading to many chronic diseases.

So if you're not able to calm down your body and mind,

you are also more self-centered.

People who are more stressed, they have more rumination.

So stress becomes their way of life.

And when you are in the mindset

that you don't even notice of being of stress,

you are not any more mindfully managing your stress.

People are stressed, and they don't know how to down-regulate.

They don't know how to shift down into this

kind of parasympathetic state.

The autonomous nervous system

can be divided into two parts:

the parasympathetic nervous system

and sympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic nervous system

is the so-called "rest and digest."

Your heart rate lowers, your ability to get oxygen in

lowers as well, and you're ready to digest food and relax.

The sympathetic nervous system activated state

can be also described as the fight or flight.

Your heart rate goes up.

Your ability to take oxygen increases, your ability to get

signals from the environment through your eyes increases.

So you're basically running your system

in an overclocked state.

It keeps us in this sort of, like, awake, alive,

sort of like survival mode in many ways,

and it's just so draining, and your nervous system will just--

Eventually, it'll be just such a wear and tear on you.

It actually reduces your ability to digest food.

So people who are chronically stressed out, they often have

gut issues, because they are not spending enough time

in a parasympathetic nervous system activated state.

Although your physiological organism is not under

any considerable, real, serious source of threat,

your nervous system is still perceiving the situations

as potential problems and threats.

The amygdala is one of the oldest parts of our brain,

and it's called the "fear center” for a reason,

because it controls all of the physiological responses

to stress, fear and, uh, dangers.

So for example, if you see a-- a snake,

that'll activate the amygdala, which will activate

your fight and flight nervous system

and prepare you for rapid action.

The amygdala is essential for survival

because it helps us to react to dangers

and physical threats much faster,

and it helps to mobilize all the resources,

gives you the alertness and energy to escape this harm

and get back into safety.

In the modern world,

amygdala can many times be mis-alarmed.

Social media, news, different fears going on.

You know, politicians, government, things like that.

If there is a phone alarm,

that can also activate your amygdala

and make your more stressed, or traffic noise.

So the more the amygdala gets activated,

the more stress responses you accumulate.

If it's too much, too excessive times

the amygdala gets activated,

then also the stress can become chronic.

What's important is actually to train our nervous system

to be in and out of this arousal state.

It's not to not feel the stress,

it's how to unstress when you feel stressed

for a longer period of time.

If you look at a dog, if he hear a knock on the door,

the dog wakes up, it's like,

It's-- it's in its aggressive, you know, fight or flight,

it wants to know who's there. And then a second later,

once it understands it's no danger,

it'll be back in the bed, asleep.

So other creatures are much, much more adept

at switching states much quicker than us.

Much-- they can switch everything off, be back asleep,

be back resting in that rest and digest.

Humans, we're not so good at that.

Humans in the past faced primarily stressors of survival.

Nowadays, our stress is slightly different.

And it's associated with sleep deprivation,

working too much, social media and environmental pollution.

However, not all stress is bad.

In fact, we need some stressors to stay optimally healthy.

For example, exercise and working out

are fundamentally stressful to the body.

We're breaking down muscle tissue

and releasing stress hormones.

But after we recover from it, we actually get stronger.

On the other hand, a sedentary lifestyle makes us

more fragile and increases the risk of many diseases.

So how can we leverage stress to our advantage?

How can we collaborate with stress to become

stronger and healthier versions of ourselves?

Stress can be divided into three different stages.

First, there is the stressor,

which can be emotional stressor,

physical stressor, or even mental stressor.

So it's very useful of analyzing and becoming aware

of what is actually causing me the stress.

Because many people don't even know that.

They are in a high-stress state all the time,

and they think, for example, that they are working too much.

But in reality, there is actually some sort

of background noise

in the workplace that is causing their nervous system

to be hyper-alarmed all the time.

It can even be a person.

It can be your working posture.

It can be the air quality in the workplace.

It can be the travel to the work.

There are so many different stressors.

Next state is distress,

which we have physiological response,

emotional response, and then it can affect,

also, social functioning.

This is where people normally become aware

that something's not in balance.

And in this stage, the most important thing

is the stress management.

The final stage is the burnout,

which means that the stress has become so prominent

that it causes, like, very, very clear symptoms

which are, like, deteriorating your immunity, your mood.

You become anxious or depressed.

So this final stage of distress

is the hardest to manage.

Anyone who feels stressed out or burnout

should stop and assess the situation.

What are the sources of stress? How are they affecting you?

And if you can somehow transform them.

What is stressing you out? What causes your mind and body

to be hyper-alarmed and-- or bad mood?

Or just, like, in a fight or flight state?

If you can remove that, remove that.

If it's a loud noise in your office,

maybe you can wear an active noise-cancelling

headphones or earplugs.

If it's a bad air quality,

you can ventilate room more or get some room plants.

If it's bad ergonomy,

you need to improve the ergonomy.

If the stressor keeps appearing in your life,

then the stress will always be there.

You have sleep issues, you cannot really rest.

Your fight or flight nervous system

is all the time active.

And then comes the problems.

You have the heart palpitations, anxiety, depression,

cardiovascular issues, high blood pressure and so on.

And all these signs are, kind of like, alarm for people.

"Hey, hey, hey, stop, stop. Take-- take it easy."

If your body says, "I'm stressed, take a break,"

then we should have the courage to take that break.

Stress does have a direct impact

on our physical health and bodies.

However, a lot of the stressors

in our environment aren't physical.

More often than not, they're mental and imagined.

This kind of psychological stress can be as harmful

as physical stress itself.

The brain cannot really tell if you are imagining

something or if it is happening in the real life.

It actually doesn't matter in what situation you're in.

Whether you're in an ice bath, whether you're in--

You're playing sports, whether you're writing

a Facebook message and somebody didn't like it

or somebody has a bad comment,

stress is manifested in the body in exactly the same way.

Imagining a threat in your head

lights up the same regions in the brain

as experiencing it in real time does.

For example, I'm sure that you've seen a horror movie.

It increases your heart rate, makes you anxious,

releases stress hormones, and it feels as if it's real.

But it's not. At the same time,

your body perceives as if it is real

and treats it as a threat.

And this all, actually, boils down to cellular level.

Your cells are not responding directly to the environment,

but they respond to the different neurochemicals

and biomedical messengers

that you are releasing into your bloodstream.

So if you get stressed and you release things

like cortisol and adrenaline,

your cells will react to that environment.

When you learn how to control your mind

and your emotional responses

and your nervous system reactiveness,

you naturally build more resilience to stress.

Stress management is a learn able skill.

There is a split second in every moment

to decide how you react.

And if you practice something like meditation

or breathing techniques where you take a deep breath

before every action, it enables you a few seconds

to change the way how you respond to be less reactive.

The frustration can be the actual thing that damages you,

not the thing that somebody cut you in the traffic

or a cue, it's your emotional response to it.

Emotion does not always have to lead to behavior.

So let's say if something is frustrating you

or making you angry,

feel that emotion,

and realize that this is making me upset...

and just let it go.

So better stress management is better response.

It's all about how you respond to the emails

and the demands of other people,

and especially the demands that you set for yourself.

Every adaptation in the body is the result of necessity.

If you don't use it, you lose it.

For example, let's take muscle.

If you were to be hospitalized

and you aren't able to move your muscles or exercise,

then eventually those muscles will begin to deteriorate.

Yeah, I think one of the funniest ideas that

I picked from Arthur Haynes and Daniel Vitalis,

these kind of almost nature-based philosophers,

and they kind of coined this term-- term, "homo fragilis,"

kind of the wise but fragile human being.

And I remember even in my schoolbooks,

they had this future human that will be very thin.

We don't need muscle mass, and we just need a lot of hair

in our face to filter the bad quality air we have.

And kind of this very dystopian picture

of-- of almost this alien-like being

that we are short-- sort of becoming.

If you look at the human being from, let's say,

like, Paleolithic era, it had much more stronger

bone structure, much more mas-- muscle mass,

more nutrient intake.

So physiologically, we've been,

actually domesticating ourselves.

And-- and that's kind of the core idea that if we really

want to build the resilience and stress buffers

and all of these, we are-- we need to really mimic many

of the aspects of our lifestyles that have been,

you know, evolving for a very long time.

Because our modern environment is quite different

from our ancestral environment,

we don't really experience the same stressors

as we did in the past.

Most people, they don't fast, they don't experience

the cold and nor the heat.

That's why we may lose some of our ability

to tolerate those types of stressors.

The body's constantly trying

to find this state of efficiency.

That's why it's so important to keep those pathways open.

That's why we do these kind of positive stressors

like expose our self to the cold, like fasting,

like sauna, a physical workout, and, you know,

lifting weights, things like that.

If we don't keep those pathways open,

the body doesn't have a use for those,

and it diverts the energy elsewhere.

The ability to adapt is essential for survival,

because the environment is always going to be

challenging us in some way

and exposing us to various stressors.

If we think about decades back, we had very different means

for survival or skills that we needed.

We actually needed to survive with hunting food

and learning to build a shelter.

In today's society,

we don't have to worry about survival that much.

We have food everywhere, and we have shelter,

and we have all of this kind of hedonistic pleasures

that we can go after. It's more about the question

how to stay healthy and happy during our lifespan.

Our modern environment is quite different

from our ancestral environment.

But at the same time, our bodies are still the same

bodies that we had in the past.

So we have this evolutionarily jet lag,

so to say, that we have this primal bodies,

but we live in a modern world.

And this can cause some, uh, incoherence.

It's so convenient to just drive through,

order the burger.

It's so easy to scoop a few candies in a bag,

weigh it up and out you go.

There's fast food all around us.

We might feel sad, or we might want some comfort food.

We reach for the sugar, we reach for candies.

And these might make us feel good or feel happy

or feel alert or alive or, like,

hyperactive for a little bit of time,

but there's always the crash. And then what are you gonna do?

You're gonna go back and find the same thing again,

because you want to chase the dragon of that high

or that emotional feeling.

The reason why we like sugary things,

why we like chocolate, why we like sex is that

it gives us a feeling of rewards and releases this dopamine.

And that's actually why we have SO many sick people today.

They find bad behavioral patterns and they just keep--

They're-- They're trapped in those vicious cycles.

The dopamine, the chocolate, the smartphone,

those are not the issues.

The issue is our inability to control our own behavior.

It's almost like the set of skills that we need

in today's society is reverse than of those

that we needed decades ago when we actually

had to have the dopamine to go after these things.

Now we have to use more of these sort of

cognitive inhibition skills that every time we see

a food cue or social media announcement,

that we won't be rushing to them

because this will create a stress loop;

every time we get something,

we feel like we need to respond to that.

What kind of cues are actually leading

to the habits for you to get the reward?

Becoming aware. Let's say you see,

like, a friend, and you immediately think,

"Okay, let's grab a beer," or something like that.

Or you go into a certain place which has a certain smell,

like a smell of a cookie or something like that.

And you immediately-- You don't even think,

"Let's take the cookie." And when you learn to see

and be mindful about these different cues,

you are actually being able to change these, if you would like.

I like, actually, biohacking in general

because it's not like ideology,

it's not like a religion or philosophy.

It's like a toolbox.

And there's this community of biohackers.

They just bring all the tools in one, this box,

and you can take whatever tool you want out of this box.

You know, you have this friend's pizza party, beer party.

You don't, kind of, restrict yourself because you know

you have tools available, SO you go and eat this pizza.

You drink this beer, which is of course, no good for you.

But because of the friends, of socializing,

you still do that.

So what I do in these cases--

And there are family gatherings and things like that--

I know that Mondays are always the empty days for me.

And I know that I can recover by doing this.

Also adding to the fasting, Wim Hof breathing technique

that optimizes your immunity,

your healing processes that already happen.

Combining those two things is so powerful

so that you really can allow yourself

to indulge into these unhealthy foods from time to time.

I consider lifestyle as a kind of a system,

and I like that system 90% of the time.

And 10% of the time, I just go with the flow.

If I go out with friends and they have beers,

and, you know, I join them and I drink a beer.

And I drink, you know, a glass of wine,

and maybe two glasses of wine.

If you apply the rule of 80/20 or 90/10,

then you can enjoy all the moments in life

and go back the next day, applying your system again

so that you still stay healthy and can enjoy life.

We have been taught that we should eat multiple times

per day to keep the "metabolism up," so to speak.

But what it actually does, it is spiking the blood glucose

and also the insulin multiple times per day.

You can think it like this: The more often you spike

the blood glucose and insulin,

your body eventually becomes resistant to it.

The same thing also happens when you have multiple

stressors throughout the day.

You secrete cortisol and then the receptors

actually receiving the hormones, they become resistant.

They are like, "Ah, enough of this,"

and then you need to secrete even more and more.

This is kind of a snowball effect

which eventually can lead to diabetes

and also the chronic stress.

Before someone develops diabetes,

they usually live years with prediabetes.

Prediabetes is a serious health condition where blood

sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough

yet to be diagnosed as type two diabetes.

It's more common than you would think.

For example, more than one in three

Americans have prediabetes.

Different foods affect blood sugar levels differently.

For example, simple sugars and carbs will spike

your blood sugar levels much more than protein and fat.

You can check each food's glycemic index,

which tells you how the food impacts blood sugar levels.

The higher the number, the bigger the impact.

So generally, it's a good idea to aim

for lower glycemic index foods.

Instead of always taking the banana,

go with less sugary, like green kiwi.

That's a better option.

Instead of eating a huge amount of fruit,

go with berries.

Changing your eating habits is also as crucial as

changing the actual food.

Let's say you have a-- like, a hamburger and a Coke.

It takes you five minutes. Thousand calories, boom.

You don't even realize that you have

some so-called "food" in your system.

When you're stressed out, your body is more prone

to storing the calories that you eat as body fat

because the stressed-out response

is going to shut down digestion.

So the longer time you actually spend with the food,

the better the digestion also works.

Take at least 20 minutes for the eating and do not use

laptop or watch TV and stimulate yourself.

Concentrate on the eating. Be mindful about the eating.

If you talk about the nutrition and the diets

in the whole world, there is only one thing that

is common in all continents, every religion,

every population, and it's fasting.

It's-- it's exactly this part where you don't eat.

The first thing that people think about

when they hear fasting is starvation.

You know, truth of the matter is that it's very hard

for humans to starve if they just skip breakfast,

because we carry thousands and thousands of calories

in our adipose tissue all the time with us.

And in order to actually reach the starvation state,

we would have to fast for days and days, even, like, weeks.

Back in the old days, the hunter-gatherers running around,

and, you know, maybe they're successful.

Maybe they find the Kill, they find the meat.

But then what happens in between if they're unsuccessful?

So humans are actually able to survive without food

for long periods of time.

Fasting has helped humans to survive before we've had

access to supermarkets and refrigerators.

In fact, during evolution, individuals whose brains

and bodies functioned well in a fasted state

were successful in acquiring food,

enabling the survival and reproduction.

If you're not used to any forms of intermittent fasting,

then you will experience higher levels of hunger

and discomfort when you do skip a meal.

It's not necessarily caused by the fasting

or the skipping of the meal.

It's just caused by your body's inability

to tolerate this type of a stressor.

So if you were to practice intermittent fasting

on a regular basis, then you will just build up

your body's ability to tolerate this kind of a stress response.

And you will also become just more robust and stronger

against various nutrition-related stressors.

During the fasting time

you actually heal your body.

You actually increase your potential. You get stronger.

You get mind focus.

There are lots of benefits that you get just by fasting

for, let's say, 12 hours, 16 hours, 20 hours,

maybe even five to seven days.

Fasting is another example of this hormetic stressors that,

in moderation and in small amounts,

will elicit a positive response in the body.

In addition to the health benefits, intermittent fasting

is also very practical in this modern society

where we're surrounded by food all the time.

And is especially useful if you're, like, traveling,

you don't have access to good-quality food.

You can just skip a few meals and say to yourself that you are

doing some fasting and getting some health benefits from it.

There are many different types of fasting,

but they all follow the same principle,

which entails restricting the eating window.

Probably the easiest way to start fasting

is delaying breakfast or having an early dinner.

One of the key nutrients your body uses

to deal with stress is magnesium.

Magnesium is important for regulating the autonomic

nervous system and relaxation as well.

But the problem is that stress depletes magnesium

by activating the sympathetic nervous system.

And on top of that, we don't get that much magnesium

from our food either, because of soil depletion, erosion,

and just food processing and eating a poor diet.

The amount of micro nutrients in the foods have been

downward trending for the past 50 years

and actually even accelerating in the past 15 years.

So most people are needing extra magnesium.

They're not necessarily, like, highly deficient,

but they are functionally deficient,

which means that they are not getting the optimum

amount for their bodies.

This is not something that you can just scan yourself

and feel you lack it or not.

You have to do the lab test.

The first step is to go with eating whole foods.

Not processed foods,

not foods with the long label of different ingredients,

and go with foods that are nutrient dense.

That is the best way to fix any deficiencies in micro nutrients.

Liver is like a natural multivitamin.

It contains most of the vitamins and minerals your body needs.

Another good example is the egg yolk.

What we did to our environment,

we pretty much did to our-- our intestines, in essence.

I think one of the biggest problems

for our gut health has been,

of course, all the processed food.

We often think about those just as, like, "Well,

there's probably a bit too much sugar or carbohydrates,"

but we don't think them at the level of,

are you feeding the bad bacteria in your gut?

Or are you, basically,

if I'd have a soil and I'm a farmer.

I love that stuff, like, hands-on thinking about

"How do I enrich this soil so I can plant seeds there

that are strong and bigger" and all that.

So if you think about your gut as this soil

and you're basically throwing just, like,

shitty pesticides and all of that in there,

you're pretty much getting very, very weak plants.

So that's kind of the metaphor that we haven't thought about,

many kind of semi-unhealthy foods at the level of,

how does this sweetener, for example,

affect the gut bacteria?

Does it feed the good stuff or does it feed the bad stuff?

And I remember one of the classic studies

was this one professor who fed his son

just McDonald's diet, and it basically cut out 40%

of the bacterial diversity from his gut.

And I think that's just a good idea to keep in mind that

when we go a bit deeper from the macro nutrients

and protein and carbs and this and that

into the world of bacteria.

Then you need to start to think about, like,

what else is in the food that's affecting the soil?

If we feed that soil with more life,

that life expresses itself with more complexity.

And complexity means more neural connections,

more new ideas and this and that.

So I think it's fascinating that we kind of

are going in the right direction, at least.

We are not simplifying it into specific

ingredients that are anti-inflammatory,

for example, and supporting high performance.

We are basically looking at diversity

and how that supports resilience and your health

and connectivity to the environment around you.

There are many ways that you can be more connected

with your local food supply.

For example, going to the farmer's market

and buy produce that grows in your region.

Or, go pick some mushrooms and berries in the forest.

Growing your own herbs and plants at home is also

a pretty good alternative.

Most people today are living in city environments.

We basically lost something that can be considered

in medical terms as "homeostasis,"

that you are in a healthy balance with different aspects

and different systems in your environment.

In a modern environment, people lose that balance.

They lose connection to themselves.

They lose connection with the very immediate environment.

They lose connection to their true nature

as what it means to be, for example, human.

And this is what causes many of the imbalances

that lead to chronic disease.

Often when people go camping,

they are like astronauts going to space.

They have all this gear, you know?

They have backpacks full of things.

They have camping gear.

They have all kinds of survival gear

as if they have lost connection to their true selves.

But they actually are part of nature.

We are so disconnected, we are so alienated

from our true nature that we need all

this protective equipment to keep nature away from us.

If you spend some time in nature, step by step,

you start to learn and see that you need

less and less and less of equipment and things,

that the environment can actually fulfill everything

you need in terms of food, in terms of shelter,

in terms of survival.

But very few people nowadays know how to do that.

People often forget many of these principles.

But when they get to a crisis like a pandemic

or a lockdown, that is when they suddenly

want to be in nature, that is suddenly when

they want to learn to be self-sustainable.

That's when they suddenly want to learn to hunt,

to gather their own wealth from nature.

Your environment dictates the default state of your mind.

The more time you spend in a particular environment,

the more used to it you're going to get.

For example, if you've never been in a noisy city before,

then at first, it's gonna be pretty stressful

and create some anxiety.

But after a while, you're gonna get used to it

and you barely even notice all the noise,

the bright lights, traffic, and all the other distractions.

If you take a wild animal from its natural habitat

and put it into a zoo, what we want to do is, of course,

give kind of the proper nutrition that

that species eats in its wild environment and kind of

"hack the environment" to suit its needs.

And now, when we've done that as a human beings

and we've-- we now living indoors for quite a while

and we still have this innate gravitation towards

the environment that we grew up in for literally

a few hundred thousand years, at least.

So I think that's itself very stressful.

Spending time in nature is pretty relaxing.

I think a lot of people can attest to that.

As humans, we've evolved to be in nature most of the time.

And it does have, like, a direct effect on our physiology

as well as our psychology.

And research has found that this kind of "forest bathing,"

as it's called, has many health benefits.

Like, it lowers stress hormones, relaxes the mind,

lowers inflammation, lowers, actually, the stress,

and other similar benefits.

Once you escape the city environment

and you go to a forest, for example,

you are actually exposed to

a wide variety of different bacteria,

fungus and so on in the air.

And that supports your immunity,

it stimulates it in a beneficial way.

Everything is very sterile

in the modern environment, so to say.

So we're afraid of pathogens, we're afraid of bacteria,

we're afraid of viruses.

But the truth is that we need those things.

We need those bacteria because, like, our own bodies

are made of trillions and trillions

of different non-human life forms.

And they help us to digest our food,

they help us to produce energy,

they help us to keep our immune system strong.

We have two immune systems.

One is the innate immune system, the one that we're born with.

The second one is the adaptive immune system,

which is the one we build up throughout our lifetime

based upon what kind of exposure we experience

and what kind of lifestyle habits we have.

So imagine if we are living in a very sterile environment.

We use a bunch of chemicals, detergents,

disinfectants all the time,

then we may end up doing ourselves a disservice

by weakening our adaptive immune system.

Everyone knows that trees and plants help us to breathe.

So they produce oxygen for us but they also have some other

quite beneficial effects

in terms of secreting these essential oils

and other particles into the air that we can inhale.

And that in turn can again strengthen our immune system

as well as improve our respiration.

So we need to kind of

expose ourselves to these kinds of ingredients

as our immune system needs to adapt to them.

If we were to completely avoid all

different viruses and pathogens and bacteria and ingredients,

then our immune system would kind of get weaker in a way,

because we don't get the reference experience

and we don't get the exposure.

In a city environment,

you have to bring nature into your apartment.

For example, you can use

air purifying plants and filtration technologies.

You can use essential oils and in the end,

using things like red-light panels

and so on if you don't have access to direct sunlight.

Most of the biohacking tools, funnily enough,

are kind of band-aids to try to mimic--

Mimic those very comforting and kind of calming effects

that how we grew up, like, evolutionarily.

Most of these technologies are beneficial

for a modern man living in concrete environments.

But once you escape that concrete jungle,

you don't need a lot of these technologies

because you can be already in your natural habitat.

You have to understand that your best work

happens when you are healthy, alert,

and ready to do what you need to do.

If you are tired, if you are sleep-deprived,

if you are not a nice person to be around with

because you are so stressed and you are reactive,

you are not going to do your best work.

The way how you find balance between work and health

starts by understanding that most growth

doesn't happen when you stimulate something.

When you go to the gym, your muscle doesn't grow

when you stimulate the muscle,

it grows when you are resting.

Similarly, when you learn something, you read a book,

the stimulus, what happens in that situation,

is not what leads to learning,

but it's actually when you sleep.

In a similar way, the most effective work

is a result of adequate recovery.

I'm always saying to people, "Work hard, rest harder."

So it's not only about looking at

how you interact with your tools,

like having a standing desk or a saddle chair

or ergonomic keyboard

and the monitor at the right height and level.

But you also look at how you recover,

how you sleep cognitively.

People have built up different protocols and tools

like the Pomodoro technique, where you are working

and aiming to work 20 minutes focused on one thing,

or one task at a time.

And what is key for getting us many moments

of focused attention in your work day

is actually the breaks that you hold between those sessions.

The problem is that there's only a certain amount

of information our brain can hold before it gets tired.

The same applies to, like, running and lifting weights.

You need to take a break and you need to recover.

So if your brain is constantly stimulated,

if you're constantly working, you're constantly thinking,

you're focusing hard, then it's not going to allow

all this information to set in,

and you're gonna get tired eventually.

Sometimes the most productive thing

you could do is to take a break.

Instead of just sitting in front of your computer all day long,

you have a break where you get a little bit of movement,

you change the environment,

you look at the completely different thing.

Maybe you focus on the horizon,

maybe you focus on the short distance,

maybe you move your body a little bit.

That often actually leads to more creative ideas to come up.

Most people think of high-performance culture

and work in terms of putting as many hours in

of "effective" time that they can.

But many studies in the last few years have noticed

that actually people get more done and they're more productive

if they do less but more effectively.

I usually only work, like, five to six hours per day.

Efficiency is doing things in an efficient way

while effectiveness is doing the right things.

It's not about the hours that you put in

but the way how you do those hours that matters.

Humans are performing at their best

when they spend more time in a flow state.

What happens, your prefrontal cortex

that basically analyzes what you do, shuts down

and you just lose yourself and lose sense of time.

And you're just so focused in the work that you do.

You're not distracted by anything else.

You're not doing any social media

when you're creating content and writing

or creating a presentation,

you're blocking out things.

The key here is ultimate mastery

of mindfulness and meditation.

And meditation actually increases

the capability of being focused

in the present moment and being

totally immersed in what you're doing.

The hippocampus is the learning center of the brain.

It's an area that activates every time

you learn new information

or you memorize something.

Meditation increases the activation in the hippocampus

and help you to consolidate the memories

that you have learned.

I still remember the day that I realized

that I've never lived in the present moment.

And that was, kind of like a shock.

Actually, we have this now moment!

And I've been either in the past or in the future

or thinking about the future or rushing things

that I'm doing, "Okay, next thing."

So learning to be in the now and being mindful

about your own life is-- is the key here.

And then you can extend that into meditation practice.

And it's, you know, it's not just for women.

I started thinking about my nervous system

and my stress levels in every single concept in my life

and how can I reduce that stress accumulating to my body?

And one of the biggest thing that really aid me

with migraines was meditation.

If you just imagine a threat...

You will alarm your nervous system,

you will get that fight or flight state.

Likewise, if you just imagine a nice, calm beach

or the presence of your loved ones or a positive moment,

your brain will react to that as if it were happening.

We can see a correlation between

the years of meditation and amygdala size.

In some studies, those who have meditated for a long time

also have a smaller amygdala which means that by default,

they are less reactive to external fear signals.

Creating more space between your thoughts

and your reactions

and you can actually become aware

of different kind of thoughts you have.

And they're not necessarily your thoughts,

they are just thoughts

chattering you a little bit then they go away.

And if you're not attaching to these thoughts,

you become more free person.

Meditation alters the brain structure and the function

and can help in managing nervous system

and stress responses.

How quickly you can change your emotional state,

how well you can be present for your family,

for your co-workers or just be present in the life.

So that needs a little bit of effort and the quantification,

it's not that obvious as, like,

muscle growth that you can actually see.

The whole modern idea of exercise

with gym memberships and so on is flawed.

If you think of modern man and how we work nowadays,

we sit for long periods of time in front of our computers.

We are basically physiologically and biomechanically

in a form that is not natural

and doesn't come naturally to us.

If you are inactive, long periods of time during the day,

what happens is your lymphatic flow doesn't move.

When you look at the human body, the heart is a pump

that pumps nutrients and blood all around the body, and oxygen.

Now, the lymphatic system doesn't have a pump.

What it requires is some kind of movement.

It requires you to use your body and your skeletal system

and some gravity also by keeping your feet on the ground.

That is key for making sure that your body

is functioning optimally.

Those people who are metabolically active

throughout the day but don't incorporate

any specific movement or exercise

or hobbies into their day are actually healthier

and have lower all cause mortality compared to those

who are stagnant and don't move

pretty much eight to 10 hours per day

and after work, they do all the exercise or in the evenings.

Sitting all day and then going for hard exercise

isn't the best way of going about it.

You should want to focus more on doing this lower intensity

exercise and movement throughout the day.

Like walking, it's one of my favorite forms of moving myself.

And it doesn't put that much stress on the body.

And you can recover from it faster.

So it's very important to have

these regular movement breaks throughout the day, spread out.

A term that has been used about this type of exercise

is, "Grease the groove." Instead of going to the gym

for one hour a few times a week,

you're actually incorporating

a few minutes of exercise throughout the day.

Some people, when they have online meetings,

they run on a treadmill, for example.

Some people are doing stretches

while they are on online meetings.

Walking in a forest, in uneven territory,

is better than just having walks.

So basically, making it slightly more difficult to move,

to use your physical environment like our original ancestors did,

that is probably the best thing to think about

when you are thinking of movement at the workplace--

"How can I move in my working environment

and do things that maybe our ancestors did

in an environment that was not built

like modern concrete office environments?"

Not 10,000 steps a day, but 500, maybe 1,000 steps an hour.

Don't take elevators. Take stairs and walk.

You don't have to go to the gym.

Just take your groceries and bring them carrying home.

In a city environment,

if you get exposed to environmental pollution,

tobacco smoke and so on,

you may want to consider using nutritional supplements

and interventions that speed up the removal

of some of this source of pollution.

We get heavy metals and different chemicals

and toxins accumulating in our fat tissue.

Sweating is one of the primary

detoxification pathways of the human body.

And you can speed up extraction of potential pollutants

by sweating and using traditional means like a sauna.

There's a couple of different types of fat.

There's the stored fat, which is white fat.

It's, like, excess energy in the body.

And that's, kind of like, what we walk around with.

Your body kind of conserves that SO we can maybe use that later.

Brown fat is something that's stimulated

at about 14 to 16 degrees.

So brown fat breaks down white fat stores

and uses that as energy.

This is why you can, kind of, like,

grow more and more accustomed to the cold temperatures.

And you can actually regulate your own temperature

a lot more efficiently.

What happens when you go into the cold,

you can train your nervous system to get more flexible.

The cold water is always the same.

The only variable is you.

Your mood, your state

can be different on a day-to-day basis

but the lake or the Baltic Sea,

the temperature remains constant.

The cold is, kind of, a more righteous kind of thing.

That's why it's like a mirror:

It shows you who you are on that particular day

in that particular moment in time.

When you go into the cold, your body can get this-- this signal

that you are gonna die, you really are gonna die.

But this controlled stress,

when you apply slower exhale than the inhale,

you actually train your nervous system

that even though outside is cold,

you still are in a calm position, calm mode.

Once you do that, maybe it doesn't help.

Twice you do that, it helps already better.

If you apply that regularly, you get stronger.

I started to do cold exposure because

of my Finnish colleagues.

They have these, kind of like, little rituals,

Christmas parties and things like that.

And every year they would basically ask me

to come to the sauna, which was okay.

Actually, once you get used to taking your clothes off

with Finnish people, it became okay.

But then everywhere you have a sauna,

you basically have a body of water.

I couldn't escape it. They were always interested

to see the Australian guy go into the cold water.

After about three of these parties,

I decided that, okay, I'm gonna show these guys

that I can do this.

I made every mistake in the book, but,

I learned very quickly.

And then, when that next Christmas party came,

I was ready to go. And I kind of got in there

and these guys were, like, literally filming me

with these Nokia cameras. And they were, like,

amazed that the Australian guy was like,

"He can do it now, he can do it."

The joke became a little less funny

when they realized that they had to beat the Australian guy

in the cold and outdo his time.

I like to push my boundaries.

That'd be, like, a dip in the ice water

or very hard sauna system,

something that's feeling uncomfortable.

And then, when you overcome the uncomfortability,

that makes you feel that you're actually alive

and you're actually accomplished something.

Yeah, cold exposure has SO many unique benefits.

You can become more resilient towards the cold

and different temperatures in your body.

I started to realize that also, I wasn't getting sick.

My immune system was being boosted by this.

As it stands, I've not been sick for about nine years

since I've been doing this thing here in Finland.

There is research to show that winter swimmers

have higher levels of glutathione

and glutathione is the body's main

master antioxidant defense system.

So whenever you are practicing some cold exposure

then your body up-regulates its own defense systems

and boosts the immune system.

I know that if I eat candy or something like this,

I eat the candy. I regret it, like, 20 minutes later.

And then, I'm like,

"Okay, I don't want to do that again for another month

until maybe I'll do it again."

With the cold exposure, it's something that

kind of keeps drawing me back.

There's this just, like, this amazing feeling

that you can, kind of, feel it inside your body.

And it's sort of, like, trying to escape, you know?

I had so much success with it that I even decided to build

my own ice bath at home.

And each morning I jump into my ice bath

and after that, you feel amazing.

With cold exposure, if you're going out for, like,

an ice bath or if you're going to nature,

you only need to go two minutes once a week.

That's all you need to do to get this full effect.

Where the brown fat's being produced,

you're actually getting those happy hormones.

Your immune system is, kind of, being rebalanced

and reset during this process.

So it's only two minutes.

It's very, very possible. It's very easy.

Every single time I go into the water,

I experience the same cold.

It's just that I'm okay with it.

It's important to understand that

being cold is just a feeling,

it's just a signal that your body sends to your brain

telling you it's dangerous to be there.

But if you take it just as a signal

that tries to communicate you something,

the same with fasting.

If you get this starvation,

you know, this hunger, it's just a feeling,

it's just the signal that tries to tell you

to survive, you need to eat.

To survive, there's one point

you need to get out of this cold water.

So just take it as a signal.

Maybe you just step aside and ask yourself,

"How do I feel in this moment?"

Just to try to do this objective assessment of your whole body.

And you will love it.

Everyone is, more or less, very aware

how our thoughts affect our bodies.

We can, you know, feel the butterflies in our stomachs

when we're nervous or something like that.

But, on the other hand, I think that

often times if you eat, for example, shitty food,

you might not realize how much it affects

your mental state because, of course, the vague nerve

and everything communicates all the time.

Your body and your brain are interconnected

and that's pretty much what we are,

kind of, trying to crack and hack

here in the biohacking community.

There are a lot of signals coming into our brain

in terms of thoughts because of the financials,

because the relationships with other people,

because of the job, because of many, many different things

that is on your plate.

To do lists are very long.

So there is no time to stop and think to yourself,

to scan your body, to understand what's going on.

So that's easy to actually confuse those two things,

like, for instance, gluten.

I know that gluten is not good for me

because when I go to my mother's and she makes a pancake

out of the normal wheat, I eat two pancakes.

My stomach feels like I had eaten 100 pieces.

And that's the difference I know.

Usually, I would have thought that it's just,

I ate too many of them, you know, because I like them.

Now, I eat two and I feel the same thing.

Well, maybe it's gluten

and maybe it's my leaky gut or something like that.

But to be able to understand those signals

that your body's trying to tell you,

you need to stop, you need to pay attention,

you need to step aside

and asking this question, "How do I feel?"

It's one of the best ways how to actually get back

to the connected with your deeper self.

And what's interesting with biohacking,

why do we use a lot of gadgets and tools and things like that?

It's because technology made us weak

and technology may a little bit help us

make strong again and understand ourselves better.

So we have some incredible technology

that can help guide us, that can give us information.

It can tell us what's happening inside of our veins,

what the condition of our blood is.

But at the end of the day, that's just a guide

you have to listen to it. You can use that as a way

to understand yourself and understand your own systems.

If you're looking to improve your health

through self-tracking,

probably the best way to start would be measuring your sleep.

You will see how exercise, food and lifestyle choices

affect your sleep.

Another great tool is a continuous glucose monitor

which tells you how metabolically flexible you are

and how your body reacts to different kinds of foods.

So in a nutshell, it doesn't really matter how...

hard you train or how well you eat if you sleep like shit.

Stress and sleep are closely linked.

Stress can adversely affect sleep quality and duration.

While insufficient sleep can increase stress levels.

Both stress and lack of sleep

can lead to lasting physical and mental health problems.

Sleep is like building block and the first,

most important bio hack

for controlling stress levels and the nervous system.

During sleep, there are actually many processes

going on in the body.

In the first hours of the night, you get more deep sleep

and later in the night you get more REM sleep.

During deep sleep, the brain is detoxifying

from harmful substances.

If you don't get that deep sleep,

there will be more toxins

circulating in your nervous system,

which obviously keeps the nervous system

in a higher stress state.

If you want to, let's say, gain muscle mass and gain strength,

you need to have a certain amount of deep sleep.

In deep sleep, you actually grow.

During REM sleep,

the nervous system is recovering.

And if you don't get that REM,

your nervous system is SO much more reactive next day.

One night of bad sleep, it's not a disaster

but when you have another one and another one

and then it's actually chronic, everything changes.

Your metabolism changes, you become crave more glucose

and sugars and carbohydrates. You make bad decisions.

It's harder to concentrate.

And the quality of the life is much worse.

For all people, lack of sleep increases

the amygdala hyperactivity.

So if you don't sleep,

your nervous system is even more alarmed.

And I know that from, like, way too well.

Let's say I have had, like, a full 24-hour shift in the E.R.

I was working all night and I was really like, go nuts.

I was craving, like, this junk, highly saturated food.

So the deprivation in sleep, it messes up

with the normal physiological mechanisms.

Meditative techniques can be used to help with insomnia.

So to fall asleep faster,

learn how to relax, progressively relax

all your muscles

so that you get into deeper relaxation

and change the brain activation

so that you get into these deeper brain waves.

What I did, I reduced dramatically my workload.

I switched the job from an easier one. No night shifts.

Began actually sleeping more,

began spending more time in the bed,

having more relaxing time.

The problem with sleep is that

when you don't wake up during the night,

it doesn't count as good sleep.

Actually, lots of people think that they sleep well,

but they really don't.

That's where technology has a role to play

because if you're not measuring, you're not tracking,

you're not getting that data and not seeing the real,

like, the real situation, then you'll never actually know.

With technology, we can make small adjustments

on a day-by-day basis

and improve the quality of the sleep.

Things like sleep hygiene, the temperature of the room.

What's the half life of coffee and caffeine in your system?

You can adjust these things real time

and you'll find the results-- You'll see the results

through the technology, through the data, through measuring.

So I'm basically using

all kinds of tracking technologies

to track how my nervous system is doing,

how my sleep quality is doing.

And even in a city environment,

although I might feel rested and my data looks okay,

when I go to nature, there is a distinguishable difference

in the way how I feel and how recovered I feel

after a good night's sleep.

And it also reflects on the data.

I get lower heart rate, I get higher heart rate variability.

I get more deep sleep

and also lower blood pressure when I'm in nature.

And I don't need any technology

to feel that, I can feel it with my body much more directly

than in a city environment

where I might need technologies like this

to tell me how I feel.

There's a few components here.

One of them is you are less exposed to EMF,

so there's less interference with your brainwave patterns

on your physiological processes.

And the other thing that happens

is also your body temperature drops

much more during night time

because it's in sync with nature.

In city environments, we are basically,

constantly in tropical environments

around 24 or 25 degrees Celsius.

But in nature, there is natural variation.

And when you go to sleep,

your body temperature naturally also drops.

And environmental temperature,

when that drops alongside with your body temperature,

that is what we are actually adapted to.

That is what is good for us.

Now, you can also drop your body temperature artificially

by using mattresses that are moving away heat from your body.

And in my home, I actually use a device

that is cooling my body with a mattress

by circulating cold water in it.

Another thing that I would do

is to avoid eating too late in the evening.

Because, when you eat something

that is a highly metabolic activity,

your body converts your nutrients into energy.

And it's a thermogenic process

that increases your body temperature as well.

Melatonin is a hormone that we often relate to sleep

and it has also other effects.

It's not just that it promotes sleep

but it also improves recovery.

So your body actually increases its recovery rate

when you have melatonin circling in your system.

And what you don't want to do is to delay melatonin release

in the evening by being exposed to artificial source of light.

In the evening, you should dim the lights,

you should go more towards the red light,

which is like the natural sunset light

and not have any bright lights,

especially not the blue light

because it's blocking the melatonin production.

Blue light is not your enemy

but the amount of it

and what periods of time of the day you get it.

So in the morning hours, you actually do want to get

some blue light because it helps you

to synchronize your biological clock.

The circadian rhythm is where all of our organs

and basically our body and the systems inside of our bodies

are kind of in alignment and in accordance

with the nature and our surroundings.

The circadian rhythms control

almost every aspect of our physiology,

starting with the metabolism, digestion of food,

hormones and cognition even.

We actually have this clock.

Usually, the alertness is highest

in the morning and mid-morning.

You have your best reaction time about two, three p.m.

Your strength and power is at the highest,

about four to five p.m. and so on.

So you have different kind of systems active

at different points of time.

Probably the best example of the circadian rhythms

is the diurnal rhythm of cortisol, the stress hormone,

and melatonin, the sleep hormone.

In the morning when we wake up,

cortisol is supposed to give us energy

and energize ourselves for the rest of the day.

Whereas, in the evening, melatonin

is supposed to make us drowsy

and promote better recovery for the night ahead.

The best way to synchronize

your biological clock

is to have really bright lights in the morning.

And the best way, of course, is the sunlight, the natural light.

And when you don't have that, you going to have problems.

And in Finland, in the winter time,

it's kind of hard to get the natural light

because it's very dark, usually in the morning.

So I might use something like a blue light in the morning,

like daylight lamp or glasses like this

to give my brain the signal that now it's day.

And the earlier I do it, the better.

If your body's circadian rhythms are aligned

with the circadian rhythms of the environment,

then it's easier to stay healthy.

Your body experiences less stress and less inflammation.

Now in the evening,

you don't want to be too exposed

to blue wavelengths of light

but you want to actually block it.

And you want to get more of the longer wavelengths of light

that are related to sunset.

If you are the kind of person

who stays up much later than others,

then that's the result of just your habits and lifestyle

and not necessarily the result of your genetics

or physiological blueprint.

If you were to go to nature, like for camping,

you would hit this reset button for your circadian rhythms

because chances are you'll just fall asleep

when the sun goes out

and you'll wake up with the sunrise.

And when that rhythm of your day and the life gets messed up,

everything gets messed up.

Misalignment with the circadian rhythms

is going to promote disease.

Shift work is actually considered a carcinogen.

It's essentially because of this misalignment

from the circadian rhythms.

There is a lot of research showing

that disrupted circadian rhythms can cause many imbalances

and chronic diseases in the body.

However, we don't need to become cavemen

in order to stay healthy.

So here are a few easy tips

of how to keep your circadian cycles aligned.

Go outside. Expose yourself to daylight.

Consume food when the sun is out.

Install blue light reducing apps.

And sleep in complete darkness.

Imagine you are in a supermarket and having a budget,

50 euros.

You walk around and you see for all the goods,

there are no price tags.

But you get those goods in the basket, and go to the cashiers.

And cashier says,

"Oh, sorry, you have goods here for 100 euros,"

and that's a problem. And that's the same with the health.

If you go with friends

eating pizza and drinking beer and being up all night long,

you know it costs you something.

And it will cost you something.

Because we know the end result is such that in Latvia,

the average lifespan is 75.

Healthspan is 55 years.

So imagine what happens in these 20 years.

People live in misery, walking from one doctor to another,

popping pills and living a really, really bad life.

And it's only because they didn't know

what the price tags were.

What amazes me each time that I talk to other people

and I discover that there is a disconnect

between what they do with their body

and what they expect from their body.

One way or the other, they...

they are not aware that it's just the one body you get.

And you should do it all your life with that one body.

And if you damage your body during your lifetime,

then you'll know for sure that you have problems

when you get older.

And when you take care of that one body

that you get from the start

and you give it the right maintenance,

and you know, and the right inputs,

then you can expect the right output.

And then, you can be healthy for the rest of your time.

I don't need to become 180 years old.

That's not necessary for me.

For me, it's all about healthspan.

So I want to stay healthy as long as possible

and then drop dead.

The reason why people are burned out--

More than 70% of people feel

disengaged or actively disengaged

from the work that they do.

So this is on one hand.

On the other hand, is that people's own life goals,

the meaning of life are not properly set for themselves.

I've never-- I've never seen anybody have a burnout

when they're really doing something

they're so passionate about.

Help big corporates to make more money

doesn't give me that purpose in life.

The moment that I decided to change my career,

it changed my life completely.

Us people, we're not stagnant like trees.

We have legs, we can move around,

therefore we can also transform our personality and character

SO we can become a new person.

We don't necessarily have to stay the same person

we were in the past and we can constantly keep evolving.

You can change your job. You can change your lifestyle.

You can change your environment.

We can always change.

You know, it's not easy. Some people will say,

"Okay, a mortgage that I have to pay, you know?

I have all kind of loans so I need the money."

I had the family, I had a lot of expenses as well.

But I can tell you that it's worth the risk.

The high achievers are very often goal orientated people.

Few years ago, when I was still running full marathons,

I set my goal to run under three hours and 30 minutes.

So I prepared myself, really went into ketogenic diet.

I worked on my running mechanics

and I actually did a lot of stuff to achieve this goal.

I did. Well, what happened?

The race was on Sunday.

On Monday, I was empty as an empty sack

because that was my goal.

I fulfilled it but it didn't bring me

the fulfillment that I expected. For the next...

week or so, I was, like, really, really depressed

and I didn't know what to do.

Should I set my goal for three hours or something like that?

And eventually, all my nice, good practices evaporated

because I didn't have this goal ahead of me.

Setting goals and achieving them

is great for getting short term results.

But you should also look beyond those goals.

For example, instead of thinking about

how I'm going to lose those three pounds,

you should think about how can I stay healthy

and fit for the rest of my life?

We need to create these life meanings.

Why we do what we do,

so that it brings us forward

so that you can feel that you get better, that you improve,

that you grow as a person, as an individual.

Only then, you can avoid burnout.

The amount of things we can control in this world

is minuscule compared to the things we cannot.

That can be a great source of anxiety and stress.

Not all people that live in the city

have the chance to go to the nature all the time.

It's nothing to stress about.

And we just need to adapt flexibly

to the biohacks that we can do in our environment

that makes us feel good.

We as human beings, we have the natural tendency

to try to control everything.

We're trying to control our lives,

our days.

If we feel anxious or stressed,

we immediately try to get rid of it.

But knowing and appreciating that life is ever changing

and there are always some surprises

and there are always moments

that we don't feel comfortable with,

is very important.

Because only in that way we're able to adapt to these moments.

If we don't try to push things away,

like uncomfortable feelings away,

we're better able to enjoy every moment.

I've tried to do

a lot of, like, difficult things in my life

to kind of remind myself that, you know,

these kinds of stressors and environmental disasters--

They're not going to go away, they're going to keep happening

and we can't really avoid them.

The only thing we can do is to keep ourselves more resilient,

keep ourselves more adaptable

and to prepare for those things in advance.

Even though biohacking emphasizes

the holistic aspect of the life

and really thinking about every single moment in your life

from morning till evening...

I think it's really important not to

try to control everything

because this can also make you really, highly stressed.

So it's more about the balance of knowing what's good for you.

Biohacking is supposed to bring you more happiness

and health and mindfulness and ease of mind,

rather than create you some rules

that you need to blindly follow.

Humans, as the species,

are so-so.

We are weak. We run slow.

We don't have claws, no sharp teeth.

We sort of are, eh, not so, so good

compared to other mammals, for instance.

But the reason why are we dominating species on Earth

is because of the collaboration,

because of being socially engaged with each other.

One of the reasons humans have survived for so long

is because of our social cooperation.

Imagine being alone in nature

or doing some sort of a crisis or war,

you wouldn't really survive for too long if you are alone.

That's why we need to, kind of, stick together.

To be able to maintain this activity

that you are aiming for, to feel better,

to do all those healthy stuff,

all those biohacks and everything like that,

pay attention to doing that together with other people.

Because, you are easiest to fool yourself

and to lie to yourself.

That's why you need somebody else

that you don't want to let down.

It's easier to stay healthy with like-minded people.

Even the sleeping tracker, the ring,

is like an accountability partner.

Don't be obsessed with the data like that.

Use it as a trainer, as a coach.

So mentors, coaches, partners, friends,

family people, everybody--

Use them to commit to this betterment of your life.

If a lady gets pregnant,

her husband doesn't demand,

"Can you do that in six months?"

Of course not. It takes, on average, nine months.

So if you plant the seed,

basil seed, herb or something,

and you want to grow it for your salad,

of course, you expect it to grow

three, four weeks or something

until you get some leaves and eat it in your salad.

So in the nature, we are really patient to wait for the things

that they take a long time.

Now, the same thing goes also with your health.

Feel like this is just too much to try to optimize,

you can start with small steps.

Like first, reduce using technology in the evening.

That's one step.

And then, step by step maybe reducing your sugar,

reducing the coffee consumption.

Step by step, building up the good habits

and making the process easier for you.

The goal is to gain a real mastery of yourself.

Let's say when you wake up, the first thing you do:

Grab a glass of water, then go outside for fresh air.

That's also a good morning routine.

Even the small things are really effective.

And that is the path to self-mastery.

Like, for instance, imagine two spaceship going into the space.

And the angle with their trajectories is just one degree.

It's like barely noticeable.

For a very long time, they are going to fly in a parallel

but they are eventually land in totally different galaxies.

So these things affect long term.

Nothing is gonna change from tomorrow on

because one degree angle is a really small one.

You barely notice it.

But after some time, in the long term,

you will notice it and everything's gonna be better.

So you start your day with the feeling

that you already did some fairly good things

for your health. Okay?

I start each morning with 60 seconds of cold shower.

But gradually you can extend that period.

So just by taking small steps,

you can build it into your life

so that you get used to it.

If it's part of your ritual,

you just jump out of your bed. You don't need willpower.

You just start to do the right things.

And then, each time

you can add something else that you think,

"Okay, that would be beneficial at this specific moment."

You can take one bio hack from here, like from the diet,

one bio hack from the exercise aspect,

one bio hack from the meditation aspect

and sort of really build your own bio hack set

that works specifically in your life.

How many people try to fast

because they want to lose weight?

That's totally wrong approach

because you want to optimize for feeling good.

And once you start optimize for feeling good,

you start recognizing just to be able to feel good,

you need to pay attention to several things at once:

Eating better, sleeping better, moving constantly,

training your nervous system, being surrounded by nice people,

having got life goals, financials--

Everything is underneath that.

And if one of those things missing,

you probably won't feel good.

We know that in seven years,

we don't have any cell left

that were, like, previously in seven years.

So you're actually, all the time, creating yourself anew.

So why not start now?

You know, when is the best time to plant a tree?

It's 20 years ago.

You know, when is the second best time to plant a tree?

It's today.

No one is responsible for your health.

And no one is interested in your health as much as you are.

So in the end, you can consult all kinds of experts,

doctors and specialists and they will say one thing.

But in the end, it's you

who needs to take responsibility of your own health.

And once you basically understand that,

that's when real change can happen.