Biohacking habits to increase your performance that you can implement today!
In this article, I want to cover the habits that help me deal with daily routines, challenges and achieve my goals. I called them biohacking, because it refers to making changes to your lifestyle to feel at your best and become a better man.
If you find hard to implement all of them or at least a few, start small. Choose one that is easier to implement into your life, and as soon as it gets a part of your life and don't require your attention to do it, proceed with another one. I am an adept of easy and minimalistic life, so to proceed you will not need any special equipment, or wait for anything to be delivered to you - all you need is your body and desire to get better.
Sitting is the new smoking, quit it
Researchers have found that prolonged sitting dramatically increases the risk of developing heart diseases, type 2 diabetes and various type of cancer. A good upgrade for your workplace would be a standing desk, which were proven to increase productivity. Google offers standing desk as a part of their employee-wellness program, Facebook has more than 250 employees using standing desks, and many other companies implemented standing desks as an alternative to the traditional sitting desks.
Although standing is proved to be the winning habit over sitting, it is inevitable to sit, and when you do you want to make sure you have a good posture. There are numerous risks associated with a poor posture:
Try avoiding sitting in same position for more than 30 minutes, take breaks and stretch.
Intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting(IF) is one of the most popular trends in health and fitness industry. It is meant to help loose weight, improve health and simplify one's lifestyle. Numerous studies has shown that it can have strong impacts on your body and brain (1, 2, 3).
Intermittent fasting does not restrict which foods you should eat, but rather when you should eat. The two most common methods are daily 16 hour fasting, or 24 hours fasting twice per week. I personally keep the 16/8 fasting schedule. I move my breakfast to 12:30, and take my last meal at 20:30 so I have an 8 hour eating window. It is very convenient for people who have a lot of things to do in the morning. You can have some extra sleep and extra energy before your first meal.
Here are some main heath benefits of IF :
The list is incomplete, but I will cover more about intermittent fasting in a separate article as it requires more attention!
Avoid blue light before bedtime
Did you know that blue light harms your natural sleep cycle? Artificial blue light emitted from LED & LCD light bulbs are quite a problem for your sleep and health overall.
Is very important that our circadian clock is synchronized with our sleep. Studies have shown that blue light suppresses melatonin which can cause a circadian delay. Modern phones and laptops have blue light filter out of the box, which can be set to start with sunset and stop with sunrise, according to your location. If you want to go more advance, there are glasses that block blue light, which are meant to be worn in the evening.
Cold showers
For some, it might sound wild, but cold showers are a pretty good habit to adopt.
I will simply list a few benefits of a cold shower, and you make conclusions:
These are the main reasons to take cold showers, but the list goes on. A shower is something we already have implemented in our lifestyle, we just need to adjust the right temperature. You can start little, decreasing the temperature over time.
I will cover these and more healthy habits in greater depth in future series. Appologize for the use of upvoting bots, but I want to get my articles seen to the community to gain some followers, and when I will have a followers base I will not need it.
Stay hydrated and be helpful to the ones around you!