Dave Asprey

Hack Your Flight: Save Your Ears While Flying With a Cold

January 21, 2011 by Dave Asprey

Air travel sucks. It’s bad for you on just about every level. Flying messes with your circadian rhythms as you shift time zones, increases stress hormones, is uncomfortable, and raises your risk of blood clots. It’s also dehydrating and your risk of getting sick from flying is actually pretty high. Because air gets filtered from the front of the plane to the back, your risk is even higher in economy class. Flying with a cold can even cost you your hearing. Here’s what to do:

[readmore title=”Avoid pressure and ear pain: Here’s what to pack in your carry-on bag”]

Business travel is something lots of us have to contend with (at least some of the time). It used to be a major concern for me – a single flight would often result in a sinus infection that lingered for a couple weeks, and I’d experience terrible sinus pain from the pressure changes. Even worse, I came close to rupturing my eardrums more than once. Two of my friends suffered partial hearing loss when their ear drums burst from pressure changes of flying with sinus congestion. I fixed my sinus problems – without surgery – by hacking my health, so I don’t get sick when I fly very much anymore, but I always carry 3 things in my travel bag just in case. After a smoke-filled week with dry desert and hotel air at a conference in Las Vegas, I almost always use these.

Here is what you can use to prevent the pain and possible hearing loss from flying with a cold

Almost every drug store carries a special kind of earplug called “Earplanes”. They are pressure-relieving earplugs made of silicon baffles with a small ceramic plug in the middle. The plug moves very slowly with a pressure change, giving your sinuses and eardrums time to adjust. Put them in before the airplane doors close and the pressurization begins. You can take the plugs out when at max altitude, but put them in again (important) before the plane starts descending. You will still feel some sinus pain/pressure, but it won’t be nearly as bad, and the ceramic plug will keep your eardrums from bursting. Earplanes are tiny and come in a little plastic box. Mine sit in the bottom of my travel backpack. If you find yourself on the road, this is the best $5 you’ll ever spend.

Mucinex

Mucinex is a brand of guaifenisin expectorant. It liquefies your mucus so that it won’t block your ears. It has no effect on your mental alertness like normal cold medications. I take a Mucinex a half hour before flying unless my sinuses are perfectly clear. If I’m flying with a cold, I take two with a big glass of water. It reduces pain and risk substantially.

Afrin

Afrin nasal spray will dramatically shrink sinus tissues in 2 minutes. If I’m congested, I use it before takeoff and landing. If my ears are *really* clogged, I tilt my head back and squirt it from an upside down bottle making for a much higher dose that works faster but can by drying.

Xlear

You might consider using a safe, non-addictive nasal spray called Xlear to prevent sinus problems in the first place. It uses a sugar alcohol called xylitol to keep bacteria from sticking to your sinuses.

Earthing

Yep, you read that correctly. Walking around outside barefoot can really have a huge impact if you travel as much and as far as I do. This is one of my favorite ways to hack my flights since it doesn’t require me to take any over the counter drugs that I normally wouldn’t take, and one of my favorite places to do it (if I’m not at home) is at a park while I do yoga, or you can buy and earthing mat too.

Learn More About Hacking Your Flights

How I Killed Jet Lag and Got More REM Sleep Too – This is probably one of the most unlikely sources you would think of for flight hacking but you would be surprised at how effective it actually is. When I first heard about this I literally laughed, but as I was traveling to England on back to back business trips I was willing to do anything, I went to the park across the street from my hotel and did yoga for 20 minutes, while doing this hack and I was shocked at how much better I felt afterwards.

Video: Oxygen & Airplanes at Quantified Self – The video in this post talks about hacking frequent flights, what to do and what not to do. I go into advanced biohacking like pulse oximeters, and blood oxygen saturation and if you’re frequently flying then you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Read More: How to Get Rid of A Cold

Happy flights! 🙂

Urban Escape and Evasion: Breaking Duct Tape Restraints

January 18, 2011 by Dave Asprey

via youtube.com

Some people go to Disneyland for fun. Others (like me) get chased around Los Angeles by bounty hunters just to see how to escape. Part of the class, from onPoint Tactical, includes teaching you what to do if you’re held against your will. Several executives like me were in the class, along with some military and law enforcement personnel.

In this clip, I’m experimenting with techniques to quickly break tape around my wrists.

See my longer post about how this class applies to being an entrepreneur; the short version is that learning to stay cool and apply new skills while under an enormous amount of stress is core to functioning in any competitive environment. Plus, this was an enormous amount of fun despite giving myself the equivalent of the Heimlich Maneuver while a former Playmate of the Year filming for an episode of G4TV watched. (You can watch the G4TV video here.)

I’ll never look at Santa Monica the same way again!

Your Brain on Improv: Hacking Creativity

January 12, 2011 by Dave Asprey

Charles Limb is a physician, researcher, and one hell of a biohacker. Charles is also a musician, so he used medical-research grade tools to study creativity in the form of musical improvisation.

I highly recommend watching the 16 minute video by Limb, just for the chance to see a distinguished middle-aged suit-wearing physician do a rap about neurology on stage.

Charles used an fMRI – a brain scanner that lets you see detailed pictures of what’s happening in your brain based on how much oxygen different parts use – to see what happens in the brains of creative artists, during solo improvisation and during group improvisation.

Attitude, Awareness, Authenticity: The 3 A’s of Awesome

January 10, 2011 by Dave Asprey

Attitude, Awareness, Authenticity: The 3 A’s of Awesome

Neil Pasricha has an amazing story. A self-described “average guy,” he realized that he was overwhelmed by life’s circumstances, so he started consciously thinking about any positive thing he could find – no matter how small. Then he blogged about it at 1000awesomethings.com, won a Webby Award, and became an international best selling author for his work, The Book of Awesome. Nice work, Neil! Neil is a biohacker too, even if he doesn’t know it. Here’s why:

Funny (but accurate) Colbert Video: Nutrition & Performance

January 6, 2011 by Dave Asprey

via hunter-gatherer.com

This is perhaps the most accurate short video I’ve seen showing why adopting a healthy diet can make you win at work. We usually think of diets as being about weight loss or looking good, but that’s now how it works. When you fuel your body, you fuel your brain and nervous system.

That’s why John Durant “Paleo Man” is able to do all sorts of things in this video. He is physically stronger – but maybe he works out better than his competition. Then again, with the right food, you don’t need to work out to be strong and cut – although, it helps. (I went 18 months without a workout and kept my 6 pack and muscle mass, for instance.)

Although it’s funny in the video, pain tolerance matters! (sitting on tacks? Colbert, what’s next?) When you can withstand cold weather, or pushing through the pain, you can be less distracted no matter what you’re doing. Then, when you are sitting in a chilly board room, or having dinner with your family when your 3-year-old smacks you with something heavy when you’re not looking, you will have more resiliency if your body is fueled properly.

Mental performance is another domain. Your brain starts to starve on a vegan diet due to lack of essential fatty acids and vitamin B12. Over time, it makes you slower and harms your memory.

I hope you enjoy the video, and I also hope that it inspires you to be a better entrepreneur by adopting a diet that feeds your body and mind! It worked for me…

Urban Escape and Evasion

December 23, 2010 by Dave Asprey

via g4tv.com and onpointtactical.com

So, being bulletproof doesn’t mean you can really dodge bullets…but what if you actually needed to? Last year, I took a 3 day course from onPoint Tactical that was basically a combination of “Great Escape” and “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”

The class was an equal mixture of executives, who traveled internationally (like me), and military personnel worried about serving in urban areas. It didn’t hurt that Playmate of the Year, Sara Underwood, was sitting behind me. It *did* hurt my wrists (those mangled wrists at 1:56 in the clip are mine…)

The instructors taught us what to do in a kidnapping scenario, how to escape from handcuffs, get out of a car’s trunk (that’s me in the black shirt escaping from the car’s trunk at about 2 mins 30 seconds on G4TV’s Attack of the Show video above), pick locks, change your appearance, and lose a tail. It was some of the most fun I’ve had in years.

The final exam involved being “abducted,” hooded and cuffed in a van, having to “escape,” and then complete a series of tasks in town (in my case, Santa Monica) while a dozen bounty hunters combed the area searching for me.

The only urban survival experience I had, prior to taking the class was my time in Nepal when the Maoists took over the country, and reading Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss, who also took this class.

So what did my Bulletproof Executive practice do to help me? The collagen I take makes me flexible to the point I was the only guy in the room who could pass my cuffed hands behind me to escape. The brain training gave me perfect calmness when I was hooded in a claustrophobic van, and my physical conditioning let me hop fences when bounty hunters were close. My greatest advantage was having enough endurance to continue the intense course for 3 days and still have fun!

I learned a lot about myself in the class that opened the way for self improvement. It’s easy to be calm when you’re hooded in a van knowing that you aren’t really in danger, but they do make it harder for you if you get caught. When the bounty hunters catch you, they tie you up and drop you off farther away, and you have to make your way back to the right area, with no money and no phone.

I *really* didn’t want to get caught. I had an awesome disguise that let me walk right past the bounty hunters without being recognized. My perfectionism led me to avoid risks I should have taken. For instance, I spent half an hour observing a bus stop where I was supposed to contact an “agent,” but I stayed hidden because I knew there was a bounty hunter in hiding waiting to pounce. I was shocked to hear that a classmate made himself visible, let the bounty hunters chase him, and trapped them in a store by leaving by the rear entrance. He was able to talk to the “agent” in less than 10 minutes and continue the assignment.

I walked away with an amazing lesson for my career: If I focus on not failing (not getting caught) instead of the mission (contacting the “agent” in this exercise), I’m less likely to succeed. This is a common mistake people make in business all the time, from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 company owners. A lot of my brain hacking has resolved issues like this, but real-world stress helped me to see that I had more work to do on staying focused on the mission instead of on avoiding failure. Success is not the lack of failure!

If you’re looking for the most amazing gift for yourself or a loved one, this class is a once in a lifetime experience. Call it Bulletproof fun!

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