I’ve been a guinea pig for every technology I can find that will change (or upgrade) my brain and mind. The only brain hacking technology on my list that I haven’t tried requires a 10 ton magnet.  I’m talking smart drugs, meditation, breathing, EEG, MCT oil, sound, light, whole body vibration, electrical stimulation, infrared lasers shining through the skull, shamanic drumming, yoga postures, even fasting in a cave.  I’ve tried almost everything I could find, no matter how weird it sounded, as long as I didn’t think it would permanently cook me.  I didn’t expect any of it to really work but hoped some of it would.

The results have been fantastic – freaking awesome actually.  They have been life-changing, performance-enhancing, need-for-sleep reducing, intelligence-building, creativity-enhancing, stress-reducing.I’m lazy. Why did I have to I work on this stuff since the late 90’s?  Why did I need to spend $250,000 of my own money to figure out what worked?  So lately, I’ve turned my eye towards how to get the most “self-upgrading” (biohacking) achieved in the least amount of time and effort.  I’m doing a cost/benefit analysis across all the domains I care about – weight loss, muscle, brain function, creativity, immune function, aging, sleep, and even pregnancy.  More bang, less buck.

Let’s use cars as an analogy.  Being an optimization-focused kind of guy who values time, my ideal is the fastest, best handling, safest, most comfortable, sexiest looking car that I can afford. Someone else who probably doesn’t know how to drive might value fuel efficiency more than their own life and pick a car that gets the best mileage and is adequate in the other categories.  They don’t sell very many of my kind of cars because they’re pricey.  People buy tons more Hondas and Fords, or even that crappy Toyota Prius, because the average person wants most of the benefits of an uber-car for a lot less money.

Biohacking is the same way.  I spent $20,000 doing 40 years of advanced Zen meditation in 7 very long days, which bought me 12 IQ points and a different response to stress.  That’s the uber-car of biohacking and brain upgrading.  It’s not accessible to most people without a lot of sacrifice.  Hell, I’d like my $20,000 back too (but I wouldn’t unlearn what I learned in exchange for that money back either).

So the question for me in the last few years has been, “How can people get most of the benefits of $20,000 of advanced brain training for $2000? For $200? For $20?”  There are options at each of those levels.  Think of it like this:

$20,000 brain training = Bentley

$2,000 brain training = Lexus

$200 = Honda

$20 = bicycle

For years, I didn’t think there was a way to get most of the stress-reducing, performance-increasing effects for less than $2,000 because of the cost of EEG equipment.  But there’s a neurological “hack” that lets you use less expensive heart monitoring equipment to influence the brain.  80% of the nerves between the heart and brain are used for the heart to send information TO the brain, not the other way around.  If you get the math right, you can use the heart to radically transform the way the brain works. That’s way cool.

I am a certified trainer the combination of this technique and technology, and I carry the HeartMath emWave2, the HeartMath Inner Ballence (for iOS – 30 pin), and the HeartMath Inner Ballence (for iOS – lightning) on Upgraded Self™.  This technology is the the highest return for your time and money.