5 Best Biohacking Devices for Brain Health 🧠

You know, what is all this thing about biohacking? We happen to be here, right, at a biohacking conference. So, you know, this is kind of what I, I roll around and I travel with.

And so these things are pretty portable.

Yeah, they're very portable, you know. And that's kind of the hard thing, like, with some of the, you know, our busy lives. I travel a lot too. And so what are some things that I can do and take on the road to make this really executable? I love this new product called Cove. Okay. And, you know, they basically call it like a hug for your, your brain and Really what it does is it actually helps relieve stress and it helps you actually sleep better. It vibrates. And so, they've actually figured a way of certain frequencies and vibrations that stimulate a part of your brain to be more calm, more active. So, you actually just wear this right behind your ears and it's only a 20-minute session, right? And so, you do it daily.

And, it's passive.

Yeah, it's passive.

You put them on your ears and then there's vibration.

Yup.

And, is this affecting our vagus nerve or how?

So, it affects a central part of your brain. So basically, The best way to describe it, it's like we're very responsive to touch.

Okay.

So, this vibratory touch sensation actually stimulates a part of your brain that induces a sense of calmness and stress relief. So, it's essentially training your brain to be stronger at being calm, which we all train our brain on how to be strong at being stressed out, right?

Okay.

But, we don't really do things to help make it more calm. And so, there's a lot of things that are interesting that are related to this. I'm a very big fan of HRV, which basically stands for heart rate variability. And, that actually then ties into a very key longevity factor. On the aspect of passive, the great part is you can just wear this for 20 minutes. I'm a very big fan of kind of maximizing my time.

So, you're stacking all these things. I stack.

So, yeah. So, I actually like to stack even my biohacking equipment. So, this is called a CORE device and it basically helps you meditate. It vibrates to teach you how to breathe in, breathe out during certain type of cadences and frequencies. And so, while it's doing that, on here has actually these little sensors and these can actually measure your HRV.

Is this called KOR?

KOR, yep. So, while I'm doing this, I'm meditating and I'm getting stimulated with the Kove device all at the same time. And, I'm actually getting great data because this is telling me about my HRV, how relaxed would I really— this is actually doing it very passively. I don't have to think about it.

And, you're using HRV as an indicator for recovery?

Yeah, it's a great indicator for recovery but also basically predictor of longevity. Right. And so what HRV stands for, and we might be able to do this whole separate episode on how these tools can help be a great monitor, enhance people's lives for longevity. HRV basically tells your body how much balance do you have between fight or flight, which is the stress response, and then the parasympathetic system, which is relax and digest.

Correct.

So HRV is a balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic. And so people who are always stressed out have a low HRV. because they're stressed out and their body's in fight or flight. People who have a better HRV, it's much higher than others. So, everyone wants to know what a good HRV is. It depends on your age, right? But, I can tell you definitely anything like 15 or less is typically not a great HRV. You see that when people are sick or people who are older.

And again, there are devices like COR or your Oura Ring that can help.

Yeah, they can help you. So, Oura Ring is great. I've been such a fan of this for a long number of years. And, what you get in the mail, it's like a sizing device. So, the size matters, right?

You want it to be not too tight, not too loose.

And basically, that can measure your HRV.

A nice temperature heart rate. Also sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep.

Deep sleep, REM. I'm a big fan of deep sleep because deep sleep is when your body does the whole recovery thing. If you really want to get deeper into the HRV, I actually do special HRV testing for my clients. And when I try to advise them what to do for their health, this is a device that gets connected to a special computer and runs an algorithm. We can actually determine, are you on the athletic side?

This is a heart rate monitor. Correct.

And, this heart rate monitor is great because you can actually start diving deep into sort of a lot of physiology.

Because the idea is you can't manage something unless you can measure it.

Yep. That's one of my favorite sayings. You can't manage what you don't measure. And so, a lot of these things give us a measuring tool. And then, even with stacking, this is Happy. This is a low energetic frequency device. And, they have this thing where you basically wear it and it basically emits a magnetic field for you, and you're basically feeling a frequency that you can choose. It's an app on your iPhone. They have a sleep formulation, they have a stress formulation. So all these things kind of add up together.

Yeah, that's amazing. We have Scott Donald, who's the founder of Hapbee, H-A-P-B-E-E. And every actual molecule has a magnetic signature, and they've learned how to be able to capture that signature for anything like Caffeine to melatonin and then capture this device and then transfer it into your physiology without all the side effects.

Exactly. And that's great with them. We're talking to them about creating custom formulas as well because you can actually start blending things, right? And so obviously, because of my years of experience, and I'm also a researcher as well, I'm a very big fan of regenerative medicine and all the things that help the body heal. We can actually start creating custom formulas that might be actually very hard to do In a pill format.

And so, this is wonderful because people could choose the way that they feel.

Correct.

It's connected to an app and you could just choose calm, choose alert, choose focus, or choose to relax.

Yep.

Where a lot of people feel like they have emotions but here and just hope that they're lucky that they have that focus for today, they could actually— these devices support their nervous system. Exactly.

And, the nice thing, again, back to stacking, a lot of us will have 1 or 2 tools, I'm a big fan of NuCalm. So, NuCalm has these little patch discs that you wear and they use the concept of binaural beats. And so, obviously, the sound tricks your brain into a way to actually go into a deeper relaxation state. So, you can listen to NuCalm with your headphones, but if you're actually wearing this Happy device, you can induce more of a sense of relaxation in your body. And then, you also have this auditory system from the NuCalm system. That actually can relax you even further. So for some people where, let's say, one thing doesn't work, you can actually start stacking these things. And so this is what I call kind of the new fitness for your body. These are your fitness equipment for longevity.

NuCalm is one of my favorites. It's something that I do and I just will do. I'll put a patch here and it has the app and I'll listen with my headphones and maybe a blindfold just to kind of keep the Keep light out. That could distract you. And I'll do a 20-minute session and it feels like I just had an amazing 2-hour nap.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of my favorite. And I've been using NuCalm for years and all these other things coming out now, especially with COVID and just even this meditation device, it really allows the busy person to actually dial their health in. And as they kind of navigate what I call their longevity roadmap, it's a lot easier now. Because there are more tools and resources.

And that's the amazing emergence of technology. Technology, yes, potentially our phones can distract us or make us more reactive, but this is the upside. We've learned more about the human nervous system and training potential and performance in the past 10, 20 years than the previous 2,000 years combined. And while it's been aggravated more because of the way the world is, there are also ways of balancing it out and creating harmony in your system.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think as technology advances, some of these things get more compact, some of these things become more accessible, and then obviously the measuring side of things becomes more effective.

And people do not— who are watching, they don't have to do everything.

No, you don't have to do everything. This is just kind of part of my routine. But I always say, what if they just did one new thing? One new thing will help. And again, if you just pick one cornerstone, let's say you just want to choose stress because I think that's pretty universal. Most people are affected by that. You'd be surprised how much that would actually improve your immune system, decrease inflammation, and then your mindset gets a little bit better too, right? Because it's an all interrelating basically square of how everything connects to each other. So I'm happy to chat more on each topic.