MBA1738 Guest Teacher – Jon Mitchell – How to Maximize Productivity With Biohacking
2 Feb 2026 · 17 min
Jon Mitchell, a functional medicine practitioner, shares biohacking strategies for entrepreneurs. He treats each person as a category of one, uses lab testing to quantify needs, and recommends practical hacks like magnesium bicarbonate drinks, lowering bedroom temperature before sleep, and wearing blue-light blocking glasses.
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Today's Guest teacher, John Mitchell is a certified physician's assistant turned functional medicine health consultant and he's worked with virtually all types of highly driven professionals like you and me to resolve chronic health issues as well as perform better. You can learn more@johnmitchellpa.com I brought on John because I do feel that a lot of us as entrepreneurs neglect what we put in our body, our physical activity, our nutrition, all that because of the business. I've been guilty of this several times in the last decade and we're all busy. So I brought on John to give us some laser focused advice on how to biohack our way to success and be more productive. I'm gonna pass it to John now, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode. Fill in any gaps, but for now, take it away, John.
Hey everyone, this is John Mitchell. I'm really excited to be here and what I want to do today is to teach you guys how to go about optimizing your health, energy, mental performance and how to do it the right way. Because there is a lot of noise and confusion online in the health space and what I want to do is help you sift through all of that. For those of you guys who don't know, I'm a functional medicine practitioner and I work virtually with driven professionals looking to improve things like energy focus and resolve any chronic health issues that are keeping them from being at their best both at work and at home. And I've worked in medicine for over 10 years. I started off on the conventional side of medicine, working in the emergency room at urgent care and addiction medicine. And then I transitioned over to functional medicine, which is more of a whole body, systems based approach to optimizing your health. And I've, I've learned firsthand that conventional medicine is great at certain things. It's great at taking care of acute issues, broken bones, infections and surgeries. But it's poor at helping people achieve robust health and maintaining it, which is what I'm passionate about and why I do the work I do because people are starting to realize the limitations of the current medical system. System, right. And if we're talking about your business or your job. The question is, why should you prioritize your health versus prioritizing your business? Well, from a business perspective, you need to be at the top of your game, right? You need to wake up with energy, you need to have the mental clarity to get your work done and you need to be level headed enough to deal with the constant stressors. So as a business owner myself, I understand that owning a business or even just working in a job can be very stressful. And you need to have the mental strength, you need to have the health to be able to handle those things properly and move forward. If your health is not on point, you are not going to be operating anywhere near 100%. You're going to be leaving things on the table. In fact, what I find with many of the professionals that I work with is that they don't even realize how bad they feel and how much they're leaving on the table until we get them feeling better. So what I want to do is I want to lay out three pillars to optimizing your health and how to do it the right way. Okay, so pillar number one, let's jump right into it. Recognize you are a category of one. So everybody has unique genetics, upbringing, lifestyle environment, habits and nutrition that inform their current level of wellness. So what you need in nutrition and supplements and lifestyle is going to be very different than what somebody else needs. So this is why we can't blindly follow online influencers or health gurus because they don't know anything about you, right? They can't tell you, oh, you should be on a ketogenic diet versus a vegan diet versus a carnivore diet. Because nobody knows your blood levels, they don't know your genetics, they don't know your history. And all these things are going to influence what diet you should be on at a current time. So I want to give you guys a good example of this from two different clients of mine who had similar complaints. So both were men in their 40s or 50s, and we'll say client number one complained of brain fog, fatigue, and he had type 2 diabetes and he was on a strict ketogenic diet, was doing intermittent fasting or not ketogenic. He was on a paleolithic diet and doing intermittent fasting, was exercising an hour a day, and yet his blood sugars were still running in the 200s or higher when they should be under 100. And the question was, what was going on? And when we did the right testing, we found that he was being Exposed to some significant environmental toxins that were damaging his pancreas. The pancreas is what produces insulin to help regulate blood sugar. So regardless of what diet he tried, regardless if it was ketogenic, carnivore, vegan, or anything in between, he was not going to get better until we addressed this toxin issue. Right, and let's compare this to client number two who had similar complaints. Brain fog. He was overweight, type 2 diabetes. He followed a ketogenic diet and did intermittent fasting. And he lost a lot of weight. Blood sugar's regulated, and he did great on that. So one person did not do well on a very restrictive diet. One person did because it depends on what they specifically needed. Okay? So always recognize you are category of 1. And all recommendations should be based off of that. So that brings us to pillar number two. Quantify what you need using the right labs. So I see too many people who just take things for things. So I'll see people take things like qualia or some mushroom blend for focus, or they'll take zinc and DHEA or tribulus for testosterone. But how do you know that you actually need these things? And how do you know you aren't doing more harm in the long run by taking these things? So let's take zinc, for instance. Some people probably know that it's hard to overdo zinc. You can take a lot of it and you really won't get into trouble. But what the problem is, if you're taking zinc, it will influence your absorption of copper. So the more zinc you take, the less you'll absorb copper. So you can create minimal imbalances by taking the wrong supplements if you don't need them. And if you're not tracking it, you can create issues over time. Okay, so instead of guessing what diets and supplements are best for you, it's better to know what's best. And you do this, but by focusing on the right testing. So what we want to do is focus on strategies over tactics. A specific diet or a certain supplement is a tactic. A ketogenic diet, a carnivore diet, intermittent fasting, they're all tactics. What we want to focus on strategies instead. Okay, so our strategy is going to be influenced by your health history, which should be. Someone should help you get a full understanding of your health history and put it together, combined with some advanced testing. So when it comes to determining what types of diets and supplements you should take, what I like to use is an advanced nutritional profile. And within that, there should be a comprehensive assessment of Your vitamins, your minerals, your amino acids, your fatty acids, heavy metals, your mitochondrial metabolites, neurotransmitter metabolites, and your detoxification status. It is with all of those, all those labs that you can put together what specifically you need, what you don't, and you'll know why. Now you can get tests like these online via a direct to consumer lab like directlabs.com, but I personally recommend working with someone. And the reason why is when it comes to these advanced tests, there is a lot to put together. And if you are just trying to piece this together yourself by looking at certain blogs online or even reading some books, you can, you're only going to get about 25% of the value of the test. So it's much better to go over with someone, find someone locally or virtually to go over the test with you to make sure you are looking at them correctly. You also want to make sure you're avoiding the wrong tests or maybe not even the wrong test, but tests that just aren't giving you enough information. So one example of this would be nutrigenomics. So testing your genes and trying to decide what types of foods you should be eating based off of that. Now here's the problem. Genes are just blueprints. It's your environment that controls the expression of those genes. So genes by yourself don't tell me what your circulating levels of B12 or folate or zinc is. I need to actually look at your current nutrient status and biochemical status by looking in your blood and your urine and those things. Genes can't tell me that they can point me in a direction of where to look where you may be deficient, but by themselves they shouldn't be used to make nutritional choices. Okay, so that's one thing. There are a bunch of other take home tests, direct to consumer testing that you really want to be careful with because their marketing is great. But a lot of times I find that there's just not much great science behind it. The data is not reproducible. I'm very picky about the labs I use because it's based off of years and years of clinical experience and seeing that these labs add up. Okay, so you want to be very careful with take home tests and make sure that you're using the right ones and you're working with someone to help you choose them and interpret them correctly. Pillar number three. Once you have this information, you want to work within a framework in the right order of operations. Okay, so this is where I find a Lot of people mess up, including clinicians. You need to do the right things in the right order to get consistent results. So it's like building a house. You first need to lay the foundation before you start building the structure. And it's the same thing within the body. You don't start tackling things like hormones and neurotransmitters and detoxification. Those are all very downstream. You want to work upstream first on the upstream factors that affect the things downstream. When I talk about upstream, I mean things like your environment, your air, water, light, sound, your nutrition, your gut, health stressors, which could be mental, psychological or even physical. Allergies, microbes, toxins, those are all the more upstream things that you want to work on. And then a lot of times you get for free those downstream things, those neurotransmitters, those hormones balanced out. So work within the right order of operations. So finally, the last thing I want to leave you guys with is three quick and easy health hacks anybody can do. First one is how to make a magnesium rich drink. So most people that I test are very low in magnesium. And you should test a red blood cell magnesium, not serum magnesium. If you're going to check this level and it's very simple to make, all you do is you get magnesium hydroxide powder. I'll put in, and this is not medical advice, but this is just what I do. I put in a quarter teaspoon of magnesium hydroxide into a carbonated water, creates a chemical reaction that produces magnesium bicarbonate. Comes out to about 500 milligrams. It's a very highly absorbable form and great way to get your magnesium. Number two of my hacks is just take that magnesium hydroxide powder, use it as deodorant. It is the best deodorant I have found, the best deodorant money can buy and much better than most of those natural ones that I find just don't really do well. And they're extremely expensive. Hack number three, two effective hacks for better sleep. Number one is drop the temperature in your home a few hours before going to bed. What research has shown is that it's not necessarily light is the first signal that tells people it's time to go to bed. It's actually a drop in temperature. So by dropping the temperature in your home, you are signaling your body it is time for bed. And then number two, wear blue light blocking glasses two to three hours before bed. Now, these will block out blue light, which is stimulatory. It suppresses melatonin which is a sleep hormone. Melatonin is also an anabolic hormone which means that it helps you repair overnight. So we want to optimize melatonin as much as we can and one way we can do that is to wear some blue light blocking glasses at night. You want to make sure that these are amber color. They should be kind a dark amber and not clear so you can find these blue blocks. There's RA optics, there's a whole bunch of different brands out there. You can choose what you want, but those are two effective hacks to get better sleep. And that's all I have for today. So if you'd like to learn more about working with me or my process, my website is johnmitchellpa.com that's John spelled without an H. Or you can follow my post on Facebook or Instagram. John MitchellPA and it's been a pleasure guys. And I'll let Umar take it from here.
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That was John Mitchell over@john mitchellpa.com One of the things that I have learned over the years that not all rest, not all sleep is created equal. Now I'm going to separate rest and sleep here. Let's take sleep first. I found that actually sleeping early and waking up early for me that is in the bed behind 9:30 and waking up at 6 maximum is peak. For me those hours are really, really maximum value sleep hours. When most of us the sun is down and I say maximum six because summer months the sun is up even a little earlier. 5:30. Now I'm the kind of person that needs eight hours of sleep. So I'm in the bed at 9:30 because I know it takes me about 30 minutes to fall asleep. I'll read a book or something on my Kindle before I go to bed. But those hours are a lot more beneficial than me sleeping let's say at midnight and waking up at 10. It's more hours but I'll feel a lot worse waking up at 10. Now I mentioned rest. It's very hard for you to feel replenished if you are constantly stressed. If you are waking up worrying about the day, going to bed, worrying about the day that stress takes a toll. It just does. And all the sleep in the world is just not going to help you. So this is where rest comes in. This is when a break from what you're doing is required. Even if you're stressed because you're in a crisis situation. In your business, sometimes crises can last months. You can't just go on for months being restless. Even if you take a day or a weekend where you totally step away from the business, whether that's a staycation or you go somewhere local. The point here is that I don't want you to interact with your business at all. You need time to get perspective so you can clear out the stress, so you can sort of reset, get some internal insights on the reality of your situation. When we don't give ourselves a chance to do that, the stress becomes this big bad monster inside of us. We just cannot get a hold of it. So taking a dedicated break, even if it's a day or two, will allow you to rest better and reduce stress, even in high pressure situations. So to wrap up today's episode, taking a little bit of time and attention and even money to improve your overall health and productivity is going to get you a net positive at the end. You only have one body, you only have one mind. You gotta treat it right so it can treat you right and give you what you need. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 Omvier Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. So you never miss a beat. Also, by hitting subscribe, which is absolutely free, you get access to over 1700 business lessons in our archives. So go ahead and do that on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify or Stitch Radio or Apple Podcast or Himalaya or we're on every single platform. Before I go, I want to leave you with this full transparency. I'll tell you from experience, it's very easy to slip into bad habits, like nutrition habits, not exercising regularly enough, not sleeping right, not taking those rests. When you are in a stressful situation in your business, when you're in a critical situation, when you're trying to solve problems, when you're launching, it's very easy to slip into those things. This is why consistency is so important with your physical health. No matter what happens, you have to hit the gym. Whatever happens, you have to eat right, because this is what's going to serve you. This is what's going to be able to be there for you when you need it. Most thanks so much for listening to the Hunter Ombay show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.
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