Biohack Your Mind and Body With These Tools| Vishen Lakhiani

My biggest highlight actually came before a fest. See, we don't just randomly put on an event, call up a bunch of like incredible speakers, promise them the time of their life in Greece and then put them on stage. We actually test all this stuff out. So pretty much every speaker here, I went through their programs, I ate their recommended diets, I drank their frickin coffee. And I've been testing this out for one year. And what I want to share with you is what I found, what worked, what did not work, what were the myths and the challenges on hacking your body. Increasing longevity. I had the healthiest year of my life and I want to share with you how I got there. Now the thing is, I turned 40 in January, so I'm now 40 years old. And I made a promise to myself when I was 35 that before I turned 40, I would be fit enough to run a marathon. In the last one year I decided that that was a dumb idea because I realized that it's actually not an actual measure of fitness or even how good your body is. That came from a conversation with JJ Bergen. So I learned that all of these ideas I had about what it meant to be fit, what it meant to be healthy, a lot of them were nothing more than rules, bullshit rules from the culturescape. What I want to share with you is what I learned that I now believe in the last one year and what you can take back. So what I'm going to talk about are my biohacking experiments between June 2015 and May. And I'm going to share with you what I learned about the mind, what I learned about food, what I learned about the body. And I'm going to give you really rapid fire, a whole range of different tools that you can look into to bring this back into your life. Okay? Depending on what results you want. I promise you this, if you take action on some of the things that I'm about to share with you, you will add as much as 5 to 25 years to your lifespan. And I kid you not, a lot of this is studied by science. A lot of this stuff is validated. This is what I believe. And I believe that because of these things which I'm going to share, I will slow down my aging by almost a factor of half and I will extend my lifespan by 10 to 25 years. So here's what I learned. Now the first experiment has to do with biohacking the mind. So a lot of people do not think about the mind as something that, you know, that you want to actually hack but what I learned from Dave Asprey in our experiments with 40 years of Zen is that consciousness is hackable, and that the way modern science is evolving is so interesting. You can actually study up to 50 different frequencies in the brain. So a lot of you may have heard of alpha, beta, theta, delta. Have you guys heard of that? Turns out that's really, really, really basic. We've gone so much beyond that. I spoke to the author of the book God in your brain, Dr. Mark Walcolm. There are at least 50 different frequencies which are being studied right now. And you can reverse engineer these frequencies to change the way your brains function. So I do this, JJ does this, Dave does this, and 40 years of Zen is one of those things. Now, you do not have to do 40 years of Zen. You could easily use this with the Muspan, which is a very affordable device. There are numerous devices out there. But what I did that I found had the biggest result was this. I want to show you something really interesting. So if you can see that image there, that's jj, Dave, and me actually looking at my brainwaves. That's what my brainwaves look like. So by learning what brainwaves correspond to, what states you want, what corresponds to creativity, what corresponds to intuition, what corresponds to. To. Now, this is weird, but the ability to alter and bend reality, you can induce those states at will, and then you can do more with life. So I actually learned how to function intuitively in a waking state. I learned how to make my meditation go really deep. And all of this through hooking my brain up and then studying these brainwave patterns. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I can guarantee you that one of the things that you can do immediately without any expensive machinery is, is radical forgiveness. Radical forgiveness is the big thing. Radical forgiveness was the key to the healthiest brain state. So you learned that technique yesterday. It's also clearly explained in my book, the code of the extraordinary mind. Radical forgiveness is one of the biggest things that you can bring into your life. Forgive yourself or someone else that hurt you every single day. And in a moment, I'll show you how. I'm going to give you guys a simple audio you can take home for free that will guide you through this. Now, the next thing that I worked on this past one year is refining my own meditation practice and being able to go into really deep, powerful states of meditation. So how many of you here have tried my six phase meditation? Quite a number. Right? How many of you here do this on a daily basis right now? So a little Bit less so. But you guys are probably the smartest, wisest people in the room. Those who raised your hand. Nothing comes close to the six phase. It isn't me who invented it. Rather I looked at all the latest research on meditation and I put it together into one 20 minute hack. Do you know that most people who study meditation stop? They do not continue because they buy into so many bullshit rules about meditation. From you having to clear your mind to you having to breathe in and breathe out or chant mantras. A lot of that is outdated. I believe in science, I believe in what scientists are saying works. I believe in empirical evidence, studying it yourself. Six phase does this. There are six different levels of your self, your consciousness that you can level up on. That science shows has the greatest contribution to well being. And the six phase takes you through this, through the most effective way in 15 minutes. So the first one is compassion and kindness. So in the first two to three minutes of the meditation, you learn a simple exercise that helps you create compassion with all of humanity. Now when you do this, you find that over time, and over time, I mean, within a month, within two, within three months, your idea of yourself changes. You start to give a damn about the rest of the world. Your affinity to your religion or your tribe or your race or your country starts fading away and you develop an affinity with the entire human race. You become more humanistic. And that's the first thing that happens in phase one. Then you go on to phase two. Phase two is about gratitude. Science has shown that gratitude has the single largest correlation with human well being than any other character trait. So you then go into gratitude. Stage three, you go into forgiveness. We've already spoken about that. Now all three of those states have to do with blissipline, with the idea of disciplining yourself to be in a state of bliss throughout your day, right? But then you go to phase 4, 5, 6, which is based on future dreaming. So phase 4, 5, 6 is about developing a vision for your future and the impact you want to have in the world. Phase four is basically thinking of your having a vision for your life three years ahead. Phase five is having a vision for how you want today to unfold. And phase six is feeling supported. Phase six comes from religious and spiritual traditions where you have this feeling of being supported by a higher power. Now we string it all together and in the book Code of the Extraordinary Mind, I included a bonus chapter where I explained this entire process. So we won't go through it now, I explain it in the book, but I go Further, the code is one of the biggest technologically hooked up books in history. So you can actually go to mindvalue.com extraordinary. It's completely free. Sign up and you get the online version of the book. In the online version, there is a free course that we have set up for you called the six phase Meditation. You can get this course and immediately over seven days, I will train you through this approach. So you start with day one on compassion, day two on gratitude. But by day seven, you're able to string them all together and you have your meditation practice. And entrepreneurs who do this, their lives change. Many entrepreneurs say, I'm so add, I can't do this type of meditation. This is designed for people whose mind, you know, doesn't want to sit still. It's designed for people who want to go out there and kick butt in the world. So. So with the book, you can unlock the course. And now, as of today, I'm proud to announce we now have an app. So you can go to the App Store right now on your Android or your iPhone, type in MindValley Academy, download the MindValley Academy app, and if you have the book and you log in, you will instantly see this program available to you, the entire six phase Meditation course. So you can go back and put yourself through this training completely free. Cool. So next up, body. So in the last, as I turned 40, I managed to get to a better fitness level than I was 25 to 40. So in the last, actually more than 10, but 15 years of my life. So I want to share with you what I discovered. So the first big thing is how do you measure fitness? If you're not measuring it, you don't know that you're truly becoming fit. There are two simple ways, two really simple ways. One is resting heart rate. When I wake up in the morning, I check my resting heart rate and I try to keep it below a certain threshold. Now, I'm not going to share that number with you because it's different for different people based on your biology, based even on your ethnicity, based on where you live and the foods you eat. But you should know your resting heart rate and you should try to make sure that that isn't going higher. Higher actually means less fit. But the second thing I do is a simple concept called set points. So a set point is a simple measure that lets you lock onto a particular health level. You see, as we get older, different things happen to biology. We might put on weight around our waist or our thighs. We might lose our endurance or our fitness Level. But most of us accept this as being so. We accept the fact that, you know, when I'm 80, I probably won't be able to do as many push ups as I can right now. When I'm 35 or, you know, when I'm 70, I'll probably get some weight around your belly. Why? That's another rule that you want to disrupt. So what I do is I establish set points. See my belt? Don't worry, I'm keeping my pants on people. So I have a particular loop in my belt. I've had that same hole in my belt for 10 years. Every time I find that I can no longer tighten my belt to that hole, I know that I have failed a set point. So my belt loop is a set point. And that means I immediately have to install what is called a set point correction procedure. So a set point correction procedure is simply for me, it's one week, low carb diet, working out in the gym twice a week, that's it. And in one week, I go back to that same belt level. So I've been at the same belt level for 10 years until AFS biohacking and the experiments I did in the last six weeks where I actually lost a further two inches. So now I'm the slimmest waist level I've had since 25. I'm actually in better shape now than I was in 25. Check this out. This vest. I bought this vest eight weeks ago, right? This is how loose it is for me right now. Eight weeks ago, this was a V shaped vest. It was actually slim fit. Now I can stick another, like human child into the back of my vest. It's amazing. So we'll talk about that later. We'll talk about how I went to radical slimming really fast. So set points are really important. I have two set points. Belt loop is one. Now, the second set point is really simple. It's push ups. At any time in my life, I must be able to drop down and do 50 push ups. If I cannot, I have failed my set point. So with set points, there's a terminology I use, and it's called your non negotiable point. Your non negotiable set point. My non negotiable set point is 50 pushups. If I cannot do 50 push ups, it means that something is off. Maybe I've put on too much weight or maybe my muscle strength has gone down again. What happens next? Can anyone answer? Set point correction procedure. So I go back to the gym and I change the way I'M eating. So I've been able to consistently do the same amount of push ups as 40 as I could at 25. But here's the thing, it's actually getting higher. So I just set a new push up record, which is 55, which is, you know, it's still pretty good. But here's what happens every time you fail a set point. Let's say I wake up one day and I cannot do 50. I can only do 47. What happens is not only must I correct myself to 50, I must level up by one. So that's called a correction procedure. I must level up by 1. My new acceptable set point becomes 51. So over the last couple of years, I've gone from 50 push ups to 51. You see, our brains are really interesting when we fail. So if I set a goal for 50 and I only do 47, you feel like a failure. But that's the wrong conditioning in your brain. You want to flip that around and turn a problem into a project or a problem into a challenge. So my brain flips and I'm like, okay, I did 47. Awesome. Now this means I got to raise my set point to 51. So now for the next two weeks, I. I'll do push ups, I'll go to the gym, I'll eat healthy, and I get to 51 and then 52. I want to be able to do 100 push ups at 80. Fuck aging. But the fact is, it's doable. You guys might remember 1993, the Academy Awards, Jack Palance, who won an award for best supporting actor in City slickers. He was 80 years old. He got down and did one armed push ups. I want to be like Jack Palance, and all of you guys should as well. So all of this is doable. I talk about set points in my book, Code of the Extraordinary Mind. Now, second thing is minimum effective dose. How do you exercise? So what I learned is that one hour exercise routines are completely unnecessary. You do not need to do one hour exercise routines. The reason why I changed my goal to not run a marathon is because I realized that many of my friends who were running marathons were not actually getting fitter. They were putting themselves through extreme stress for the marathon. They were injuring their knees, but it didn't really change their body shape. And I was having a conversation with JJ and she says, you know, don't run a marathon. And JJ also said this. She said this whole idea of one hour at the gym is a culturescape rule that we can dismantle why? Who says you need to go to the gym to get an hour worth of exercise? Well, the fitness industry, because personal trainers charge by the hour, gyms charged by the hour. You can get. Modern science is now showing that through minimum effective dose exercise you can get the same results in four to seven minutes. Mark Hyman was telling me about one study he just read about that said one minute can give you the same results. So what is minimum effective dose? Well, there are a number of different models that I use. One is a program called Total Transformation which mindvalley publishes. It's by Christine Bullock. Seven Minute exercises. So I combine three different formats of exercise. Some days I'll do total transformation. So I pick a particular routine. You can just Google Total Transformation mindvalley and you'll find it. Now on other days I do something called kettlebells. Kettlebells are really interesting. I learned about this from Tim Ferriss book, the Four Hour Work Week, which is an incredible book. So I want to show you how rapidly kettlebells can shape your body. Tim Ferriss said if there's one exercise you do you, it's kettlebells. And that's basically what it looks like, right? So this is called a kettlebell swing. You have a kettlebell between your legs, you squat, you grab it and you do this. So that's a kettlebell swing. So it exercises every aspect of your body. If you are a woman or a guy, it gives you an incredible ass, but it also increases your shoulders, your arms, your chest. It's an incredible exercise. Now I want to show you how rapidly kettlebells improve your strength. This was my kettlebell routine. Okay, over one month before a fest, I started out 14 kg. I could do 50 swings. Now Tim Ferriss in this book says you only do this twice a week. So this is actually, this represents week one. In week one, Tuesday, I did 50. By Thursday I could do 60. As soon as I got to week two, I could do 14 kilograms, 75 and I stayed at that level. This is week two, this is week three. Now by week four, I could already go from 14 to 20 kilograms and 50 swings. And by week five, I could do 20 kilograms, 75 swings. That's how rapidly kettlebells improve your strength and your endurance. They call it the ultimate exercise. Now week eight, I injured my back and that's why it says ouch, ouch. So you gotta be careful with kettlebells. So what was happening was I was lifting a very heavy weight and I bent forward a little bit too much. And that's How I injured my back. Okay, so you want to be careful, but if there's one exercise you can do, this is it. This is what I found to be the most effective. And each of these, by the way, takes two minutes. So my daily morning exercise routine is either seven minute total transformation or two minute kettlebells. Two minute. It's not even the length of a song, which kind of sucks because I love doing this to Eminem, right? He's my new favorite white rapper. And by the way, interesting statistic. I googled this. Can you guess what is the number one music to listen to that is proven scientifically to improve your workout? M and Ms. Lose yourself. Awesome, right? So the next thing I do is Tabata. So total transformation kettlebells. And I switch it up with Tabata. Tabata is really interesting. It's an exercise routine designed by a Japanese exercise fitness coach. And what Mr. Tabata found is that when you do this for four minutes, you get the same results as almost an hour in the gym. It's insane. Now, Tabata looks like this. Let's say you're doing Tabata push ups, right? You, you get down and you do push ups as much as you can for 20 seconds, then you break for 10. Then you go down again, 20 seconds, then you break for ten, you go down again, 20 seconds,. You break for ten. You repeat these eight times. Four minutes have passed. So the Tabata exercises I do are push ups. I do Tabata squats and I do Tabata burpees, which is basically this. Okay, so that's the burpee. So Tabata highly, highly, highly effective. Now the tricky thing about Tabata is that 20 minute, 10 second timer. So what I use is the Microsoft band. Now, let me say, I used to work for Microsoft. This is one of the shittiest fitness products I've ever experienced. I don't know who designed this because it is just downright stupid. And it doesn't connect with your iPhone very well. The Bluetooth is horrible. It breaks very easily, but it does one thing really right, and that is the timer. So I pay 200 bucks for this band for just one thing, the timer. It's supposed to like, it's supposed to log your heart rate and it's supposed to measure stuff and keep your timings on. Your phone doesn't do any of that because the damn Bluetooth doesn't work, but the timer works. And so just for that timer, I own this band and I love this band because think about it, right? This little band helps me get one Hour of gym time in four minutes. It's so freaking easy. And that's really all it takes. So my exercise routine, again, Let me repeat 7 minutes, 2 minutes, or 4 minutes. That's it. I do not exercise for more than this. Yet I'm able to get the same results, body wise, muscle wise as I had and better than I had when I was 25. And I know this because once a week, on a Sunday, I go to the gym and I go to the gym and I test and I work out for no more than 30 minutes. So my total gym time a week is. Is 30 minutes. And I always start with one exercise, which is the push up. Sorry, which is the bench press. For men, bench press is awesome because men, men are considered more attractive when you have a powerful chest and shoulders. Bench presses do that. For women, you probably want to do leg squats because, honestly, we love your asses. And leg squats really, really, really help. So I choose the particular exercise technique in the gym that crafts my body to the shape that I want for attractiveness. So you decide whether you want a better chest or a better ass or better legs and pick that. But I only do focus on that. So as a guy, I focus on my arms, on my chest, but I track this. I use my fitness Paul as my fitness pal, as a fitness tracker. So over a period of six months to one year, I can see that I'm able to bench press heavier and heavier and heavier loads. So. So again, it's a really good sign if at 40, 50, you can bench press more than you could at 25 and 30, and you can with the right stuff. Now, one thing I do, which JJ will completely disagree with, is after a gym, I have a whey protein milkshake, right? So I go to. I think it's gnc, Whey protein milkshake. Studies show that when you have a high dose of protein after a gym workout, you can get up to 40% higher muscle gains. But you must have this protein shake within 40 minutes or of your gym workout. So I found that this has really helped me. Now one more tip your skin. Whether you're a man or a woman, one of the things that's going to age you like crazy and most people are not aware of. This is the sun. This was released in the New England Journal of Medicine. This is a truck driver. One side of his face is exposed to sunlight because of how he drives his truck. The other is not. This is how his aging occurred over 10 to 20 years. You can see if you block off this side of the face, he looks maybe 15, 20 years younger. That's what the sun does to your skin. You need to wear sunscreen every single day, folks, every single day. So one of the biggest things I started doing, washing my face and putting on sunscreen. You want to slow down aging. That's your face. Your face is what is going to show the most when it comes to aging. And it's a really simple hack. Sunscreen. It's that simple. Next, let's talk about fuel. Okay? Food and the food you put in your body. So again, by the way, all of this I learned in, in the months preceding a fest just from studying. But I found the results to be so beneficial, I'm now making this part of my life. Now, fuel. Here's the important thing. 95% of your body shape is what you eat. 5% is exercise. So those ads you see late night, P90X, all of that stuff, if you want a better body, ignore that. Honestly, I tried that and I can say it's nice, it makes you fit and you want to exercise, you want to get fit, but if that one hour of time is precious to you, skip it. Don't do tabata, but focus on eating well. 95% of your body shape is what you eat. So I did an experiment. I did beachbody Les mills pump for 30 days straight. Okay? This is where you use weight. So it's P90X but with weights. It's by the same producers and I loved it. It got me really, really, really fit. But in terms of body shape and how I want it to look, it was nowhere, nowhere, nowhere nowhere near effective as simply following a particular diet program from Eric at Meadies, which is Get Wildfit and Eric at Meadies Get Wildfit didn't cost me any additional time. I had to give up some foods I love. But that's what got me to really lose excess belly fat and change the way I look. Now, here's what Get Wildfit is about, right? It's about switching your engine. So most of us have a sugar burning engine. We burn sugar and we live in a society that really, in a bad way, promote sugar consumption. Sugar is addictive. You go back, you go back to 7,000 years ago when we were hunter gatherers. If you were roaming through the forest and you saw a bunch of bananas, you would leap, get those bananas and eat as much as you could because you would not know when the next bunch of bananas would be spotted and you'd want to eat it. So you and Your tribe and your family get that fuel, not the next bunch of like hunter gatherers who come by. So our bodies evolved to give this thing where sugar causes a craving. If you eat something with sugar, such as fruit, you need to keep eating. But that's good, that's what causes us to survive. Because here's what the body does next. It takes all that sugar and it stores it as fat. So when winter comes, you have fuel supply. And so you're burning, you're burning that sugar. Now in our modern world, where sugar is everywhere, food companies have figured out that if you add sugar to something, including ketchup, we need to consume more of it. So to get you to spend more on a grocery store, sugar is added to as much as 70% of food products. It's ridiculous. The American diet is dangerous and it's evil and it's spreading to the rest of the world. And companies like Coca Cola I believe are criminal. And if you work for Coke, please quit, folks, please. You're fucking up the world for our kids. So thank you so much. When you switch your engine, what happens is you stop burning sugar, you start burning fat, you start burning that storage fat. And that's what Wildfit does. It trains you to switch your engine. Now here's how it works. Now it's a complex program. It's about 90 days, but it gets you to eat more quality meat, lots of veggies, I love nuts. So I swap to pistachios and almonds and sparkling water. Sparkling water is brilliant. We'll come to that in a moment. Now some of the rules I learned from Eric is skip the cheat day. So again, even if you read four Hour Body, it talks about a cheat day, low carb diet, then on Sunday you just binge on everything you want turned out that's dumb. That will prevent your engine from flipping from sugar to fat burning. So skip the cheat day. Do not do the cheat day. When I learned from Eric to remove the cheat day, I got much, much, much better results. Second, even a tiny amount of carbs or sugars can prevent the engine switch. So you gotta be pretty disciplined about it. And, and third, hunger is often thirst. So sometimes when you feel hungry, just drink more water because your body is trained to. Seven thousand years ago, we got our water from fruits so hunger would emerge because our bodies needed water. But it's not that you need to eat fruit. You can now get fresh water easily. So drink water and the hunger goes away. When I learned that, it got rid of my mid afternoon snacking which really, really, really helped. And finally I learned that it's really easy to retrain the mind. We think it's so much harder, right? But it's really easy. So these are all the things I used to crave. And all my cravings disappeared in the last two months. Cheese, wine, whiskey, chocolate, coffee. I would drink four cups of coffee a day. I would eat one bar of chocolate a day because I love eating chocolate. Because I'm married to a European, right? Chocolates are everywhere. Whiskey. You should come to my house. I've got like the best frickin bar. I've got bottles from every country. I love my bar, I love my whiske, I love my wine and I love my cheese. And I gave all of this up. But what's interesting is I didn't give it up completely. I gave up my attachment to them. The cravings stop now. When I go to a party, I need one glass of wine before I'd have three. Now what did I replace all of this with? One thing. Sparkling water. And this I found really amazing because I never liked sparkling water. Growing up in the U.S. sparkling water isn't, isn't popular, but in Europe it is. And what I found is that sparkling water is a really powerful substitute for coffee, for wine. I found that often I was drinking coffee not for the caffeine, but because I liked the feeling of comfort having a warm liquid in my hand during a day at the office. When I swapped this to sparkling water, so much changed. Now with sparkling water, keep this in mind. Please do not buy the commercial stuff like Evian or these other bottled waters. They are bad for the environment. Really, really, really, really bad. Horribly bad. The whole plastic water bottling industry is started by companies like Coca Cola. Because when Coke found that teenagers stopped drinking their poison, Coke started going into water. So Coke started manufacturing water such as Dasani, shipping it in these plastic bottles. Today, Americans discard a billion plastic bottles and only 5% actually get recycled. So what do you want to do? You want to support companies like this? Sodastreamusa.com you buy this machine and you buy that little capsule. You put it in the back of the machine. It comes with a plastic bottle, you stick it in, it makes your water sparkly. And then you can return. You can go to any store that sells it and get the carbon dioxide in this refilled. There's no plastic waste at all. This is what I started doing. And this was amazing. Now the final thing I started doing was in the mornings as part of Wildfit, I needed to make sure that I had a really good breakfast, right? So I would either if I had time, I would make myself an omelette, but if I did not have time, I would use JJ Virgin's shakes. So JJ Virgin's shakes is what I typically eat 80% of the time when I'm rushing off for work. And I love it. It's delicious. Again, I'm not doing this to support JJ or whatever. She's incredibly successful in her own right. But she has a shake guide online that you guys can check out. That is the website jjvirginshakeguide.com so check it out. So anyway, I hope these three tips, conscious hacking, exercise and nutrition and food. This is what I learned. This is what has made me so much fitter at 40 than I ever was in the last 15 years. And I hope you guys can take this back with you, decide what you want to implement and see the results shortly. And by the way, all of these changes, two months, all of it. Two months, all my weight loss, two months, me going from 50 push ups to 55 push ups, which is hard. Two months, my bench press weight increase, all in two months. All of this is possible with the right attitude. And you can completely rewire your brain, rewire your cravings in two months with the right program. Thank you.