Lessons - How Biohacking Your Mind Unlocks Peak Performance | Dave Asprey - Biohacking Pioneer & Performance Expert

In this lessons episode, discover why self-awareness is essential for lasting success, and how emotional triggers silently sabotage performance, learn how to reprogram reactive patterns, understand the science behind brain states, and explore how ancient wisdom and neurofeedback combine to build unshakable resilience and authentic leadership. I think that I think that so many people just drift through life with really no focus, no self-awareness, no understanding of their own mental state, and to your point, that is a that is a nuclear bomb if you end up being successful. I would make the argument that's actually highly difficult to be successful without a little bit of introspection and understanding your own mental state, but if you manage to do it, then you have the lives of hundreds or thousands plus employees and stakeholders and people that are basically potential targets for your lack of self-care, for really lack of a better description, was there a point? I read this little paragraph from your book that sort of speaks about combining physical and mental and understanding yourself and modern science and ancient wisdom, and even before we press record, you said, I only write about things that I actually care about, and you've written nine books, and you really can't be persuaded to write about shit that is just sort of run of the mill, that 10 other people, 20 other people have written about, and this is very unique. What was the thing in your life that prompted you to care so much about understanding your mental state, but not just from a modern perspective, including some of these ancient techniques? When I was 26, I made six million dollars, and this was pre-bidened dollars, so it was worth something, and I lost when I was 28, and I made that money because I was convinced it would make me happy, and I looked at a friend, this is a true story, we're there in Santa Clara, California, Silicon Valley, and I'll be happy, when I have 10 million dollars, I actually said that, so what a douchebag, but I fully believed that that would make me happy. I also tried to getting married very briefly in my 20s, and oh, let's try fame, that will make you happy, so I met entrepreneur magazine. If you go to my Instagram account, the fat picture there is me from entrepreneur magazine, when I'm 23, is the first guy to sell anything over the internet, and I can tell you, I had 15 minutes of happiness from the magazine article, I had 15 minutes of happiness and a whole lot of misery from the money, and a bunch of other things, like you just realized none of it works, so by the time I'm 30, like I've made and lost more than most people ever make in their life, and I am freaking miserable, and it was only when my relationship at the time just fell apart, I got to do something, I'm a computer science guy, I'm actually a computer hacker, so I tried all this stuff that was supposed to work, none of it worked, so then I tried this stuff that only idiots would try, I went to Tibet, and Nepal, and I studied shamanism, I did all this stuff that my family and my life taught me were worthless, because I was desperate, and I had already tried all this stuff, the reality is I finally committed to only doing things that work, which means I'm going to measure, and I'm going to believe something works, and then I'm going to test it, and if it doesn't all change, before I went to the gym, six days a week, 90 minutes a day, for 18 months on a low fat diet, I never lost an inch off my waist or a pound of weight, I probably lost some fat, gained some muscle, but I was still fat, and I could either say it's because I didn't try hard enough or because I had terrible advice, so this has led to so many of the businesses I'm running today, like upgrade labs, we're doing 187 million data points across people's minds and bodies, so don't just come in and think it's going to work, we'll show you it's working every time, because it does, and this is why the basis for heavily meditated is 40 years of zen. This is my, we'll call it entrepreneur, CEO, brain upgrade program in Seattle. People come in, they have for 10 years more than a thousand high performing brains, have taught me what's in heavily meditated. They come in, spend five days with my team of neuroscientists and facilitators and custom tech, and we show you what's going on in your brain, how triggers happen and how to go in and edit them out. People spend 20 grand to do that, and it works, but if you read heavily meditated, I give away the process I use, it works better with the computers and all the other stuff, but you can do this at home, and even if you're just getting started, at the end of the day, someone got under your skin, they're controlling you, and you need to install a firewall in your consciousness, so that you no longer have that vulnerability, and it's not about being tough and inflexible. Step one, if you have a company, hopefully you've done this, someone says something that pisses you off or does something, and if you were a 10-year-old, you'd get really mad and probably punch them, but you're a functioning adult, so you do what most people do. You smile, the thick smile, put on your game face, and everyone in the room knows that you're pissed, but you act like you're not, and well, okay, at least we have civil society, but everyone knows you're no longer in congruence, you're interstate and outer state don't match, and your customers can feel it, your team can feel it, and it comes across as well you're probably a con artist, even if you're not, it just comes across that way. So learning how to actually have congruence is the only way to have authentic leadership, which means you own your own shit, and every single time something triggers me. I'm going to write it down and say, I wonder what that is, and then I'm going to run this reset process that's in the book, and I'm going to track it down, and I'm going to edit the vulnerability out of my settings. What do you mean, vulnerability? Think of it like this. If you went to the therapist and you said, hey, I have this problem focusing on my phone. All these alerts keep popping up all the time. This is all the time. And the therapist says, oh, that's okay. Every time one of them pops up, just take a deep breath and gently swipe it to the side so you can focus on your work. You would fire that therapist. But if you go in there and say, I keep getting mad every time a girlfriend says this or my mother-in-law says that or my boss says this, it's the same thing. Turn off the alerts. Stop managing them. And the difference is incredible capacity. I think that this is one of the most useful tools for any high-performing individual entrepreneur or otherwise. Like you mentioned before, like even people in jobs, you're not achieving peak performance. You're not getting the promotion if you can't manage and regulate yourself. When you think about, this is one of the other ideas that you write about, I will talk about the reset process in a second, but one of the ideas you write about just so people can understand. And sort of we can go through some definitions or some basics as to how the brain works. They can see what's happening here. Because you write about exploring pathways to inner peace and meditation. It's very crucial to understand the science behind your brain states. So can we talk about brain states? Because you mentioned that the brain is like this complex orchestra producing all these different types of brain ways. I don't think many people even understand how their own brain works. So what are the brain states that people should be aware of? And why do they matter for, for example, mental performance? If you're an entrepreneur, you want to be able to have energy and be focused all the time. So you could have the energy of running a sprint all day long. You think that would work? No, you'd burn out. No, it wouldn't work. So a lot of the times we get triggered. And it's not a big trigger, but you're just like irritable. That's a beta brain state. And beta brain states are great for performing well physically. They're not great for intuition and creativity and working in collaboration with the team. So you would want to know, how does it feel when I'm in a high beta state versus when I'm in an alpha state? And alpha has nothing to do with alpha males. And even alpha male was a complete myth from the guy who studied wolves and made a mistake. So when an alpha state is slower brain waves than a beta state, this is a relaxed and alert. A lot of meditation takes you there. And you can drop down from there into theta where we have dream states and day dreaming and more intuition and creativity and weird visions. And then deltas the dreamless deep state where your brain is refreshing itself. And you have a mix of all these all the time. So that makes it sound really easy. Well, I'll just dial my brain up or down. The reality is think of these as music notes. You have a C note or a D note or a G note or whatever. It's not about the note. It's what song are you playing in the note? So say, look, I manage to have alpha brain waves. I'm like, yes, and you're playing a Metallica song, right? Ride the lightning in alpha is probably not the brain that you want, right? So on one hand, knowing brain states is beautiful because we can measure those when people come in, we do a clinical grade scan on their brain. Like, oh, look, here's your likely behavior patterns based on your brain waves. By the way, these two parts of the brain, you know, the cello and the the drums, whatever, they're not talking to each other, they're not playing the same notes. If you want, we can teach you how to align those. And here's what happens to your behaviors when those are aligned. And that's a pretty profound shift because otherwise, the brain doesn't know what's happening. In fact, the only nerve that goes inside the brain is the fifth cranial nerve. And that comes from your molars. Other than that, the brain is blind to itself. That's why you can see the Hannibal Lecter movie and it takes off the guy's brain and pokes at it. Doesn't do anything. You can't feel your brain. So your brain doesn't know what it's doing. But if you ever see the mirror experiment where they hang a mirror up in the jungle and an ape walks up and looks like, oh, that's me. And it'll like find lettuce in its teeth or whatever they're eating, right? And that's amazing. Your brain is doing that. So when you do neurofeedback, you start learning how to control the states and the song that's playing. And the special thing about 40 years as n. As we figured out, a way to shift from one state to another in order to permanently turn off the source of a trigger. And it's very different than just maintaining your cool. That's a waste of time. So maintaining your cool is almost like you're trying to put a bandaid on this open wound where with with 40 years of zen, with basically everything that you teach, you're talking about stop like it's almost like a leading indicator of a trigger. You're stopping it before it even impacts you. That's that's what you're trying to do. It's more than just stopping it. You're permanently removing it from your reality. Wow. Right. So that way there's nothing to stop. It's kind of like you're you're in a boxing ring, right? And I go, okay, I'm going to be tough. And okay, do the the rope a dope strategy? I'm still letting him hit me. I'm going to pretend like it doesn't hurt. I'll take the hit and I'll be tough and I'll counter attack to that is not a good path. What you want is for him to hit you and it goes through you with no effect. Right. Yeah. What that's what's possible when you permanently remove this, the thing that just got under your skin, it doesn't matter. And the best example for this for a lot of a lot of just a lot of people in general, it's driving. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Everyone gets mad until they learn to do something about it, right? And it's just this feeling. Well, if you're on the reset process on that feeling, there was some time earlier in your life where you felt disrespected and it really hurt your feelings. So your automated defense systems, which are based in the body, not even the mind. Oh, this matches that other situation. Therefore, it's a threat. Therefore, have some anger. And then you're going to make up a story about what's going on. The other guy's head. Like, you don't know if the guy's about to fill his pants. You don't know if you really thinks you're a jerk and he's cutting off and you don't know if he's on the way to the hospital to go, you know, deliver someone's baby. You just don't have any information at all. All the story you have is BS. If you could do something. So the next time someone cut you off, you just didn't care. You wouldn't make up a story. Your heart rate wouldn't change and you wouldn't remember it because it's irrelevant. And we want to live in that state. And that means if you're running your company and you get the phone call that anyone with any level of success has, that some employee who you fired for doing something that was well deserving of firing decides to sue you, right? Because many employees, in fact, the lowest performing employees will almost always try to sue you. Because it couldn't be them, it must be you, right? In their core of little twisted reality. So that can really, really push buttons for people. And when you've run through your reset process on that, oh, look, it's happening. Okay, I got the attorney's handling it. Like, it's going to happen. But the amount of suffering and therefore the amount of wasted energy goes down. And that's what, that's what just gives you resilience and business. And if you can manage to be unprogrammable, you get to choose your state and you can choose success. And if you're programmable, some asshole somewhere is going to program you when you're not looking and you're going to act like a jerk and it's going to affect your team. It's going to affect your customer. It's going to affect how you sleep. It'll affect your relationships at home. And it affects, it affects everything. It affects your performance. Everything. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.