Over the turn of the year I took some weeks off, in order to work out some private projects, finish some books that I had halfway-finished for far too long, and of course, to reflect about what such concepts like New Year actually could mean. As usual, the short answer is… not much per se, but one can seize the occasion to contrive a few goals for the year. You know, not these mundane, marginal resolutions like “on February 20th I will definitely go for a run”, or ambiguous abstracts like “in 2021 I‘m finally gonna be a people person!”, but a more profound search for something new, a kind of evaluation of undiscovered instrument in the toolkit of one‘s being, the juicy stuff.
Now we‘ve seen for quite some years, that the world of self-improvement likes to border on the superstitious. From particularly fine-tuned compositions of one‘s diet plan, to the sheer religious belief in certain routines, there‘s no shortage in shady suggestions that draw their data from unique success stories that makes me wonder: Even if there was a kind of biological truth to these underlying claims, how could I survive the cringing of my heart that I would experience by reading these articles?
A special downside of solutions of the kind „collection of very intricate details“ is that they aim to intervene in your life at a very incessant level. Which is, you have to think about them all day in fear of breaking the patterns, i.e. you not only distract yourself from the stuff you actually want to do, but also not giving you a certainty of feedback in either – if something appears to help – what exactly it is that helps, or – if there‘s no effect to be noticed – which detail is maybe done wrong in order to blast away all the other efforts. I guess I would only resort to such methods if I had the impression that something‘s seriously wrong with me, and I currently don‘t notice people telling me this more than once a week, so it‘s fine.
Then there are the kind of solutions that I consider just minor variations of the stuff that one already sort of knows. E.g. I don‘t consider “doing some physical movement once in a while is quite ok” as a real form of “bio-hack”, as that is just common knowledge. Ok, you still have to actually apply it, fair enough, but from an intellectual standpoint it’s boring.
So anyway, I‘m still convinced there ought to be some ways of modifying your life style at quite a beginner-suitable level, one that can easily be opted-in, low requirement of risk or investion, and that‘s where I usually start listening.
A few years back, for instance, for me that was the discovery of intermittent fasting, which in my case happened to show nearly instantaneous effects, mostly positive (e.g. for subjective impressions of my attention and overall well-being). This is something that I‘d at least easily recommend trying out a few times, but as for me, right now, I‘m not really inclined in implementing it right now.
One can probably be a bit ambivalent about all these over-the-(online-)counter supplement prescriptions that are listed everywhere. I‘m not going to recommend the regular use of any substance here, but there‘s plenty of articles about nootropics or other cognitive enhancers; some of these articles also border on the quasi-religious realm, others appear more scientific (the usage of coffee is living in the same domain, and I like that a lot) – so I‘ll leave it to the reader to form his own opinion.
Having said that, I can now finally reveal what this post is all about, as I seem to have found another intriguing way which I‘m just trying out now since a few weeks. I found the claim that it is advantageous of sleeping on an inclined bed. That certainly was outside my curretn scope, the underlying claims are about an improved flow of your glymphatic system, as well as pressure regulation. Be that as it may, it doesn‘t sound harmful and it‘s easily obtainable: by raising your bed‘s head end about 10-15cm with some suitable, stable risers, available for below 20€. I found only weird for the first night and seemed to wake up in a better mood. Together with such nice add-on as a wake up light (if you have one), this certainly qualifies as a “why didn’t anyone tell me earlier?”-moment for me.
So, if you have more intriguing bio-hacks that you consider definitely on the non-quacky side, I‘m interested 🙂
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