Vibrant You

Biohack Without Breaking the Bank: 7 Cost-Free and Timeless Biohacks for Women to Harmonize Your Health Today

• Bindi Stables • Episode 33

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Text Bindi!

If you’ve been on a health or wellness journey for any length of time, you’ve definitely heard of biohacking - a way of life, practices, and technologies that support optimal human health, function, and performance.

So many women I talk to about biohacking, think that biohacking is all about modern, high-tech gadgets, expensive therapies, luxurious treatments, and pricey supplements.

But the truth is, biohacking doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. 

Biohacking has been around for thousands of years, practiced and taught by different wisdom cultures as a way of life and living in harmony with nature - within and without - resulting in optimal health and well-being. 

So today we’re talking about:

  1. How to bio-hack without breaking the bank
  2. 7 Cost-free and timeless bio hacks to harmonize your health today
  3. Ancient biohacking techniques to actualize your fullest potential

Links:

  1. Research and benefits on Forest Bathing (study) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6589172/ 
  2. "Menstrual Cycle Syncing 101: Optimizing Nutrition, Exercise, Self-Care and Work to Unlock Your Hormonal Advantage" (podcast episode)
  3. Optimize and Rise: 1-1 Health Optimization Program with Bindi www.bindistables.com/optimize


Thank you so much for listening. I’m so honored that you’re here and would be SO grateful if you could leave me a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, that way we can inspire and educate even more people together.

I’d love to connect with you on IG: www.instagram.com/bindistables

Visit my website for more resources and ways to work with me: www.bindistables.com

Bindi:

Welcome to the Vibrant you podcast. I'm your host, bindi Stables, and here we talk all things wellness and vibrant living. You'll learn about integrative health, functional medicine, holistic biohacking and enjoy raw and real conversations on personal growth, mindset and motivation. Optimize your body and mind and become the happiest, the healthiest, most vibrant. You Enjoy the show, hey, and welcome back to another episode of Vibrant you.

Bindi:

If you have been on a health or wellness journey for any length of time now, I am almost certain that you've heard of biohacking, which is a way of life, a series of practices and modern technologies designed for helping you optimize your health, your function, your performance. Many of the women I talk to about biohacking think that biohacking is all about these modern high tech gadgets, expensive therapies, luxurious treatments and pricey supplements. The truth is that biohacking doesn't have to be expensive or complicated, and neither does your health. Biohacking has been around for thousands of years, practiced and taught by all kinds of different wisdom cultures, as a way of life and living in harmony with nature within and without, which, as a result, creates that optimal health and well-being. This is how I originally studied biohacking. I didn't start off with aura rings and blue light blocking glasses and infrared saunas and red light therapy. I studied in India for years learning the secrets of ancient Ayurveda, yoga, meditation and other ancient Vedic sciences, which revealed such incredible gems of health optimization and actualization of our full human potential. This is what I call bioharmonizing rather than biohacking. Biohacking I've never liked the word I use it because people get it but bioharmonizing really feels more like living in alignment with nature, living in alignment with the cycles, the rhythms of nature that help optimize our human health and reset our circadian rhythm and optimize our human potential. So Ayurveda is a Sanskrit word, which is the original language that Ayurveda is taught in.

Bindi:

Ayurveda is an ancient medical science, the oldest known medical science known to humankind. It's the oldest form of biohacking, and when I was actually preparing for today's episode, I realized that almost all of these biohacks or dina tarias, as we called it in Ayurveda that I learned they're actually so simple and almost all of them are free. They are using nature versus expensive gadgets. So today that is what we were talking about. We are getting into all about how to biohack without breaking the bank, and we're going to get into seven of my top cost, free, timeless biohacks that you can use to harmonize your health today.

Bindi:

Now, I'm certainly not anti-modern biohacking by any means. I love red light therapy and I love my saunas and I love my cold plunges and I love all my fancy treatments and therapies. But I also just want to share with you some of more budget friendly and simple at home health optimizing practices that you can start to really optimize your health today. So let's get right into it. So the first biohack I want to share with you is especially for women of reproductive age, and the first biohack is cycle sinking.

Bindi:

So cycle sinking is a way of life and adapting what we eat and how we exercise and how we live our lives as women, adapting that through the various phases of our menstrual cycle. So, women of reproductive age, we have 28 day long ish menstrual cycle. It can be 21 to 35 days, whatever it might be, and we go through four different phases through that menstrual cycle. Right? One menstrual cycle is from day one of your bleed to the next day, one of your next bleed. That's one menstrual cycle, not just your bleeding days. But we can really biohack or bioharmonize rather, our health, our hormones are a cognitive well-being as women, by starting to adapt these basic things that we're doing every day to be in favor of these different phases.

Bindi:

What we need in each phase of our menstrual cycle really varies. So what we might need during our period is different than what we might need when we are ovulating or premenstrual, for example. So, adapting the foods that we eat, adapting how we exercise right, and this is very intuitive, when you are on your period you probably don't want to be doing high-intensity interval training, but you may notice, the more in tune with your body you get, the more in tune with your inner nature, right, we go through different seasons, just like we notice the environment around us, nature. She goes through spring and summer and fall and winter. Women, as beings of nature, we go through that same thing. And so the biohacker, the bioharmonizing here is to live in alignment with that nature and use the different seasons that we go through to adjust our food, our exercise, our self-care and so on.

Bindi:

So I actually have an entire podcast episode dedicated to just this. It's called menstrual psychosyncing 101. You can scroll back through previous episodes and find it, and I'll also link that episode up in the show notes so you can learn exactly what those foods are, how to exercise, how to self-care and so on through those different phases. So that's biohack number one psychosyncing. Biohack number two is early morning sunlight. So the ancients have done this for thousands of years and many different wisdom traditions and cultures have. Ancient Indians, you know from the lineage of Ayurveda, the Mayans, the Aztecs, so many different cultures really understood the power and the health benefits, the human optimization benefits, of the sun, especially those early morning sunlight hours.

Bindi:

And modern science now confirms that, of course, those early morning sunlight hours where we're getting exposure of that sun directly on our skin, in our eyes, you know, before it gets too bright and burns our retinas right when the UV radiation is at zero or low enough in those early morning hours, there's countless health benefits. It supports our circadian rhythm for better mood, better sleep. It boosts our overall mood. It helps with vitamin D production, which is of course essential for healthy bones, healthy mood, healthy menstrual cycle, all that good stuff. So there's endless benefits on our brain chemistry by getting that early morning sunlight exposure. It supports neurotransmitter production like serotonin, which is our happiness feel good neurotransmitter, as well as it helps with endorphins, which also make us feel really good. When we get those early morning sunlight exposure we're reducing the levels of cortisol or stress hormones that are being flooded in the body with just the responsibilities and challenges of daily life.

Bindi:

So I love early morning sunlight exposure every single morning. We're pretty lucky. It's easy here in Bali because my home is like indoor, outdoor. Well, we have our two bedrooms, but like our living room and our yard and our pool, it's like one big open area. So easily I get early morning sunlight. But you may be thinking, if you live in a cool climate, a northern climate, you don't get as much sunlight exposure. I so remember that, living in Canada where you know you'd go to work and come home and not see the sun for the whole day being indoors. If that's you and you're like, how am I supposed to get direct sunlight on my skin and in my eyes first thing in the morning? What I invite you to do is even just like sit in a window or at any point throughout the day. Go get some sun right, just be outside. You don't have to look directly at it. I wouldn't look directly at it at midday, but just making sure that you're getting sunlight exposure throughout the day is so, so important.

Bindi:

Ancient Biohack Free, simple, okay, free. Biohack. Number three is tongue scraping, and tongue scraping is also an ancient practice. It's free or almost free. So tongue scraping is a really simple but effective practice, not only for oral hygiene but for overall health. Where you take a tongue scraper which okay, you guys, maybe it's not free you got to spend $5 to $10 on Amazon to buy yourself either a stainless steel or copper tongue scraper, which is this big, simple U shaped device that you hold onto both sides. You stick out your tongue and you basically scrape five to seven times all the gunk, all the white coating. That is really just a manifestation of what's crawled and creeped up your digestive tract overnight from your body's natural recovery process. So when we wake up in the morning, we have a lot of like undigested food particles on our tongue and bacteria and toxins that we've exhaled throughout the night and we want to really eliminate that. So of course, that helps with oral hygiene, but it also is like a natural detox every single morning and I swear once you've done it once and you realize how much comes off of your tongue when you scrape it every morning.

Bindi:

You will never be able to go back. It will just be a lifelong biohack that you will embrace and it's just so good. So I've been doing this for oh my gosh 15 years now, every single day, and I love it. I did say that this is going to be an episode on free biohacks, though, so I am going to give that option. If you don't want to, or you can't find a tongue scraper, an Ayurvedic tongue scraper, then just use the side of a big metal spoon. So everyone has in their kitchen a big tablespoon and all you're going to do is use that to scrape the tongue. So you're going to use the concave part and you're just going to scrape down the tongue and pull that gunk off. So in ancient times, this was a practice that was done every single day as part of the daily routine called the dinataria, and it's a really excellent practice. I can't recommend it enough.

Bindi:

Okay, biohack number four is another ancient practice from Ayurveda called dry brushing or exfoliation. In Sanskrit, we call it garshana or uduvarthram. Traditionally, dry brushing was actually done with herbal powders, so I'm going to share both options with you. What it is is we either are going to take a simple dry bristle brush, which you can buy for a couple of dollars at your dollar store or your local pharmacy. You can get them online for five dollars or less you guys, so not a big deal.

Bindi:

And all you're going to do is you're going to, when your skin is dry, you're going to take that dry brush and sweep long, broad strokes towards the heart over the different parts of your body. So, for example, you have the dry brush and you're going to sweep from your fingertips to your shoulder right and you're going to sweep all the different sections of your skin from your fingertips to your shoulder. Then you're going to do from your toes to your hips or to your groin and you're just doing long, broad strokes, sweeping that dry brush, those dry bristles, along the skin towards the heart. You can't do it wrong if you're doing it in the direction of the heart. That's the general rule. You'll go down the neck towards the heart. There's all the lymph nodes in the armpits and under the clavicle, the collarbone. You can do figure eights around the breasts. You can sweep your abdomen, sweep it towards the heart. Just keep it simple. There is a full technique behind it, but general rule, if you're sweeping towards the heart you can't go wrong. That's one way.

Bindi:

Another way, actually more traditionally, is that it was usually done with herbal powders. So there was Ayurveda Charayama, like a Ayurvedic physician or an Ayurvedic practitioner would prescribe to you specific herbal powder combinations that you would do this exfoliation with to help detoxify the skin, which is the body's largest detoxification organ. So really helping our skin unclog pores and release toxins is one of the best ways that we can detoxify the body as well as it has such a beautiful effect on the nervous system, really helps to drain the lymphatic system, give us energy. I swear every morning that I dry brush. I do it for two, three minutes every single morning, most of the time just with my dry brush. But if I'm showering first thing in the morning before I go to Pilates, I have a herbal powder combination of Trifla, which is an Ayurvedic combination of three Ayurvedic fruits called Trifla, and that's a great exfoliant powder that you can use to actually massage into the skin and get that nice circulatory boost and lymphatic drainage. And I swear, every time I do it I just feel so energized and it wakes me up and it feels like I had a whole body massage and it's just better than a cup of coffee, I swear. So that is Biohack number four. Dry brushing or exfoliation of any kind is really excellent.

Bindi:

Okay, biohack number five is Irthing, also known as grounding or forest bathing. So People and cultures have been doing this practice for, again, thousands of years. We've known since the beginning of time the power of nature, the impact of being in nature, the effect that it has on our nervous system, our hormones, our cognitive health, right that exposure to nature's negative ions really helps to lower stress, lower inflammation in the body, reduce the effects of all of the technology that we're on those EMFs that we're exposed to. And I actually found a really great study recently which I will link up in the show notes. But studies have found that this forest bathing has such positive physiological effects such as lowering blood pressure, improving our autonomic and immune functions, as well as all kinds of psychological benefits of alleviating depression and improving mental health. So that is a direct quote from a study that I will link up that really shares the benefits of earthing or grounding.

Bindi:

So it can literally be as simple as going out and getting into nature, getting that fresh air, getting that sunlight on your skin, being in nature to really receive those negative ions and receive that calming, soothing effect. Some cultures and ways of practicing this can be just being in the forest, sitting in the forest. You know, being exposed. Others will say that to have the greatest effect is to have your bare feet on the earth or your whole body on the earth, just lay down on the earth. And this is actually a bio hack that I use for jet lag when I travel, to help reset my circadian rhythm and just like ground and release all of the EMFs, like. You know what I mean, right, guys? When you travel and you've been through all kinds of airports and all kinds of scanners and X-rays and metal detectors and you're eating not so great food and you're exposed to all kinds of EMFs when you travel, you know that feeling, right Of just like, feeling like staticky and gross and like I don't know. I think you can understand the feeling where you just feel like cortisol and your cells are stressed and what I do is go get my bare feet on the earth or I jump in the ocean, depending on where I'm at. If I'm going to Canada, I just put my bare feet or I lay my whole body on the earth for 15 minutes and, I swear to goodness, it just resets my whole circadian rhythm and really helps me overcome jet lag so much faster, which is another great effect. So that is earthing or grounding or forest bathing.

Bindi:

Okay, bio hack number six is another ancient practice that is so simple but so powerful, and that is breath work. So in ancient Ayurvedic times or yogic times we called the practice of breath work pranayama, which means to control the breath or to control the life force. This is another Sanskrit word, the original language of yoga and Ayurveda, which means to control the life force, energy inside of our body. So different cultures have called this life force, energy that gives us life and health and vitality, different words or different names. In Ayurveda and yoga they called it prana. In traditional Chinese medicine They've called it chi or ki. In Japan They've called it reiki. In Hawaii They've called it mana. But it is the control and the balancing of this life force, energy that creates tremendous vitality and energy and longevity.

Bindi:

So a great way to calm your mind, reduce stress. We can use breath work or different breathing techniques, manipulating the breath. Whatever we do to the breath, we do to the mind. So when we start to change our breathing, we can't help but change our mind and change our thoughts and our emotional state. So one of my favorite breathing techniques that I have done for the last oh my gosh, at least 15 years now, is something called ujjayi breath or conscious breathing. Ujjayi breath, or it's also known as this oceanic breath, right, victorious breath. So all that it revolves is slowing down the pace of the breath and really controlling the flow of air in the back of the throat, so controlling and kind of constricting, creating this almost oceanic whispery sound at the back of the throat which sounds a little bit like this if you've never heard of it. Hmm, even just that one breath, you guys, I feel my whole nervous system just ground and center and harmonize. So it's this little constriction in the back of the throat where we're almost creating a ah sound on the inhale, but keeping the lips closed, and a ha sound on the exhale, but again keeping the lips closed. It's an inner sound in the back of the throat, almost like a gentle little hum, and it really helps to control that flow of breath. It helps to calm the mind, it gives mental clarity and focus, it supports lowering our blood pressure, it rejuvenates our nervous system, helps with sleep and just overall gives us such a sense of calm and relaxation in the body and mind. So again, we breathe all day, every day, and how simple to really allow our breath or the ways in which we breathe, and the breathing practices that we can do intentionally to really biohack or bioharmonize our entire mind and body. Can't emphasize breath work enough. I love it so much. Okay, biohack number seven.

Bindi:

Final one, is contrast therapy, also known as hot and cold shower therapy. So contrast therapy can be used in a number of ways. If you've ever been to a sauna or a cold plunge, you've been practicing contrast therapy. However, a free way of doing it is by doing it at home and simply using your shower and adjusting the temperature of your shower in various cycles of hot and cold to create a therapeutic effect. So contrast therapy in the shower involves just alternating the temperature of your water between warm or hot and cold, which really helps to stimulate circulation and it eases muscle soreness. But it also helps to improve our metabolism and lymphatic drainage and therefore detoxification of the body and really helps with just building our mental and physical resilience and overall health and wellness.

Bindi:

So how I like to do contrast therapy and a benefit of doing it in the shower versus, obviously, the cold plunge in the sauna that you pay to enter is, one, it's free and two, you actually have full control over the temperature and to slowly and gradually adjust the temperature back and forth without shocking the system, which, for women especially, is actually quite important. If you are just going from really extreme hot temperatures in the sauna to extreme colds, if you have any sort of hormonal imbalances or too much cortisol in your system, sex hormone imbalances or thyroid imbalances, it can really be too much for your system. It shocks your system. So the nice thing with the shower is you can gradually adjust it both ways, get the benefits of hot and cold therapy, but without the shock on your system and without it perpetuating hormonal imbalances. So that's pretty cool.

Bindi:

How I like to do it is I start with a few minutes of warm water, first to relax the body, get your body adjusted, improve your circulation because of the heat, that vasodilation of your blood vessels, and I do that for two to three minutes. So warm or hot water for two to three minutes, and then I slowly, gradually again because I don't love to shock myself every day I turn it down to as cold as I can comfortably handle for 30 seconds to one minute. Okay, after 30 seconds or one minute, then I turn it back to warm or hot, slowly, gradually, to let my body ease into it, do that again for two, three minutes, then turn it back slowly, gradually to cold, 30 seconds to a minute. So I go through about three to four cycles of hot to cold, again two to three minutes of warm or hot water, and then 30 seconds to one minute. So about half the time, or a third of the time, on cold and really practicing just deep and slow breathing to help your body adjust to that cold. So again, it's not a shock, but this is a really excellent bio hack that, again, is really budget friendly. So I love that.

Bindi:

Okay, you guys, so that is all I wanted to share with you for today. These are the top seven bio hacks. They are cost, free, ancient, timeless bio hacks for women that you can start to harmonize your health with today. So I would love to hear your top takeaways from this episode over on Instagram. Send me a DM. I'd love to hear.

Bindi:

Which of these bio hacks have you already tried? Which ones did I miss? What are some free bio hacks that you love and swear by? Check out my latest Instagram post and please share in the comments so we can inspire each other and, of course, if there's anyone in your life that you think could benefit from hearing this information, this knowledge. Please do send it to them, and I look forward to seeing you back here for another episode real soon. Take care. Thanks so much for listening. If you loved today's episode, please spread the love by subscribing and leaving a review, or if there's someone in your life that you think could benefit from this conversation, please share this episode with them. I would love to hear from you over on Instagram at bindi stables, or visit my website, bindi stablescom, to connect and work with me. Thank you so much again for being here and I'm celebrating you in this journey of becoming the happiest, the healthiest, most vibrant you.