At its simplest level, it means putting yourself first, focusing on what you need to optimise to get the biggest performance improvements in every area of your life. It is vitally important for people to put themselves first and in doing so they are in the best possible place to look after their career, business and loved ones.
Human Optimisation and Performance is all about you and not about your work, career, spouse and family. It’s completely focused on what you can do to put yourself in the best possible place to deal with life’s problems and maximise life’s opportunities across all areas of your life.
There are three key components to Optimisation:
- Energy – tapping into your hidden energy and maximising your energy levels
- Emotional strength – increasing resilience, mitigating stress and managing the voice in your head
- Cognitive performance – making better decisions, thinking faster, thinking creatively, and increasing your brain power
When you optimise all three you will start to see results in all areas of your life and not just your performance at work. It’s not good enough to focus on one or two, you need to do the work and focus on all three.
The secret to making massive improvements in all three areas is biohacking, which I define as taking control of your physical, mental and emotional states, harnessing the exciting intersection between biology and technology. It is a cutting edge and holistic approach that will open your eyes to a world you never knew existed.
Focusing on the three components above, you will typically hear the following advice:
- Energy – eat a balanced diet, drink plenty of fluids, exercise, take multi-vitamins and don’t sit down all day
- Emotions – meditation, deep breathing exercises, confidence building exercises and getting sufficient ‘down time’
- Cognition – focus techniques, sleep 8 hours a night and brain training games
These are all great and I work on these with my clients but I also take them further and much deeper. Here are just a few examples:
- Energy – gut microbiome testing, blood testing, quality deep sleep, targeted supplementation, time efficient exercise, cold exposure, light exposure and fasting
- Emotions – HRV training (trains you to handle stress), deep meditation, EMDR and techniques to handle emotional triggers ‘in the moment’.
- Cognition – nootropics (aka smart drugs), neurofeedback, fasting, binaural beats and advanced brain training