45+ Top FREE Biohacks You Can Try Today

Many of the best, most time-proven biohacks are completely FREE.

When you Google “biohacking”, you’ll come across influencers spending hundreds of thousands, even millions, on their routines.

Don’t let these folks convince you that the best biohacks cost your full salary, fill half your apartment, or require a massive team to implement.

From extensive research and my personal experiments, here’s a list of cheap and free biohacks you can do today. Biohacking without breaking the bank.

Improve Sleep Quality & Quantity

If sleep were a drug, it would be the trillion-dollar miracle pill. Quality sleep is the foundation of health.

During this time, your body repairs and rejuvenates, and your mind consolidates memories and processes emotions.

Humans today sleep less and with lower quality than ever before. Here are the key free biohacks that’ll help optimize your sleep:

1. Consistent sleep schedule: Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day to regulate your circadian rhythm. This makes getting 7-8 hours easier, without fancy biohacks
2. Unplug Wi-Fi: Improve sleep quality by turning off your router and any other sources of wireless signals (e.g. Bluetooth) while you sleep
3. Afternoon recharge: If you don’t get enough sleep, a quick 20-30 minute nap will boost productivity and health
4. The neck pillow: Biology has a concept of “use it or lose it”. Similar to wearing a heavily padded shoe, when you sleep on a big pillow, your neck muscles atrophy and your cervical vertebrae shift. Put a small pillow under your neck instead of your head, and you may wake up feeling more lively
5. Optimize sleep environment: Make your sleeping space dark, quiet, and cool for better sleep quality. Build your wellness palace and enjoy the many health benefits
6. Calming music: Listening to music with a slow tempo entrains your heart rate and breathing to a lower rate, helping calm your nervous system
7. Natural lighting: Expose yourself to early morning sunlight to regulate your internal clock, improve your mood, and balance your nervous system. Try sun gazing for the best results
8. Avoid heavy meals before bed: Eating large meals late at night disrupts your sleep and affects your gut. This then makes you more vulnerable to weight gain, skin conditions, and more
9. Limit caffeine intake: Avoid caffeine in the afternoon and evening to ensure restful sleep (or switch to paraxanthine instead)
10. Modify your bed: Slightly elevating the head of your bed by just 1-3″ helps the brain’s cleaning process called glymphatic drainage work more effectively. People often report waking up feeling more rejuvenated
11. Try mouth taping: Train yourself to nose breathe for a deeper sleep, healthier mouth, less anxiety, and more. Here’s all you need to know about mouth taping

Sleep is the most crucial to get right. It helps you recover faster when you’re working on your physique or weight loss, helps you focus and get rid of brain fog, and makes you look and feel healthier.

Optimize your sleep with the tips above and maybe even get the best tech down the line.

Optimize Your Nutrition

We need food and water to survive. But with food sources becoming more nutrient-deficient each year, how can you ensure you eat healthy for as long as possible?

While you’ll need to take supplements at some point, there are still many reliable ways to biohack your diet & nutrition for free:

1. Upgrade your fats: Use extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, ghee, and butter instead of canola oil and other “Hateful Eight” toxic seed oils
2. Liquify your meal: Replace breakfast with black coffee to stabilize blood sugar. Avoid creamers, sugar, and additives so you don’t negate the benefits of your coffee’s rich antioxidants
3. Most important meal: If you’ve relied on fasting, TRE, caloric restriction—or experience high stress levels—prioritize a clean breakfast. Containing ample protein, healthy fats, and some complex carbs
4. Fast for mental resilience: Try upgraded fasting (skip breakfast and lunch the next day) to address some hormonal imbalances, activate healing through stem cells, and much more. If you’re really optimized, you can try dry fasting
5. Structurally intact food: Maintain your food’s nutritional properties and reduce the formation of AGEs by cooking at lower temperatures
6. Stay hydrated: 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. Start your day with water and a pinch of sea salt for electrolytes (or try Nick’s morning hydration drink). Ideally, carry a bottle with you and add some trace minerals back in
7. Use baking soda: Add 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda to a glass of water to reduce inflammation, buffer systemic effects of acidity, enhance exercise capacity, and overall athletic performance
8. Meet your farmers: Visit local farmers‘ markets for fresh produce and cooking recipes/tips. The fresher your food, the higher levels of vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and other nutrients
9. Practice mindful eating: Pay attention to your food and chew it well to improve digestion, nutrient absorption, and overall satisfaction with each meal
10. Stabilize blood sugar: When you eat, your blood sugar naturally rises. That’s normal and healthy, as long as it doesn’t spike too high or drop too quickly. When it stays high, your rate of biological aging increases. Optimize this by walking for a few minutes after eating, doing ten air squats, or using one of these blood sugar-stabilizing supplements
11. Incorporate a rainbow of foods – Choosing colorful foods ensures you get a wide range of nutrients

Proper diet and nutrition are possibly the most polarizing topics of today. There’s no universal best diet.

Check out the quick Outliyr diet and nutrition guide to learn about different diet protocols, simple ways to improve nutrition, the best minerals for your health, and more.

Biohack Your Movement

Humans are built to move. Regular movement and exercise strengthen your muscles, bones, heart, mind, fascia, nervous system, and improve all aspects of life.

You don’t even need to pay for a gym membership or workout gear. Some free ways to biohack your movement and exercise include:

1. Try High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT): Short bursts of intense activity followed by rest can be done anywhere. Sprinting, for example, is a great micro-workout that helps with cardio, weight loss, mental health, and overall wellness. Make sure to NOT overdo it
2. Move often: Small movements throughout the day beat long workouts followed by sedentary living. The gym session doesn’t counteract sitting sedentary for the rest of your waking hours
3. Walk daily: You already walk every day, but you have more for more. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Walk to your destination if it’s a few minutes away instead of driving. Even better if you can add resistance, like rucking
4. Sweat it out: Do a workout or sauna session to circulate your lymph and cellular detox. This helps you flush out toxins, increase metabolism, improve longevity, promote optimal performance, and so much more
5. Centenarian Olympics: Physical fitness naturally declines as you age. To live a long healthspan in which you can still chase kids, lift luggage overhead, carry groceries, etc… add some functional conditioning into your routine today
6. Brain-expanding novelty: Try a new form of movement like dancing. It’s a fun way to socialize, burn calories, boost your mood, challenge proprioception and help your brain improve spatial awareness
7. Shake vigorously: Bouncing on a mini trampoline (or even just skipping) helps build bone density and promotes lymphatic drainage. Key to cellular health longevity. If you have the means, you can upgrade to one of these whole body vibration machines to make it completely passive
8. Play with kids or pets: Engaging in playful activities not only keeps you active and puts your body through varied ranges of motion, but it keeps your body supple and your mind young
9. Find an exercise buddy: It’s always easier to move toward your goals and overcome plateaus or setbacks with social support

The fitness influencers are wrong. There’s an upper ceiling on intense exercise, and it’s lower than you think due to the response of cortisol and other stress hormones. Keep it short, ideally under 45 minutes for the lowest all-cause mortality.

On the other hand, there’s no upper cap on your dose of low-impact movements.

Of course, this isn’t an excuse for you to skip the gym altogether or take it easy.

Incorporating small movements through the day, every single day, will do wonders for your well-being.

Protect Your Mental Health & Cognition

Keeping your brain active and resilient through mental exercises, learning, and positive thinking wards off cognitive decline and improves emotional well-being.

The great thing is, you might already be biohacking your mind and not spending a dime. Here are some of the popular ways to biohack your brain:

1. Social nourishment: Spend quality time with friends, family, or groups. Your perceived (yes, self-perception) social life correlates highly with cognition, hormone optimization, healthspan, resilience, immunity, emotional wellbeing, relaxation, self-esteem, and overall health
2. Self-examination: Schedule time for mindfulness practices to enhance self-awareness. Try yoga, meditation, journaling, or visualizing, and watch your baseline mood transform
3. Silent time: Outside of building social connections, regular periods of quiet and alone time also improve your focus, idea generation, stress, and mental clarity
4. Challenge your brain: Try puzzles, reading, or challenging problem-solving tasks to keep your brain sharp. The old reliable for brain training at home (basically anywhere for this matter)
5. Knock down the lead domino: Prioritize your to-do list into a maximum of three key tasks for the day. Focus on the most important task at a time to improve efficiency, meet deadlines, feel accomplished, and reduce stress. Optionally use software to block distracting apps/websites
6. Apply the Pomodoro technique: Break work into 30-minute focused blocks with short breaks. Let your mind rest instead of focusing for hours on end, and watch your productivity skyrocket
7. Stay curious: Cultivate a habit of lifelong learning to keep your mind engaged and adaptable. This is a proven way to increase your gamma brain waves for peak performance, improved memory recall, decision-making, energy, and flow state focus

Want to stay sharp as you age? You don’t need to start with the fanciest technology.

Optimizing your mind involves social interactions, a mix of challenging your mind, and giving it time to recover.

If you’re ready to take it even further, these Outliyr mind & cognition resources will have all you need.

Bulletproof Yourself Against Stress

Chronic stress is a silent killer, contributing to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and more.

Manage stress with these simple techniques and watch your quality of life and longevity improve, slowly but surely. Easy, free ways to biohack your stress levels:

1. Breathe deep: Use box breathing, 4-7-8, Wim Hof, or alternate nostril breathing to regulate your nervous system. Which reduces stress and enhances mental clarity. Check my box breathing guide to learn how to do one form of effective breathwork
2. Track your mood: Log your daily mood to understand patterns affecting your happiness or any other qualitative metric. You can use a journal or app, but make sure to jot down other circumstances going on
3. Vagus nerve reset: The vagus nerve is an information superhighway responsible for controlling your stress response (among many things). Singing, humming, chanting, gargling, cold water immersion, and technology can help you tone your vagus nerve and alleviate feelings of nervousness or fear within seconds. This article shares top ways to stimulate your vagus nerve at home
4. Try inversion therapy: Hang upside down occasionally for better circulation, lymphatic drainage, and relaxation. This practice can also alleviate compression and pain
5. EcoMeditation EFT Tapping: Invented by Dr. Dawson Church, this method combines guided meditation with EFT Tapping and other modalities to rapidly shift your brain into restorative states. As shown on EEG brainwave analysis
6. Nature bathing: Spending time outdoors lowers stress hormones and boosts your mood. One study (unsurprisingly) found that grassy environments are more relaxing and mood boosting compared to concrete-only environments [R]
7. Information detox: Overexposure to news and social media feels good but heightens biological stress. Your mind doesn’t know the difference between an imminent threat to your life, or something tragic that occurred across the world. Try this social media and news detox protocol and notice how you feel after a week
8. Say no: Social conditioning generally makes saying “no” difficult, but it’s key to healthy relationships and to avoid building resentment. Setting boundaries helps prevent burnout, supports mental health, and enhances overall life satisfaction
9. Declutter your space: Fully optimized, tidy living environments reduce stress and free up your focus, whether the mess consciously bothers you or not
10. Progressive muscle relaxation: Tense and then release each muscle group in your body to reduce physical tension and signal to your nervous system that it’s safe to relax

Stress allowed humans to survive. We wouldn’t be here without it. Yet today, virtually everyone lives with chronic low-grade stress.

Here’s where you can learn the top ways pro biohackers relieve stress.

Other Free & Cheap Biohacks You Should Try

As we’ve established, you don’t have to spend a fortune to improve your quality of life.

A few of my other favorite free biohacks include:

1. Light filtration: Use software like IrisTech or F.lux to reduce blue light exposure and eliminate light flicker. This helps reduce eye strain, supports eye health, and minimizes blue light’s impact on your sleep
2. Practice gratitude: Write three specific things you’re grateful for daily. Gratitude has the highest correlation with happiness and overall life satisfaction. It’s worth practicing, no matter the tragedy you may be experiencing
3. Shadow work: Use journaling to identify limiting beliefs and clarify your thoughts. This helps you understand your automatic behaviors and transform the ones holding you back
4. Ditch the shoes: When possible, go barefoot to connect with the Earth and reduce inflammation, improve healing, protect against electrosmog, and more. Check out my Earthing guide for a deeper dive
5. Micro cold exposure: Start with brief cold exposure (like cold showers) to build resilience, increase energy, burn fat, and boost your focus & attention. If you’re up for it, consider trying out cold plunge therapy
6. Use your phone: Temporarily track what you eat and workouts in an app. It’s a free and simple way to track progress without spending money on a top-tier smart ring or wearable. You can get some vital insights from the right biohacking apps & software
7. Optimized routines: The way you “launch” and “land” your days sets the stage for an effective week. It’s one of the core commonalities shared by almost all elite performers. The article explores the top routines of high-achieving biohackers

Best of all, each tip in the above lists help improve multiple aspects of your health.

The Complete List of Biohacks Everyone Can Try

Phew. That’s a lot of information.

I hope that you’re motivated to try something new.

Today! Not some day.

Notice any patterns? Many of the diet, exercise, and lifestyle tips are old practices.

As the top biohacking experts point out, they’re cheap and affordable, yet they have the greatest impact on your well-being.

Everyone has their favorite biohacks. Test these one by one to find what works for you. Time is precious, so stack multiple hacks for maximum efficiency.

Have a friend who’s looking to start biohacking? Share this with them so they can start their journey even without the fancy equipment!

Am I missing any big ones? Let me know below.