2026 Biohacking & Longevity Trends: What Will Actually Improve Health & Performance | Nick Urban

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I’m your host Nick Urban and I hope your 2026 is off to an incredible start so far. Wherever you are tuning in from in the world today, we’re going to take a brief departure in this episode from the usual programming where I host and interview guests on this podcast to discuss some of the trends that I’ve seen come across my desk and that I’ve started seeing echoed on social media and in the medical research these days. I started compiling this list back in December.

Nick Urban [00:01:23]:
It is now currently late January, and some of these trends have already started surfacing. Now a quick note on these trends. Specifically, I could either go for the moonshots and tell you what I think is going to happen in 3, 5, 10 years time, or tell you about the things that have incrementally improved year after year, which will obviously continue in 2026 and again next year. Both are important. Both provide different value, so so I figured I would mix and match a little of each in this episode and if you have any comments you agree you disagree, I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment below and let me know your thoughts on what the 2026 Biohacking, longevity, performance and overall health optimization trends will be. Okay, with that out of the way, let’s dive right into trend number one and that is the emergence and growth of the active wearable market. Most wearables started out as devices that would tell you your data, in hindsight how well you slept the previous night.

Nick Urban [00:02:29]:
It would collect it passively and then display it for you. And then it was up to you to actually make the changes to improve your health and performance. That’s helpful, but it fails on several fronts. First of all, you have to be able to actually go in and check the data. Then you must interpret the data. And the most cumbersome part is you have to make those lifestyle changes yourself. Then came along the idea of wearables, 3.0 or active wearables. Instead of merely passively telling you what’s going on in your body, these intervene and actually do things to help modulate, to help change your state.

Nick Urban [00:03:07]:
Now that might seem a little bit abstract in and I don’t like to just go off theory alone, so I’ll give you some real life examples. I’m currently wearing a device called the Apollo Neuro. You simply put it on and then load the app and choose a state that you want to be. Perhaps energy to replace that morning cup of coffee, focus to get more work done, meditation to deepen the experience, sleep to deepen your sleep or recovery after workout. A lot of different states. But instead of merely telling you what’s going on with your nervous system, this wearable helps shift your state towards that goal. Other examples might be a smart mattress, A mattress topper that cools your body temperature to a level that will either support REM sleep or deep sleep. It doesn’t just track your sleep, but actually based on your patterns, helps you reach and maintain deeper levels of sleep.

Nick Urban [00:04:01]:
There are several different companies that create these. There’s one called the Bedjet, which is good and affordable. And there’s another called 8Slee, I personally have that dynamically adjust your sleeping experience to help you get more return on your time in bed. Another device that has active wearable technology built into it is the Muse Athena headband. Now that’s a neurofeedback device that uses EEG sensors When you wear it to sleep. There is a special mode called digital sleeping pill that plays special frequencies while you’re sleeping. The band is reading your brain waves using EEG technology to help you fall back asleep and hopefully stay asleep. Another example would be vagus nerve stimulators.

Nick Urban [00:04:45]:
These are devices you put on your vagus nerve and it provides a small amount of stimulation which can help with recovery and balance of your overall nervous system. They don’t just measure your heart rate variability, they actively help you optimize it or other parameters that you might want to focus on instead. One of the ones I use is called Coolit Vrelief, I think. And they have different modes for panic, one for performance, one for stress and unwinding. And these deliver different signals via the vagus nerve like the other technologies actually shift your biology. So in 2026 and beyond, I think we will start to see more wearables that are providing more than just your passive data that’s being collected. They’re still collecting that data. A Lot of times, but then they’re actually utilizing it to give you a better experience without you having to expend additional effort.

Nick Urban [00:05:39]:
Number two, this is one of the most important, or really two of the most important biological inputs that we’re all getting every single day that fly under the radar for the most part, not food, but water and the air that we inhale. You probably know that the body is mostly water, and if you go by the molecular count, over 99% of the molecules in your body are water. It’s the interaction of that water with the non water molecules that is the basis of life. And it is one of the uncharted and little explored facets of human biology. Then there’s the other side of the equation, and that is air. We each breathe thousands of breaths every single day. The quality of that air matters. There are things like particulate matter, PM2,5, mycotoxins, endocrine disrupting chemicals, all kinds of stuff in the air, and that alone can cause biological shifts.

Nick Urban [00:06:40]:
The air itself is one of those overlooked factors that can silently bring your health up or down. Simply installing a high quality air filter in their bedroom can dramatically improve the symptoms of those conditions as well as their sleep and recovery scores. Things like how long it takes them to fall asleep, the number of times they wake up throughout the night, their minimum resting heart rate, their heart rate variability. Simply changing the air or cleaning the air can improve each of those and many others. That alone has become clear from all of the unfortunate natural disasters that have stricken different parts of the world over the last couple years. Wildfire, smoke and exposure to the chemicals in unhealthy air don’t just increase risk of long term disease, but also have midterm effects and even immediate effects such as decreasing cognition and increasing stress load. On the air side, the place I recommend starting, if you have a whole home filtration system or H Vac, if you use air conditioning or heat to get high quality filters that are rated for whatever system you have in your house or apartment, and to change those regularly. Before I got some fancy flashy air purifier or air scrubber, I would focus there because it’s much less expensive and has a very high return on that investment from there.

Nick Urban [00:08:05]:
Once you do that, then I would look at the air scrubber. The one I use is called Jasper and I would put that in the area where you sleep because that’s when you’re in the deepest state of recovery and it’ll make the biggest difference. On the water side, if you have access To a high quality contaminant, free or very low contaminant stream, a natural stream, that will be best because you’ll get things that you won’t get when the water has gone through miles and miles of corroded piping and been treated with a bunch of harsh chemicals. But certainly verify that it’s an uncontaminated source. If you don’t have that or you don’t want to go out of your way to gather that, the next best is to get something like a reverse osmosis system and to use that and then add back in minerals to replete the water that’s been stripped of everything or next to everything. Yes, water is not the best source of minerals to begin with, but water that’s been stripped of everything inside of it works more aggressively. And when you expose it to other things such as plastic, so you put it in a plastic bottle. Hopefully you don’t, but if you were to, then you’d leach more microplastics from the plastic bottle.

Nick Urban [00:09:17]:
So in general it’s better to remineralize reverse osmosis or heavily filtered water in general if the minerals and other substances have been all pulled out of it. We’ve got a lot to go through today, so I’m going to make these next ones a bit faster. This next one is the concept of digital twins. A digital twin is a copy of a real world object, system, process or human that stays connected to it using data. The digital version updates as the real one changes so that you can monitor, simulate and most importantly predict behavior without ever touching or modifying the physical version. And then I can model what would this behavior look like if I do it every single day for 10 years? If I picked up a drinking habit, I had that so called healthy glass of wine every single night, what would that do to me? Specifically? The digital twin would make that clear. So it’s a way of personalizing interventions across any domain and seeing what they do in the short, mid and long term. It sounds a bit sci fi, but it’s actually already used for healthcare, for some smart cities, in the automotive and aerospace industries, for building and industry and manufacturing.

Nick Urban [00:10:41]:
It’s used in a lot of different sectors already. The improvements in AI and technology will soon make this accessible to the average person without a massive budget. What I find most interesting about this is it helps us take the hypotheses, the latest findings of research papers, and go from that abstract theory behind them into direct behavior change and a good source of motivation. Okay, after that one we have the Rise of multi sensor continuous monitoring. You might have heard of continuous glucose monitors. They started becoming popular in the biohacking world in about 2017, 2018, as non diabetics got their hands on them and started using them to understand how their body responds uniquely to different foods and food combinations and lifestyle habits. There were just three main issues with them. First of all, they were fairly expensive when they were introduced.

Nick Urban [00:11:43]:
The cost has now gone down significantly, so that’s less of a barrier. They also only measured blood glucose specifically. Well, technically interstitial glucose, but essentially blood glucose. And that would cause you to over index on your glucose response to meals and lifestyle interventions. Glucose is one piece of the pie, but there’s a lot more to health than just blood sugar. The reason this is a trend now is that they’re able to incorporate data from multiple different sensor types and overlay it all into one. So instead of just seeing your blood sugar on a graph, you can see a graph that contains other things like your blood ketone levels. And soon there will probably be blood insulin monitors and perhaps down the line, blood testosterone and other hormone monitors as well.

Nick Urban [00:12:32]:
When you have multiple continuous sensors, you get a much better, cleaner, clear and more actionable picture of what’s going on. So these continuous monitoring technologies are only getting more useful over time. After that, we have the concept of mental fitness. The pop culture idea of engaging in fitness for fun and for health purposes is actually fairly new. Of course, the roots of it go way back to the ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek days. But then modern gym culture really only began in the 20th century, and now it’s generally recognized as a crucial staple in any health and wellness program. So how does this relate? Well, in the 21st century, now the idea of mental fitness is becoming the correlate of physical fitness. As we’re inundated by more algorithms, more short form viral content, everything in the world becomes faster and more fragmented, and the threat of AI looms ever larger.

Nick Urban [00:13:34]:
There’s now increasing interest in the whole concept of mental fitness. How can you train your cognition, your attention, your emotional regulation, and Overall resilience? Beyond 2026, mental fitness will become as normalized as cardio has become for physical fitness. There are lots of ways to train mental fitness, including something as simple as meditation, which I’ve also heard referred to as the bicep curl of the brain, other forms of biofeedback, and even things like doing challenging mental tasks that require complete focus. After that, we have a topic that has taken the world by storm over the last few years. And that is the concept of photo biomodulation, or to make it simple, light therapy, but not just any light therapy, multi wavelength light therapy. Until about 2024, manufacturers of light therapy panels were relying specifically on only a few different bands of light. These are called light wavelengths. And specifically we’re talking red light at about 60 nanometers, but really ranging from 30 to 660 nanometers, and most commonly at 30 nanometers and 50 nanometers.

Nick Urban [00:14:56]:
That’s the way it used to be. And there’s emerging research and scientists speculating that increasing the range, getting more different parts of the spectrum in the panels will provide more therapeutic benefits than having just very narrow windows of isolated light where you used to see two, maybe three maximum different light wavelengths in one panel. Now the higher end panels often have 4, 5, sometimes even 6 different wavelengths all in one device. Anyone with one of these, a light spectrometer, will tell you that natural sunlight has a lot more than just one or two or even three isolated wavelengths. It seems likely that recreating that as close as possible and even allowing users to dynamically change the wavelengths that the device is emitting will cause the greatest benefits. I envision. Devices of the future will let you dynamically adjust the program so you can dial up the red light in the morning. You can dial down the blue light at certain times.

Nick Urban [00:16:02]:
You could even add a little bit of UVB and UVA to get extra nitric oxide release and to stimulate the production of vitamin D. Or perhaps you want to blast yourself with blue light in the morning. Now, it’s often villainized as a really bad wavelength of light that has all kinds of detrimental health effects in isolation. But blue light is also important to entrain circadian rhythm. It’s important for a proper morning cortisol response. It’s all about context. So the light therapy devices of the future will have more context built into them and let you mimic different parts of the sun that you want to chase. Particular benefits.

Nick Urban [00:16:42]:
Okay, moving on. There is widespread concern that therapeutic peptides will become inaccessible due to products like Ozempic, Manjaro, and now Retatrutide. There’s been an explosion in research around these and specifically novel delivery mechanisms, unique formulations, and small molecules. In 2025, I saw certain companies selling these peptides in forms such as your traditional oral capsule, of course, the injectable, but then the transdermal nasal spray, and even peptide strips that you can theoretically put on your tongue and let them dissolve. Some of these technologies are still in their infancy, but they will only continue to grow as the injectables become harder to procure. I also foresee peptide mimetics or other molecules that are like the classic peptides becoming a thing. There are a couple currently in development, but it’s a little bit too new to talk much about, although if things go the way they might, you’ll be hearing more about those. Probably not much this year, but perhaps next year.

Nick Urban [00:17:46]:
Okay, on to the topic that is the most divisive, that is diet. When I was preparing this back in December, it seemed clear that there would be some reforms to the food system. Whether you love or hate the current administration, just recently, a couple weeks ago, they did release the updated food pyramid. So the government recommendations on what you should eat and how much have been modified, and this administration seems likely to continue along that path and to increase the regulations around ultra processed foods. Even just the name ultra processed has sparked debate in the scientific community about what qualifies as ultra processed versus normal processed. The current administration seems to be targeting particularly hyper palatable food engineering. So in case you aren’t aware, the big food companies have entire teams tasked with finding the most profitable combinations of food ingredients to keep you hooked on their product because economically it makes the most sense. That’s why some of their marketing will brazenly tell you you can’t have just one because it’s that addictive.

Nick Urban [00:18:58]:
It’s literally biochemically addictive. That type of thing seems to be under fire currently in the name of metabolic hell. A simple way of thinking of metabolism, how effectively your body’s able to take the inputs such as food and drink and turn that into biological substrates, energy, ATP and others. The goal in this regulation is to reduce the incidence of metabolic disease, which could also reduce the incidence of related conditions such as type 2 diabetes. If you read any of the media tabloids in 2025 related to diet, you probably came across the viral topic of the sugar diet. And that is another diet that doesn’t really have an accepted universal definition, aside from the fact that it’s a low protein, low fat diet and ultra high carbohydrate, like simple carbohydrates. So that one broke about every rule in every nutrition textbook. But something strange happened.

Nick Urban [00:20:01]:
People lost weight, they became more insulin sensitive, which isn’t supposed to happen, and they had other benefits when they ran the sugar diet, at least in the short and medium term. Many sugar dieters also reported improved performance in the gym. This is all hypothesized to be through the action of something called FGF21. Now, the details of that Alphabet soup aren’t all that important. What is interesting about this is that scientists look at the mechanism that this diet targets and then they started wondering, can we design things that will target this same mechanism? Sure enough, there are now substances that activate FGF21 called FGF21 agonists that are showing potential to improve liver fat, triglycerides, insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease risk. Personally, I do not advocate the sugar diet. Proceed at your own risk there. Now we’ve got some of the trends that sit more on the social side of things than technological breakthroughs.

Nick Urban [00:21:02]:
We’ll start with one that I’m pretty excited about, and that is the idea of recovery becoming something that people now gather around as a social event. Perhaps it’s just because I live in Austin and there’s an abundance of alternative health and wellness related stuff here, but I’ve noticed more and more sauna ceremonies, guided recovery sessions, group breathwork practices, and eventized hot cold contrast therapy. Part of the club and night scene here has been replaced by massive gatherings of 100 plus people all coming together to do a bunch of rounds of breathwork, sauna, ice bath and hanging out. And they’re kind of fun. A lot of the technologies in biohacking are less about performance and more about recovery because recovery is the root of performance and the root of health. You look at a lot of the top professionals across sports, business, people in the military, and recovery becomes a huge topic. In fact, there are some gyms here that will use AI to personalize workouts with adaptive resistance for about 10 minutes, maybe 12 minutes of total work time. And then they’ll spend the next 20 minutes or so, 25 minutes, prioritizing post workout recovery.

Nick Urban [00:22:24]:
It’s not the session itself that’s causing the muscle growth, it’s the recovery, repair and regeneration that occur afterward. In fact, some of the other technologies in this very list actually work by improving recovery. From the multi wavelength light panels to improving water and air filtration to sleep to vagus nerve stimulators to neurofeedback and biofeedback to a lot of the popular peptides, many of these are first and foremost recovery tools, and recovery is often the pillar that’s most deficient in people’s lives. Related to recovery is the next trend, and it’s also one that my email newsletter subscribers were recently reading about. When it comes to nervous system health, you’ve probably heard at some point about the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the automatic bodily responses, perhaps the two branches, the sympathetic fight or flight branch, and perhaps also the parasympathetic rest and digest branch, maybe even the third and final branch, the enteric nervous system. What most people don’t realize about the nervous system is that it directs and shapes your life perception. That’s right, your entire experience of life depends on your nervous system more than anything else. It’s the reason why some people watch fireworks and they say it was the highlight of their night.

Nick Urban [00:23:49]:
Conversely, someone else watches those same fireworks and it causes a panic attack. Same stimulus, two totally different responses. Now that’s the extreme example, but it applies equally to the big and small things going on throughout every day. The nervous system also shapes immune responses, inflammation, and stress responses. So if you’ve heard that stress is the root of all disease, stress actually depends on the state of the nervous system. When I reviewed all of the podcast interviews I conducted in 2025, the most common theme across all domains of health was the role the nervous system played in that domain. For example, I interviewed Blair Lacourt of the Prestigious, where they conduct longevity research. And he explained how even simple everyday things, such as when you’re walking down the sidewalk peacefully and you look over and see a car whiz by you, your nervous system, because of the proximity, the speed at which it passes through your field of vision, the size of the car relative to the other things in your surroundings, those all create micro stress responses.

Nick Urban [00:25:01]:
And with those micro stress responses, by necessity your body is deprived of resources that it could be using in better ways elsewhere. So you might not consciously perceive that walking down the sidewalk in a city or even a town with lots of traffic is stressful, but to your subconscious, it is. What makes this worthy of discussion is that the nervous system is also one of the few bodily systems that we have direct access to, we can directly modulate it. In part, that’s why tools such as vagus nerve training, HRV training, vagus nerve stimulation, somatic work, hot cold contrast therapy, breath work, certain forms of meditation have all taken off in popularity. Each of these help train nervous system regulation. When you build nervous system regulation, everything you do in life becomes either easier, more effective, or both. If you’ve seen my article explaining the framework that I call the neuro energetic loop, the very first stage of that is state. It’s the baseline orientation of your nervous system.

Nick Urban [00:26:11]:
You want to break a habit, start there. Issues with sleep, anxiety, burnout, low energy, lack of happiness. Nervous system orientation is the perfect place to start. And there are simple regulation practices that make it a lot easier. So if you take away nothing else but this from this podcast, work on your nervous system first and foremost, and everything else is more likely to fall into place easier. Next one is Women’s health optimization is finally getting recognition. It’s getting the seat at the table that it’s long since deserved. It’s tragic that women were excluded from scientific research for so long and that many of the recommendations, the dosing, the protocols, the adverse effects were modeled on primarily males.

Nick Urban [00:27:01]:
So there are a lot of black boxes out there around how these same interventions impact male and female physiology differently. Luckily, that’s now finally starting to change, and the tech ecosystem around women’s health tools and platforms and technologies is growing very rapidly. The market is finally experiencing a correction and all of this will translate into better, more consistent, more reliable health optimization information for women. So topics like infradian rhythms, different biological cycles, hormonal and neuroendocrine changes will become better understood in 2026 and beyond. Another change that has been steadily growing over time is the emergence of travel. Not for a booze filled pina coladas on the beach type of experience, and instead more of a structured bio optimization immersion experience. The idea of going abroad overseas to get different medical interventions that either are not available or cost prohibitive in the US has existed for a while, but it’s now becoming more accessible and less reactionary. People are going abroad for biological resets, for physiological training, for recovery intensives, and for comprehensive, thorough diagnostics.

Nick Urban [00:28:30]:
It’s still tourism, it’s still a vacation, although the definition of that has changed. This side of experience optimization is also growing very rapidly because it’s part of a cultural shift, moving from health and wellness being a solo endeavor, to a more structured thing that is universally recognized as important. Important instead of piecing together different tools and tactics and protocols from information sources as you compile them that may or may not conflict with the things that you’re already doing. The new paradigm is combining baseline diagnostics with interventions and then the layer on top of that being modeling and iterating. That way you’re optimizing at the system level versus trying to focus on one particular part of that and doing things that may or may not work out the way you expect. When you take the systems level optimization approach, you find the redundancies, you find what has the entourage effect, where the things that you do complement each other and work better together than they would individually. And you also make sure you’re moving towards the right endpoints, you’re going towards the right goals and that your lifestyle, your routine, your stacks, they don’t get too bloated with things that cost you time, energy, resources, and don’t provide a very large return on those. There are now a number of startups working on this because the technology is much more accessible than it has ever been before.

Nick Urban [00:30:09]:
Simply put, better decisions, better life. Okay, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for tuning in and spending your time and your energy with me and making me a part of your day. I don’t take this lightly. I’m also curious your thoughts on these trends. There are a lot of smart people in this community, so if I’m missing anything or you disagree, I want to hear from you. Go ahead and leave a comment below this video or if you’re tuning into the audio version of this, you can find the comments on the YouTube version of this podcast. Until next time, Be an Outlier thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity.

Nick Urban [00:30:46]:
If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes and resources [email protected] until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.