Head Strong

Dave Asprey

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062652430
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Neurowissenschaft

From the creator of Bulletproof Coffee and author of the bestselling The Bulletproof Diet comes a revolutionary plan to upgrade your brainpower—in two weeks or less.

For the last decade, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Asprey has worked with world-renowned doctors and scientists to uncover the latest, most innovative methods for making humans perform better—a process known as "biohacking." In his first book, The Bulletproof Diet, he shared his biohacking tips for taking control of your own biology. Now, in Head Strong, Asprey shows readers how to biohack their way to a sharper, smarter, faster, more resilient brain.

Imagine feeling like your mind is operating at its clearest and sharpest, and being able—possibly for the first time in your life—to do more in less time? What it suddenly became easier to do the very hardest things you do? Or if you could feel 100% confident about your intellect, and never again fear being the person in the room who just isn't smart enough, or can't remember something important? How would you treat people if the mood swings, short temper, and food cravings that disrupt your day could simply disappear?

In Head Strong, Asprey shows us that all of this is possible—and more. Using his simple lifestyle modifications (or "hacks") to take advantage of how the structure of your brain works, readers will learn how to take their mental performance to the next level. Combining the latest findings in neuroscience and neurobiology with a hacker-inspired "get it done now" perspective, Asprey offers a program structured around key areas of brain performance that will help you:

• Power the brain with exactly what it needs to perform at its best all day long
• Eliminate the sources of "kryptonite, " both nutritional and environmental, that make the brain slower.
• Supercharge the cellular powerhouses of our brains, the mitochondria, to eliminate cravings and turn up mental focus.
• Reverse inflammation to perform better right now, then stay sharp and energized well into your golden years.
• Promote neuron growth to enhance processing speed and reinforce new learning—hotwiring your brain for success.

Asprey's easy to follow, two-week program offers a detailed plan to supercharge brain performance, including: which foods to eat and which ones to avoid, how to incorporate the right kinds of physical activity into your day, a detox protocol for your home and body; meditation and breathing for performance, recommended brain-boosting supplements; and how to adjust the lighting in your home and work space to give your brain the quality light it thrives on.

A better brain—and a happier, easier, more productive life—is within reach. You just need to get Head Strong.

PART I

IT’S ALL IN
YOUR HEAD

HEAD START

YOUR BRAIN ON ENERGY

Think about your smartphone. When you first took it out of the box, it was so fast and efficient, wasn’t it? It held its charge for a long time. It performed at its peak. Then you started downloading apps and filling up its memory with pictures and videos. The operating system grew increasingly bloated, and it stopped performing as well. Now it’s slower to respond, and the battery is more quickly depleted. Nothing on your phone works as well as it did when it was new.

Your brain is not dissimilar, but instead of being clogged with selfies and cat videos, it gets drained by things in your diet and your environment that shouldn’t be there. When most people think of toxins, they think of poison. And certainly, there are some poisonous chemicals that inhibit brain function: neurotoxins destroy or damage brain cells and weaken the body’s ability to produce energy in cells.

But there are other, less frequently discussed things that I like to think of as brain kryptonite. These aren’t just chemicals. Brain kryptonite includes anything that pulls needed energy away from the brain and into another part of the body. Certain foods, products in our environment, types of light, and even forms of exercise can weaken your brain. This brain kryptonite doesn’t kill you—at least not at first—it just slowly and stealthily eats away at your battery life.

Your brain needs a lot of energy to perform well—in fact, the brain uses up to 20 percent of your body’s overall energy.¹ That’s more than any other organ in your entire body! So where does it get this energy? Your body makes it. Inside almost every cell in your body are at least several hundred tiny descendants of bacteria called mitochondria. The energy that sustains us is created in these mitochondria, and you’d be amazed at how important they are to the quality of your life. If your mitochondria stopped making energy in all your cells for even a few seconds, you’d die. The number, efficiency, and strength of your mitochondria dictates whether or not you’ll eventually develop cancer or a degenerative disease, as well as how much brainpower you have right now. Who would have thought that these tiny organelles (organs inside each cell) were the key to your brainpower?

The body is amazingly efficient at producing energy and delivering it to exactly where it’s needed, but any cell in the body is only able to store a few seconds’ worth of energy at any given time. The body has to constantly make energy on demand, and from one moment to the next, it has no way of knowing what that demand is going to be. When you go to a job interview, your cells don’t know ahead of time if the office is going to have fluorescent lighting that can slowly drain your mitochondria’s energy. Suddenly, your brain is wasting some of its available energy to filter out that junk light, and you’re left stumbling over your sentences and grasping for words. Your mitochondria can’t keep up with your brain’s energy demands.

Luckily for you, the prefrontal cortex—the “higher” part of your brain in charge of advanced cognitive function—has the most densely packed mitochondria of any part of your body (except for the ovaries!). That means that your mitochondria contribute more energy to your brain’s performance than your heart, lungs, or legs. Your brain gets first dibs on mitochondrial energy, and your eyes and heart are right behind it in line.

When your body has to contend with toxins or brain kryptonite, or if it isn’t creating and delivering energy as efficiently as it could, the body’s demand for energy can exceed the supply. In these instances, you get mitochondrial energy “brownout” in parts of your body. The first symptom that your mitochondria are overtaxed is fatigue. Fatigue is an absolute performance killer. It causes cravings, moodiness, brain fog, forgetfulness, and lack of focus. Yes, most of the things you hate about yourself can stem from brain fatigue. It’s not a moral failing. It’s an energy delivery problem. When you have limitless energy, you stop needing to try hard to be a good person. You can learn to do it effortlessly, because it’s what you always would have done if there were nothing in the way.

Your body has to make extra energy to get rid of toxins. This means that if toxins are draining your energy, your body becomes less and less efficient at metabolizing and removing them, and you’ll have to expend even more energy to get rid of them. It’s a vicious cycle that can wreck your performance if you don’t do something to stop it.

Of course, this doesn’t happen all at once, which is a good thing. If it did, you’d die. (Some fast-acting poisons like cyanide actually work by quickly stopping mitochondria.) The energy drain we deal with on a daily basis is a classic case of death by a thousand cuts. We live in an increasingly toxic world, and most of us eat toxic food. Our lifestyles (including the very same technology that makes us so efficient) also deplete our cellular energy reserves. Each one of these elements takes a little more energy away from your brain and away from your life.

Imagine that you’re Superman (or Superwoman). One day, Lex Luthor pulverizes some kryptonite and sprinkles just a little bit of it around your house. If you eat (or inhale) a small amount of kryptonite dust, it won’t kill you. You’ll still be able to push through the day and save people, you’ll just feel slightly off. In fact, you’ll get used to feeling that way and believe it’s normal. But as you keep ingesting a little bit more kryptonite every day, your ability to help people will slowly, invisibly decline until your body reaches the point where it’s spending all of its energy trying to overcome the effects of the poison.

If you’re anything like I used to be, you probably think that these symptoms of brain weakness are natural or perhaps just an unavoidable part of getting older. That’s because almost everyone has some of these symptoms, which medicine defines as normal or “healthy.” That’s why normal is your nemesis—it’s considered “normal” to grow increasingly tired and foggy as you age until one day you wake up with dementia, unable to remember the things that matter most.

Screw that noise.

Wouldn’t you rather make it “normal” (for you) to get better each year, or at least to not decline? Don’t you want to feel the energy and focus you had at twenty-five when you’re eighty?

Before I learned that it was possible to increase my brain energy, I thought it was normal to get really pissed off in rush hour traffic, to wake up feeling exhausted after a full night’s sleep, to get snippy with the people around me in the late afternoon, to crave sweets after a meal (isn’t that what dessert is for?), to sometimes lose my train of thought midsentence, or to walk into a room and forget why I’d gone in there in the first place.

Maybe you only experience one or two of these symptoms on a regular basis. Most likely, they’ve become so “normal” to you that you don’t even notice them until you start looking. You’ve figured out how to work around them so you can live your life—in fact, you’re probably expending even more precious energy coming up with work-arounds so you can still function. But the truth is that none of these symptoms are normal. They are not inevitable. And they are not simply built-in mental weaknesses.

There is a way to change the amount of energy being delivered to your brain so that its energy level actually exceeds its demands. Once you learn how to do this, your brain can function like that brand-new phone, fresh out of the package—fast, responsive, and highly charged.

THE THREE F’S

Why do our brains require so much energy in the first place? The truth is, it’s an evolutionary imperative—our brainpower is part of nature’s plan to help us stay alive and propagate our species. If you were to design a species to live forever, it would need the built-in ability to do only three basic things, all of which are F-words: Fear things (deal with scary stuff in our environment using our “fight-or-flight” response), Feed (get energy from food), and the other F-word (reproduce!). Our bodies have evolved so that our species can survive just about anything the world throws at us, and our systems allocate energy to our cells the same way.

In the 1960s neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Paul D. MacLean developed something called the “triune brain model,” a simplified way of looking at the regions of the brain that is useful when we talk about how the brain uses energy. In this model, the “reptile brain” controls low-level processes like temperature regulation and electrical systems. Every creature with vertebrae has a reptile brain, and this part of the brain is first in line when it comes to energy needs. If you don’t get enough energy and nutrients to this part of the brain, you will die, end of story.

All mammals share the second brain, which I refer to as our “Labrador retriever brain,” because those big, happy dogs are such great examples of animals that bark at most things, eat nearly everything else, and try to mount what’s left. Your Labrador brain controls the instincts that keep our species alive and propagating—the “three f’s” that I mentioned earlier. Your Labrador brain means well. It is only trying to help you survive. The issue here is that the very urges that were meant to keep us alive can cause massive brain-energy problems.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of “fight or flight”—our physiological response to a perceived threat. The ability to go into fight-or-flight mode was incredibly important when humans evolved, as lions and tigers were chasing us on a regular basis. Back then it would have been detrimental for us to stay focused on any single task when a pride of lions was lurking nearby. Our fight-or-flight response kept us a little bit distracted all of the time so that we could constantly scan the environment around us for threats. When our brains perceived a threat, they would divert all of our energy into the systems necessary to either kill a lion or at least run away from it faster than the slowest member of the tribe.

The problem is not only that lions don’t pose much of a threat anymore but also that our bodies can’t distinguish between real and perceived threats—they react the same way to any stimulus, from a lion to a bump in the night to an e-mail alert possibly delivering some bad news. And given our 24/7 lifestyles, we’re now bombarded day and night with all kinds of stimuli—some completely harmless—that our biology compels us to respond to in the same way. This constant state of monitoring for danger and then overreacting to minor threats keeps the body in a constant state of emergency—sapping our energy, and therefore our focus.

A decrease in energy available to the brain triggers a brain emergency. After all, from the brain’s perspective, if there’s not enough fuel for the Labrador brain, then a tiger might eat you. So when energy in the brain dips, emergency stress hormones are released to steal energy from elsewhere in the body, and they make you feel like you want to either run away or kill something. You get distracted, yell at the people around you, forget what you were right in the middle of doing, and then give in to major sugar cravings—all things you’ll be ashamed of after you have a snack.

When you resist the Labrador’s urges, you are using the third and final part of the brain, your “human brain.” This part of the brain—the prefrontal cortex—contains the most mitochondria, which is why all this resistance uses up massive amounts of energy. Every time you resist an urge, you are making a decision. Scientists have proven that there are a limited number of decisions you can make each day before you reach “decision fatigue.”² Each decision requires ener...