Why You Should Be a PrimalHacker...
44 BC, Rome- As the sun rises in the east, a healer leads a warrior outside and directs him to stare at the rising sun as a way to heal his mind and body. The warrior is a Roman centurion who was gravely injured during the fight resulting in the assassination of Julius Caesar
823 AD, Denmark- On a very cold morning, just before the sun becomes visible above the horizon, a young Viking warrior plunges in to the freezing water of his village’s river. He has returned from a raid in Ireland and finds a deadly sickness ravaging his village. He’s now swimming in the ice cold water to boost his immune system to ward off the sickness and acclimate his body for the coming cold season.
2017 AD, Los Angeles- To compensate for all the time spent inside of his office, a wealthy angel investor spends every morning welcoming the sunrise as he swims through the chilly water of the Pacific Ocean. After he leaves the water he warms himself by the sun’s rays and spends 30 minutes twisting, stretching, crawling, running and hanging from the bars of the beachfront playground. Even though he owns and uses some of the most cutting edge devices, lights, and supplements to keep him performing at his best he knows that nothing compares to the ancestral health principles of the past. He is a PrimalHacker!
2017 AD, East Coast of the United States – A woman wakes up groggy, the brain fog descending on her today like a bank of heavy clouds. Her mind is slow and she can feel that she’s not at her best. Flipping on the energy efficient LED lights of her bedroom she slowly makes her way to the dresser for a fresh pair of clothes. As she takes a hot shower before work she rubs citrus smelling shampoo and waxy conditioner into her hair as she fantasizes about a bigger paycheck from the new promotion she’s sure her boss is going to give her. She quickly grabs a bagel with cream cheese and heads out the door. Stepping into her well-lit garage, she presses the green unlock button to her SUV and jumps inside. As the car crawls through traffic she flips from one morning show to the next, intent on picking up all the good celebrity gossip from the night before. She finally pulls out of the Starbucks drive through with her Grande mocha late and does her best not to spill any of the hot sugary coffee on her work clothes. Her unexplainable energy crash 2 hours later only elicits another run for coffee. After a full day of work she heads to the gym and grabs sushi as a treat to herself. She deserves it after a. for a productive day at work and a good Zumba class. She knocks off the night with her favorite television series, which she watches from her bed and then turns off the TV and attempts to go to sleep. Tossing and turning for an hour, she finally gets to sleep. The next morning, she wakes up groggy, with brain fog and begins again.
Most of us are living some reality of this woman who is unknowingly putting her health and her sanity at risk. She likely suffers from anxiety and various low level health problems and listens intently to her doctor’s advice to eat a low-fat diet and get lots of exercise.
But does she know that exercising indoors, under artificial lights could be harming her health? Does she know a low-fat diet may be undermining the very hormones she needs to stay healthy? How about the fact that our own EPA states indoor air is 5x more polluted than outdoor air.
PrimalHacker Noun (plural PrimalHackers)
Someone who embraces the foundational principles of ancestral health and works to overcome their modern lifestyle with biohacking techniques to supplement for our lack of interaction with our natural world.
A person who merges ancestral health and wisdom with biohacking to overcome their indoor domestication.
Let’s face it. We as a species have largely been domesticated.
Some people more than others.
In the same way that the wolf has been domesticated to become a sweater wearing poodle, humans have been domesticated into a fragile, controlled and sickly version of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is in a large part a result of our modern culture, technology and indoor existence. While we enjoy many conveniences and benefits that our ancestors did not, we are also struggling from many degenerative diseases and conditions that did not plague them.
In modern society, we can go weeks without ever setting foot outside. We’re not exposed to temperature changes, natural light or fresh air. Could those things be required to keep us healthy?
Between garages, parking garages, grocery stores and indoor gyms, we’re keeping ourselves out of the natural light, at a constant 72 degrees and filled up with processed food, chemical laden water and artificial light. Think about how easy it is to kill a chameleon kept in a cage if his light, water and food isn’t just right. When we take ourselves out of our natural environmental and live a life indoors, we’re doing the same thing. We’re making it harder to stay healthy.
WE THINK THAT’S NOT OK
Over all human history we’ve been exposed to daily temperature fluctuations. Full spectrum natural sunlight. We drank water from the earth without any additives and breathed in fresh air. We moved often.
PrimalHacking is a combination of using ancestral health techniques to create optimal health while taking advantage of the latest biohacking technologies to overcome modern lifestyle and toxins we can’t get away from.
Often moving to the ideal location for human health isn’t possible for most of us. Between jobs, childcare and modern life, we are exposed to toxins that cannot be avoided, no matter how far into the wilderness we travel. Even if we want to move ourselves closer to the ideal, we can’t do it all at once. To make up for what we lack, we use biohacking technologies to bring our bodies back into balance, detox and provide critical components that we are lacking.
Primal hacks reduce the health impact of living indoor lives. We need to take control of our own environment as much as possible. With so many aspects of our lives and environments outside our control, we owe it to ourselves to improve those areas within our control. As we now spend on average over 90% of our time indoors, we must look for ways to improve our health for a human biology designed for outdoor living.
At PrimalHacker, our goal is to help you improve EVERY aspect of your health and wellbeing to help you perform at your highest level possible while looking and feeling great. Oh, did we mention that you’ll also be MUCH harder to kill? We do this by trying to align as much of our lives as possible with ancestral health principles. Once we do that we can recognize the areas where we need to use modern technology, research and “biohacks” to supplement the areas that we are deficient in.
Here are just a few of the things that we will be talking about here at PrimalHacker:
NATURAL LIGHT
In the grand scheme of things, light is probably the most important aspect to your health. This includes the quality of light we receive through our skin and eyes, the light we avoid, the light our food is exposed to, the light when we’re exercising and the light that we use to heal, just to name a few. Because we live modern life indoors, we must pay attention to light. Like all living things, we need the nourishing rays of the sun to survive.
We also need to understand that modern artificial lighting is having a very detrimental impact on our lives. The only sources of light at night that our ancestors had were fire and the light from the moon. These light sources have a very specific combination of wavelengths that ARE NOT replicated with common indoor lighting. Not to mention all the extra light we are exposed to from our TVs, devices and street lights outside.
Light can influence almost every aspect of our health to some degree.
- Sleep
- Energy
- Weight
- Muscle Quality
- Bone Density
- Skin Health
STRESS ADAPTATION (HORMESIS)
We all face stress in our lives. Some of it can be very beneficial. While chronic stress can be very harmful to our health and wellbeing, acute, short bouts of stress can help us to be much healthier and perform better at everything in life.
This is called hormesis. Whenever we stress our bodies in the ways, it produces a hormetic response that increases our ability to deal with these stressors. I think this is what Friedrich Nietzsche was referring to when he said “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
There are many ways that we can induce hormesis and we’ll be going in depth with many of them.
- Cold Exposure
- Heat Exposure
- Exercise
- Caloric Restriction
DIET/NUTRITION
Our bodies have adapted to a certain type of diet over thousands of years. With the advent of modern agriculture, we stepped away from the typical diet of our ancestors. Then through biased research done by the food and pharmaceutical industries we were lead even further away from our ideal diet.
It’s time to change that. It’s time for us to start eating how we are meant to eat.
This starts with a diet based on local, organic whole foods that are in season.
COGNITIVE FUNCTION
The function of our brains are essential to achieve optimal performance. Great cognitive function starts with healthy lifestyle choices like quality sleep, good food, controlling stress levels and enough exercise.
From there are other things you can do to increase your brain power even more.
- Nootropics
- Neurofeedback
- Meditation
STRESS & ANXIETY
We all face stress daily. There’s nothing we can do about that. It’s just a part of life.
What we can control is how we deal with and reduce that stress. Our body’s stress response is necessary for our survival and to warn us of danger. The problem today is that we are bombarded with some much stimuli that many of us cannot shut down that response so we become chronically stressed.
It’s time we fix that.
TOXIN EXPOSURE
Unless you are living on some pristine mountaintop surrounded by nature you are going to encounter toxins. Like many things we have mentioned, that’s just part of life. That’s why it’s so important to limit our exposure to these things in every way possible.
SLEEP
If light is the number one most important aspect of health and optimal performance, then high quality sleep is a close second.
Sleep is how our body recovers from everything that happens during the day. It is also how our brains consolidate memories.
Proper light exposure and sleep hygiene is a big part of getting quality sleep, but there are other ways to make your sleep even better so you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to meet all of life’s challenges head on.
FRESH AIR
The EPA says indoor air is 3-5X more polluted than outdoor air. That’s a huge problem even outside of the city. Many building products, furniture and household products contribute to toxic air inside our homes and offices.
MOVEMENT
Humans are designed to move.
Constantly.
We are NOT designed to sit in one place for hours at a time like many people do daily. Even if you spend time at the gym every day, it still isn’t enough to offset the harm that sitting has on your body.
We must make a conscious effort to move constantly in the ways that our bodies are designed to move. This helps to keep us flexible, strong and healthy.
TRIBE
We believe that the importance of having your own tribe or close knit group of friends and family is one of the most understated aspects of the wellness industry. We aim to change that.
Humans are a tribal species. We thrive in small groups of like minded individuals. The problem today with social media and our fast paced lifestyles is that we have so many so called friends and acquaintances but not enough close friends. People who will hold us accountable and help us to see our strengths and weaknesses.
Having people like this is SO important to our development as people. Having a close group or tribe allows us to really excel in life and keeps us on track towards our goals.
CONCLUSION
There are many different aspects of all the above mentioned things and we will be touching on all of them in due time. We are all at different points in our own journeys towards optimal health and performance and that’s great.
It’s one of the things that make us human.
No matter where you’re at, let us be your guide on this journey.
Let us know what you are struggling with. What do you want to improve?
Welcome to PrimalHacker.