About Head Strong

Like Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss, the book is a refined version of Dave Asprey’s podcast, you could learn everything in this book by just listening to the Bulletproof podcast.

So you could, of course, save yourself the $12 and the 9 hours of reading by just listening to all his podcast episodes, but this book does a great job of summarizing the best Biohacks discussed in the podcast and putting them in a holistic context of optimizing your Mitochondria. I don’t recommend you buy and read every book I review, but this book I do!

The common criticism you hear of Dave Asprey is that: he pitches his own products too often! He does pitch his products often during his podcast but I would say that just about 15% of this book is him talking the Bulletproof products and often he gave alternatives because not everyone can afford or easily get their hands on Bulletproof products.

Moral Failures have Biological Causes

For those of you who don’t know, the author has a really interesting story, he was born with a very unlucky roll of the genetic dice and grew up with almost every health problem you could think of. He describes this epiphany, paradigm shift he had where he realized that his failings were not necessarily moral failings but were the fault of dysfunctional neurobiology…

my diminished brain function stopped being a moral problem and became an issue with my body’s hardware that I could fix.

And as he fixed his neurobiology, he made better decisions and became more successful.

Similarly, I often thought of my failures in moral terms, I just wasn’t a good enough person to become a millionaire by age 30, I just didn’t work hard enough.

Maybe you should think about your failures similarly. It’s an incredibly liberating sentiment!

Now I’m not a moral relativist, I don’t want to say that nobody is to blame for their bad decisions and that we are all victims but we could live in a drastically more sane and moral world if neuro-biological dysfunction was the exception as opposed to the norm. Dave writes

I have come to believe that high-performance brains are our birthright as humans.

But, this is a birthright that you have work for! You don’t “deserve an airplane”

What is Mitochondria?

To get more specific than the Star Wars metaphor

The energy production that takes place within your mitochondria is therefore the single most important function in your body. (pp. 23–24)

The average human cell contains between one thousand and two thousand mitochondria. The cells in the parts of our body that require the most energy — the brain, retina, and heart — contain about ten thousand mitochondria each. That means you have more than one quadrillion mitochondria within your body.

(p. 23)

The cool thing about your mitochondria is that when you make them more powerful, you get better at everything you do, (p. 36)

Why Mitochondria is a Brain Power Hack

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. (p. 6)

Hacking Motivation

If defying your genes is something that you want to do, I’ll suggest that you combine motivational mechanisms and one of the strongest motivational mechanisms is sunk cost; spending money.

Several supplements powerfully optimize your Mitochondria, I’ll suggest that if you haven’t already, order them now along with ordering Head Strong. Don’t get the audiobook, get the actual book or the Kindle edition, so you can take notes.

With a not insubstantial chunk of change already sunk into these Mitochondrial supplements, you will be REALLY motivated to actually metabolize the rich information in this book into transformative wisdom about your health. Not to mention you’ll start feeling more limitless (or bulletproof) right away!

Mitochondrial Nootropics

I have here the Mitochondrial Nootropics that deliver the best ROI and credible sources to order them from.

Listed in descending order of the most effective and most economical, if you have a limited budget get the ones near the top of the list

Smart Drugs are the Gateway Drug

This book confirms that smart drugs are the gateway drug to true personal development and transforming one’s health. Smart drugs gave a once, profoundly sick Dave Asprey the initial motivation to take on the gigantic task of fixing his broken biology.

I poured the extra energy and performance I got from the smart drugs into experimenting with and gaining an understanding of every conceivable method that might upgrade my brain’s performance.

The Myth of “Settled Science”

There’s this tendency amongst laypeople to think that science figured out health a while ago.

I think this is because it’s been a while since any really big, paradigm-shifting scientific innovations…

The airplane was invented about a century ago

Space travel was figured out 60 years ago

Computers were invented in the middle of the last century

The last really big innovation that changed the world was the Internet and that also is like 30 years old

So I think that the average person kind of assumes that similarly there have been no major innovations in the health sciences in recent times. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Actually, the past 10 years have been the most exciting times, a lot of things we’ve learned have flipped the conventional wisdom on its head.

For example, for the longest time the mainstream media, institutions and diet gurus told us that fat was bad — Don’t eat fat, unless you want to be fat!

There were all these diet books about high carb, low-fat diets. Yet in the past 10 years, it’s become increasingly evident that fat is good for you, fat is what our minds and bodies run off of and carbs and sugar are what we should be avoiding. The “settled science” was dead wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of people still dogmatically believe that fat is bad.

Neuroplasticity is another topic that “settled science” was wrong about for a long time.

It wasn’t until later in the twentieth century that scientists discovered what’s called neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to grow new cells and forge new neural connections throughout your life. Before then, researchers believed that your brain remained static until it degenerated in old age.

(p. 4)

We are at the frontier of an exciting new era of performance enhancement science. Our generation was born too late to explore the earth, yet too early to explore the stars but we were born at the right to time to take on perhaps a far more important project; making better humans with science. Maybe they’ll make it to the stars…

Why is it crucial to hack Mitochondria?

Someone may reasonably ask: Why do I need all these Biohacks, smart drugs and supplements to optimize my Mitochondria? Can’t I just do it with my diet?

Dr. Frank Shallenberger (who discovered and named EOMD) estimates that we actually need 50– 100 percent more energy now than we did a hundred years ago to get rid of all of the toxins that are inside our bodies, slowing down our energy production and making us weak. (p. 37)

Hormesis for Better Mitochondria

By strategically and temporarily stressing your body, you can boost its natural detoxification systems and stimulate the creation of new mitochondria to maximize your energy. (p. 39)

Just taking a cold shower for one minute in the morning is often enough to stimulate cold thermogenesis. (p. 175)

After hearing about cold showers from so many high performance people I finally took the plunge and have been regularly doing cold showers.

Initially, I did like 60 seconds cold at the end a normal shower, which would, of course, be the longest damn 60 seconds of my day spent shivering vigorously with that dainty pink body scrubber thing, And sometimes I would wimp out and not do the cold shower at the end of the shower.

Here’s the lifehack for this

Start with the cold water, after 60–90 seconds switch to hot water. Which is like having dessert AFTER a healthy meal, instead of BEFORE it! Brush your teeth during the cold shower. You need to brush your teeth and it takes 60–90 seconds and it kind of takes your mind off the benign thermogenic torture that I’m subjecting myself to!

Light vs Mitochondria

One of the points that is made repeatedly in the book is that bad light is bad for you. Yes, just like we avoid junk food, we should also try to avoid junk light.

There are two main kinds of light you want to avoid:

Blue light and fluorescent light (especially after dark)

Your mitochondria have to produce a lot of extra energy to process the blue light in LEDs, which burns oxygen and creates free radicals in the cells of your eyes. And when the mitochondria in your eyes are stressed, the rest of your mitochondria can get stressed, too, including the ones in your brain. (pp. 159–160)

You are getting overdosed on blue light, so changing the ratio of blue to red can help your eyes and your brain, and your mitochondria will thank you. Simply install a red light somewhere in your field of vision. (pp. 241–242)

Here’s a cool fact

We have learned that mitochondria make biophotons — tiny pulses of light that last for one-quadrillionth of a second. This is part of how they communicate with each other. As it turns out, gut bacteria also make biophotons. Is it possible that your gut bacteria are communicating with the tiny bacteria-derived mitochondria that rule your cells? I think it is, especially because we know mitochondria are sensitive to external sources of light. (p. 63)

The Best Diet for Mitochondria

Is almost certainly the keto diet…

Dr. Veech explained that humans are the only animals that go into ketosis when we fast because we have such large brains to support. Ketosis protects our big brains from oxidative stress and allows us to survive. (p. 99)

Combined with intermittent fasting…

Lots of people have tried to hack long-term fasting with a technique called intermittent fasting. This means you eat all of your food within a specific window of time (six or eight hours) and fast the rest of the day (sixteen to eighteen hours). This is an effective way to cycle in and out of ketosis while remaining well fed, and it’s been proven to have plenty of other brain benefits such as increasing neurogenesis. (p. 103)

Self Monitoring Your Mitochondria

Pay attention to your energy dips throughout the day — perhaps you ate something or were exposed to something that damaged your mitochondria! (p. 41)

Biohackers are always interested in doing A/B testing. I have a daily regimen of coconuts, broccoli and probiotic yogurt that I know keeps my energy levels quite high, but someday I may try something new, like a sushi lunch special, but I’ll carefully self-monitor that day. If I get a bit dopey around 3:30 PM then I likely won’t be back for those tasty rolls.