Boundless

INTRODUCTION 01 COFFEE, BOOZE, AND HORROR FLICKS How to Rewire Your Skull’s Supercomputer 02 38 DEGREES BELOW ZERO How to Fix a Leaky Brain 03 BREATHWORK AND BEYOND How to Banish Stress and Kiss High Cortisol Goodbye 04 EAT YOURSELF SMART How to Fuel Your Brain 05 LIMITLESS AND LUCY Nootropics, Smart Drugs, and Psychedelics 06 UPGRADE YOUR HEAD Brain Biohacking Gear, Games, and Tools 07 SLEEP How to Fix Jet Lag, Nap Like a Champ, and Track Sleep Cycles 08 LEAN AND MEAN How to Burn Fat Fast Without Destroying Your Body 09 SEXY FOREVER How to Build Functional Muscle for Life 10 FITNESS DECODED The Ultimate Blueprint for a Perfect Body 11 BIOHACK YOUR BODY Science, Gear, and Tools for Building the Perfect Human 12 WOLVERINE A Complete Toolbox for Recovering with Lightning Speed 13 CLEAN GUT How to Fix Your Gut, Optimize Digestion, and Maximize Nutrient Absorption 14 F&*K DIETS How to Customize Your Nutrition to You 15 NEVER GET SICK How to Build an Unstoppable Immune System 16 QUANTIFIED SELF How to Test, Track, and Interpret Blood, Saliva, Urine, and Poop 17 SUPERMODEL Maximize Your Symmetry and Beauty 18 SEX Tantra, Orgasms, Libido, Sexual Satisfaction, Hormones, and Beyond 19 LONGEVITY DECODED Ancestral Wisdom and Modern Science to Maximize Health and Life Span 20 INVISIBLE Hidden Variables That Make or Break Your Mind, Body, and Spirit 21 ROUTINES AND RITUALS A Plan for Your Perfect Day CONCLUSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (Location 16)

(For more on the myths behind salt consumption, I cannot recommend highly enough that you read Dr. James DiNicolantonio’s book The Salt Fix.) (Location 937)

The vagus nerve is the largest nerve in your body and runs from your brain to your ears, tongue, lungs, and gut. It is the backbone of your parasympathetic system, and its health goes hand in hand with both emotional and gastric health. (Location 965)

When training with former Navy SEAL commander Mark Divine at his famous SEALFIT Kokoro crucible camp in California, I learned box breathing and holotropic breathwork, the latter of which got me the highest I have ever been sans psychedelics. (Location 1101)

Freediving instructor Ted Harty introduced me to static apnea tables for hypoxia (low oxygen) and CO2 tolerance. World-famous holistic health coach Paul Chek taught me the best tricks for proper deep belly breathing. The Iceman, Wim Hof, taught me his body-charging breathwork tactics, and big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton showed me how to use my breathing to instantly enter the parasympathetic rest-and-digest state. (Location 1102)

The HPA axis includes the hypothalamus (the part of your forebrain toward the front of your skull), the pituitary gland (just below the hypothalamus), and the adrenal glands (at the top of the kidneys). By producing a host of chemicals, such as corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), glucocorticoids, and cortisol, these three organs regulate functions such as stress response, mood, digestion, immune system function, libido, metabolism, and energy levels. (Location 1159)

It consists of thirty cycles of continuous breathwork, with no pauses between each inhalation and exhalation. Each exhalation should be relaxed—meaning you should not fully exhale but should instead leave some air in the lungs, so that you breathe in more oxygen than you breathe out. At the end of thirty breath cycles, exhale and hold your breath for as long as possible with no air in your lungs. You will eventually get the urge to breathe. At that point, inhale and hold your breath for a final fifteen to thirty seconds, or for as long as you can. You can squeeze your forehead a little to get more blood flow to the brain. Repeat this process, starting with thirty breath cycles again, for two or three rounds. To complete the routine, take one more deep recovery breath to restore normal oxygen levels. Wim Hof also encourages doing bodyweight exercises such as squats or push-ups while holding your breath on an exhalation. (Location 1393)

First, energize your body before a workout or during a bout of tiredness with one full minute of Wim Hof–style breathing (short, rapid, forced inhalations followed by short, rapid, unforced exhalations). (Location 1485)

First, ketosis makes for healthier mitochondria, the driving forces of each cell in your body. When your mitochondria malfunction, they can’t produce enough energy. As a result, tissues with high energy demands, such as muscles, the heart, and the brain, suffer, resulting in complications that can include blindness, deafness, movement disorders, dementia, cardiomyopathy (disease of the heart muscle), myopathy, renal dysfunction, and accelerated aging. Ketosis is effective at reversing mitochondrial dysfunction because it increases the number of mitochondria and the production of oxidative ATP, particularly in neurons. (Location 2024)

Mitochondria and the Future of Medicine (Location 2030)

The list of herbs and ingredients in the supplement TianChi is far too long to include here, but it contains nearly every Chinese adaptogen and natural nootropic described in this chapter. So when it comes to a nonsynthetic approach to mental enhancement, this blend tops the list. All the herbs in TianChi are gathered from their native, wild environments or are organically grown, non-GMO, kosher certified, non-irradiated, and pesticide-free, then formulated in small batches by a Chinese herbal medicine practitioner in Oregon. The herbs are extracted in purified water and test free of heavy metals. (Location 2835)

My own experience with psychedelics has spanned several years of relatively high psilocybin and DMT doses for self-discovery once a quarter, weekly LSD microdoses for creativity and productivity (I take larger doses if I am both sleep-deprived and in need of hefty creative output), weekly or monthly psilocybin microdoses during holotropic breathwork sessions or hikes, ketamine microdoses during massages and sex, and ibogaine microdoses for a pre-workout or pre-sex boost. (Location 2860)

RealChems (RealChems.com): RealChems sources synthetic versions of 1P-LSD, ALD-52, ETH-LAD, AL-LAD, 4-AcO-DMT, and many other psychedelic and nootropic “research chemicals” that are “not sold for human consumption” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). (Location 2885)

Note: it's not realchemsnet

The SAID principle is one of the first principles I learned in my undergraduate exercise physiology courses. It stands for “specific adaptation to imposed demands,” and it basically states that your body will eventually adapt to the demands you place upon it. (Location 4806)

These are just a few ways you can switch up your workouts and minimize repetition. When in doubt, follow this rule: Don’t go for more than four weeks without significantly changing a specific staple of your exercise program. (Location 4837)

Cool Fat Burner or Cool Gut Buster vest (the latter can be worn for forty to sixty minutes as you work, commute, clean the garage, or eat breakfast). (Location 4878)

Turns out that the weight of the load is not important. Instead, what matters is whether a muscle is worked to complete fatigue. (Location 5212)

Fact is, research suggests that pure muscle mass does not increase longevity. Instead, longevity is more heavily correlated with muscle quality and the ability of the muscle to support daily functional activities such as walking, sprinting, and lifting heavy stuff, all of which positively impact insulin resistance, fat-burning rates, mitochondrial density, mobility, muscle fiber type, and strength. (Location 5270)

The prefrontal cortex is improved by meditation, language games like crossword puzzles and Scrabble, and strategy games like chess. • The temporal lobes are improved by memory games and learning musical instruments. • The parietal lobes are improved by juggling, map reading, and logic games like sudoku. • The cerebellum is improved by dancing, yoga, tai chi, and coordination games like table tennis. (Location 5489)

He also performs intense sessions of heavy, full-body weight lifting one to three times per week for seven to thirty minutes. Finally, he avoids any long, unbroken periods of sedentary time by using tactics like treadmill workstations and relaxing paddleboard sessions. (Location 5508)

One of Art’s other posture exercises involves standing with your back to a wall, slightly arching your lower back, keeping your head and shoulders back against the wall, and then walking away from the wall without collapsing your spine or neck—rather than lowering your head to look forward, look over your cheekbones while maintaining your posture. (Location 5542)

So what do you do if you’re not going to sit on the ball while hunched over a keyboard? For starters, try the supine lateral ball roll, an exercise that develops the spinal stabilizers, the foot and ankle complex, hip, pelvis, shoulder girdle, and neck. This is what Paul Chek calls a “Big Bang exercise” because it conditions the body in all planes of motion at once and activates all the weak muscles responsible for stabilizing all body segments involved with the exercise. (For a video demonstration, (Location 6289)

The Relaxator is the final breathwork tool that I’ll recommend in this section, particularly because I find it far easier to use hands-free than a PowerLung while on my afternoon walk, and it pairs quite well with the type of breath-hold walks discussed in chapter 3. The Relaxator is a small, no-frills device that you can hang around your neck like a necklace. You (Location 6327)

A sample of a Neuro-Set for the upper body would be a set of super-slow push-ups, a push-up hold at the bottom of the push-up for as long as possible, then a final set of explosive push-ups to failure. (Location 6346)

Companies such as Nikken, Promagnet, and Body Glove make thin, light, flexible magnets that you can wrap around your body or apply with adhesive and wear while you are sleeping, exercising, or working, and the company BEMER produces a magnetic mat that you can lie on for full-body therapy. (Location 6986)

Note: maybe for the xiandao shirt ?

In other words, constantly training in a fed state or eating postworkout may make things too easy for the body. (Location 7196)

Finally, to learn more about how medicine took a very wrong turn from finding the root cause of illness to masking the symptoms, I recommend the books Undoctored by Dr. William Davis and Unconventional Medicine by Chris Kresser. (Location 10002)

Studies have shown that this change in the shape of proteins can change the expression of genes. Electromagnetic fields are generated by thoughts and emotions, and since proteins are altered by electromagnetic fields, this means that genes can be turned on and off by those same fields. That’s right: you can control gene activity by focusing on your beliefs. (Location 10713)

Note: really??

As a matter of fact, scientists at Yale University have discovered that the conditions for developing cancer can be significantly affected by your emotional environment, including everyday work and family stress. In this case, Western medicine is catching up to the traditional Chinese medical view of cancer, which has long held that emotions are a major contributing factor. For example, researcher Sun Binyan wrote in his book Cancer Treatment and Prevention, “According (Location 10735)

My favorite qigong master is Robert Peng, who is quite good at distilling this ancient Chinese practice so that even my eight-year-old twin boys were able to learn qigong along with me over the course of an eight-week program. (Location 10786)

I spend several minutes each day, usually during my morning stretch routine or while in the sauna, going through a few easy yoga flows borrowed from hatha yoga (one of the better forms of yoga for dropping into a meditative state). I visit a yoga class or follow along with a yoga DVD a few times a month, and once or twice a year, I attend more intensive yoga retreats for a deeper dive into this potent energy healing tool. Finally, for a more intense form of yoga that incorporates movement, dynamic breathing techniques, meditation, and chanting, give Kundalini yoga a try. It is one of the more difficult but more energy-vibrating forms of yoga I’ve learned! (Location 10905)

Note: for yoga

It’s a settling and peaceful way to live your life, knowing that—pardon the slight cheesiness of this statement—the Big Guy is on your side. (Location 10958)

Note: yes it is settling, even if not direclty correct can we capture the positive of it in a way that's internally consistent with our beliefs? ultimpately you get to the same place, just different substrate xiandao

Buettner discovered several characteristics that the people in these zones shared, such as these: • A lack of smoking • A high intake of wild plants • A regular intake of legumes, usually prepared using ancestral methods such as soaking, sprouting, or fermentation • Constant moderate physical activity, not as isolated exercise sessions or gym workouts but as a natural part of life (e.g., gardening, yard work, walking, and bicycling) • Healthy family relationships and social engagement (despite less use of social media, people are extremely socially active and integrated into their communities) Other key characteristics Buettner identified were low-to-moderate alcohol intake (especially wine and other fermented beverages), caloric moderation and fasting, a strong life purpose, low amounts of stress, and engagement in a spiritual discipline, religion, or belief in a higher power. (Location 13995)

You’ll find instructions for preparing a wide range of legumes on Boundlessbook.com/19. (Location 14143)

Many scientists believe that if you do not expose yourself to different hormetic stressors, your body may never develop an adequate adaptive response to high levels of oxidative stress (Location 14441)

Here’s how it works: when you experience a hormetic stress, it signals your body to enter a stress-resistant mode that tells your cells that it is probably not a good time to grow old and die. (Location 14443)

Some practical ways to experience hormetic stress each day include lifting heavy stuff (refer back to chapter 9), not stuffing yourself with antibiotics (this can even mean not using antimicrobial or antiviral essential oils every day), engaging in hot-cold contrast therapy (such as alternating between hot and cold water when taking a shower—refer back to chapter 12), eating plants with a high polyphenol content (many of the beneficial compounds found in plants are actually noxious and stimulate a hormetic response), drinking wine for its polyphenols and similar compounds, such as tannins and anthocyanins, and even consuming alcohol for its own sake (small doses of ethanol may initiate a stress response). Below are a few of my favorite forms of hormesis. (Location 14448)

Two apps that I’ve found to be particularly helpful for identifying wild plants are FlowerChecker, which gives you access to a team of live botanists, and PlantSnap, which uses artificial intelligence for plant identification. (Location 14490)