10 Ways to Improve Your Brain Without Supplements or Tech
Tim Gray — Founder & CEO @ Health Optimisation Summit
TIM GRAY (UK)
The UK's leading Biohacker / Founder of the Health Optimisation Summit
Tim Gray is a true pioneer in the world of biohacking and a renowned global speaker. He is known for his wealth of knowledge and infectious passion for maximizing human potential.
Tim's journey began with a relentless pursuit of understanding the intricate workings of the human body and mind. He is widely recognized as the "UK's leading Biohacker," a title earned through his unwavering commitment to tracking over 35 biomarkers every single day.
As the Founder of The HealthOptimization Summit, Tim has cultivated a vibrant community of like-minded individuals who share his passion for pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. This group serves as a hub for innovation, sparking new ideas and fostering collaboration among health enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and forward-thinking professionals.
Tim Gray reveals 10 unexpected, everyday ways to optimize brain power without
Everything for our physical health relies on our mental health. If your brain isn't optimized, you can't figure your way out of health issues.
Summary
- Eliminate fluoride and address dental issues like root canals or metal fillings, as these can negatively impact IQ, organ function, and overall mental health. - Replace nonstick cookware with ceramic or cast iron to avoid thyroid-disrupting chemicals and petrochemicals that accumulate in the body and brain. - Minimize Bluetooth and EMF exposure by using wired headphones, and test for heavy metal toxicity, which can significantly increase sensitivity to electromagnetic frequencies. - Protect the brain's reward system and improve productivity by strictly limiting smartphone use and avoiding addictive digital content that burns out the pleasure system. - Prioritize high-quality sleep using natural-material mattresses and blackout masks to ensure the brain can effectively "wash" itself and detoxify every night.
Article
The Basics Before The Gadgets: Tim Gray’s Case For Brain Health At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam
A Fast, Provocative Manifesto For Mental And Physical Health Optimisation
At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 14 and 15 October 2023, Tim Gray arrived with a deliberately unfashionable message for a crowd often drawn to cutting-edge devices, wearables and performance tools. His presentation, **10 Ways to Improve Your Brain Without Supplements or Tech**, argued that cognitive performance was not built first in the lab or on an app, but in the kitchen, the bedroom, the dentist’s chair and the habits of ordinary daily life.
Gray, introduced as the UK’s leading biohacker and the founder of the Health Optimisation Summit, spoke with the urgency of a man compressing a longer sermon into a short slot. His central claim was simple and sharp: brain optimisation begins with removing the invisible frictions and toxicities that blunt mental clarity long before people start chasing advanced interventions.
“You cannot be a biohacker unless you get the basics right,” Gray told the audience. “While I love advanced technology and tools, you must have the foundational basics in place first.”
The Brain As The Starting Point
The talk stood apart from the usual conference fascination with enhancement. Gray’s emphasis was not on what to add, but on what to stop tolerating. In his view, mental health underpinned every other effort at physical optimisation. If the brain was fogged, overstimulated, inflamed or sleep-deprived, even the most sophisticated health strategy risked becoming cosmetic.
From there, he launched into a list that moved briskly across fluoride, root canals, cookware, electromagnetic sensitivity, gut health, mattress materials, smartphone addiction, sleep quality and the social architecture of a good life. Some claims were contentious, others deeply personal, but the through-line remained consistent: modern environments quietly erode cognition, and people often miss the most obvious causes because they are looking for more glamorous answers.
Fluoride, Dentistry And The Hidden Sources Of Cognitive Strain
Gray began with fluoride, urging attendees to abandon conventional toothpaste and reject what he framed as an unnecessary neurotoxic exposure. He described fluoride as incompatible with a health-conscious lifestyle, especially for those attentive to chemical load in food and household products.
He then turned to biological dentistry, one of the most striking sections of the talk. Gray argued that root canals, metal fillings and conventional dental approaches could have consequences far beyond the mouth, linking teeth to broader organ function and even mental health. He recounted his own experience of long-running digestive distress, which he said resolved after treatment from biological dentist Dr Dom Nishwitz, whom he mentioned by name from the stage.
For Gray, the mouth was not a separate domain of health but an overlooked gateway into chronic dysfunction. He urged the audience to seek biological dentists who reject root canal-treated teeth and prefer ceramic rather than titanium implants.
The Household As A Neurological Battlefield
What made the presentation memorable was Gray’s insistence that brain optimisation is often decided by ordinary domestic choices. Non-stick pans, he argued, exposed users to endocrine-disrupting and persistent chemicals that could interfere with thyroid health, energy and cognition. His advice was practical and unadorned: swap them out for safer alternatives such as ceramic or cast iron and cook with more oil, particularly extra virgin olive oil.
He applied the same logic to mattresses. Memory foam, in his account, was not a luxury but a source of petrochemical off-gassing and hormonal disruption. Metal springs, he suggested, added another layer of concern by attracting electromagnetic fields. The remedy, in his view, was a bed made from natural materials, a place where the body could recover without additional toxic burden.
This was biohacking turned inside out. The pitch was not for novelty, but for environmental subtraction.
The Gut, Mood And The Fragility Of Emotional Stability
The most vulnerable part of Gray’s presentation came when he described his own recent health struggle. After taking antibiotics for an infection that had gone undetected for years, he said he found himself overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, an experience he described as profoundly unlike his usual state.
He used that episode to underscore the relationship between the gut and the mind. The disruption of the microbiome, he said, could reverberate into mood, resilience and cognition. From this followed a broader appeal to pay closer attention not only to the gut, but also to the oral microbiome, which he portrayed as the first step in digestive and neurological wellbeing.
The message resonated because it replaced abstraction with lived experience. Gray was not speaking merely as a conference personality, but as someone publicly tracing the emotional consequences of physical imbalance.
The Phone, The Pleasure System And A Culture Of Exhausted Attention
If one section carried the clearest moral force, it was Gray’s critique of digital compulsion. He described smartphones and social platforms not as harmless conveniences but as machines that continuously reward the brain until its pleasure system becomes dulled and dependent.
“You need to own your phone and your phone should not own you,” he said. “If you are constantly rewarding yourself with screen time all day long, you overwork your pleasure system until it gets burnt out.”
Gray said he had imposed tighter rules on his own use of Instagram, limiting access to specific moments of the day. The result, he told the room, was a marked improvement in both productivity and happiness. His broader argument was that constant stimulation leaves little space for thought, discipline or meaningful work, and that reclaiming attention is one of the most powerful cognitive interventions available.
In a conference culture often eager to quantify performance, this was a reminder that distraction itself may be one of the largest unmeasured drains on the brain.
Sleep As Nightly Brain Maintenance
Gray’s comments on sleep were among the least controversial and perhaps the most universally applicable. He insisted that seven to eight hours of sleep were not optional for serious cognitive performance, framing rest as the period in which the brain effectively cleans and restores itself.
“If you are not sleeping seven to eight hours, your brain is not washing itself every night and you will have less brain performance than you should,” he said.
His recommendations were straightforward: remove phones before bed, reduce light exposure, use a sleep mask, and take sleep quality seriously before turning to more exotic interventions. In the wider logic of the talk, sleep was not one biohack among many. It was the condition that made all others matter.
The People Around You As The Ultimate Biohack
Gray saved some of his most emphatic language for the social world. Friends, colleagues and intimate partners, he argued, shape behaviour more profoundly than any wearable or supplement ever could. The right circle normalises discipline, steadiness and healthy habits. The wrong one makes self-sabotage feel ordinary.
“Your social circle is your number one biohack,” he said. “If you put yourself around the right people, you will eat properly, you will sleep properly, and you will have the right mindset.”
He extended that argument into a reflection on commitment and partnership, describing his own recent learning as a move toward choosing a “partner in crime” and treating commitment itself as a modern form of strength. In a setting often associated with optimisation as an individual pursuit, Gray’s closing note was strikingly relational. Health, he suggested, is built not only through protocols but through people.
A Restless, Polarising And Strangely Grounded Appeal
Tim Gray’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam was, in one sense, classic conference provocation: fast, personal, eclectic and unafraid to make claims that many clinicians would dispute. Yet beneath the polemics sat an argument that felt more grounded than the title first implied.
His real target was not technology itself, but the fantasy that technology can compensate for neglected fundamentals. Better cognition, he insisted, begins with cleaner inputs, deeper sleep, steadier attention, a healthier mouth and gut, and relationships that reinforce rather than corrode good judgement.
In that sense, **10 Ways to Improve Your Brain Without Supplements or Tech** was less a rejection of modern optimisation than a rebuke to its excesses. It asked a room full of enthusiasts to consider whether peak performance had been oversold as something downloadable, purchasable or wearable, when it may still depend on older disciplines: what we sleep on, what we cook with, what we scroll, what we ignore, and who we choose to become alongside.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam