HOW TO BIOHACK YOURSELF TO OPTIMAL WELLNESS
Joseph Cohen
At the age of 25, Joseph Cohen was sick, broke, and unemployable. Since ‘biohacking’ himself from sickness Joe has become an entrepreneur, investor and writer, founding SelfHacked and SelfDecode. SelfHacked is a leader in biohacking content, with 1 million views a month. SelfDecode is a popular biohacking software that combines data from genetics, blood tests and symptoms to render personalized health recommendations.
Joseph Cohen, founder of Selfhack.com, shares his formula for optimal wellness
Anyone can use this general formula to optimize their biology. I am going to give you the tools to figure out why you might not be operating at peak performance and how to fix yourself.
Summary
- Synchronize circadian rhythms to regulate the body's internal clock, as these biological rhythms control up to 90% of gene expression and influence sleep, metabolism, and immune function. - Maximize outdoor light exposure during the day to boost dopamine and nitric oxide, while minimizing artificial blue and green light at night to prevent disruption of the sleep cycle. - Tailor nutritional timing by eating protein-rich meals in the morning to increase metabolism and consuming carbohydrates in the evening when glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity are highest. - Enhance cognitive performance and decision-making by reducing indoor toxins like carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) through consistent fresh air ventilation and open windows. - Systematically address the "Big Eight" factors of wellness, including managing chronic stress, avoiding sleep debt, and incorporating natural stressors like exercise, sauna, or cold exposure.
Article
How To Biohack Yourself To Optimal Wellness
Joseph Cohen’s Big Eight Formula Put Circadian Rhythm At The Center Of Health
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Joseph Cohen delivered a talk that sought to turn the language of self-optimization into something more systematic, more biological, and, in his telling, more urgent. Speaking on Friday, 13 October 2017 in Helsinki, Finland, the founder of SelfHacked and SelfDecode argued that wellness was not built on fashionable interventions or isolated supplements, but on a hierarchy of forces that shape the body every hour of the day.
Cohen’s presentation, titled *How To Biohack Yourself To Optimal Wellness*, was rooted in personal reinvention. He told the audience that he had once been “sick, broke, and unemployable”, and that his recovery had led him to develop a framework for why people become unwell and how they might restore function. That framework, he said, was the “Big Eight”.
These were the broad drivers of suboptimal health as he saw them: an unsuitable diet, sleep deficit, lack of sun and light, disturbed circadian rhythms, excess stress and unhappiness, a lack of natural stressors, toxins, and infections or injuries. The point was not that any one factor explained everything, but that most people, through genes, environment, or routine, were being pushed off course by one or more of them.
Circadian Rhythm Was Presented As The Hidden Governor Of Human Biology
If the talk had a central thesis, it was this: the body’s clocks mattered more than most people realised.
“Up to ninety percent of your genes are controlled by your biological rhythm,” Cohen said. “Circadian rhythm is your epigenetics. These clock genes are changing the expression of your genes throughout the day.”
It was a striking claim, and he returned to it repeatedly. Every cell in the body, he said, had its own clock, and those countless peripheral clocks needed to stay synchronised with a central one. If they did not, the consequences rippled outward into sleep, metabolism, immunity, mood, and disease risk.
“Every cell in your body has a clock in it,” Cohen told the Biohacker Summit audience. “It is extremely important to synchronize all activities of the body with a central clock so that everything works one step after another.”
In his account, modern life had become an assault on that choreography. Bright indoor days were too dim. Evenings were too bright. Meals came too late. Stress ran into the night. Heating systems erased the body’s expectation of cooler darkness. Technology prolonged wakefulness past the hour when biology wanted surrender.
The result, he suggested, was a civilisation living against time itself.
Morning Light Was Cast As A Biological Reset Button
Among all the interventions he discussed, sunlight emerged as the most elemental. Cohen described morning outdoor light not as lifestyle decoration, but as a signal the body had evolved to require.
“In the morning you want to increase your metabolism as much as possible,” he said. “Eat a protein-rich meal soon after awakening and get outside for fifteen minutes to entrain your circadian rhythm.”
This was one of the practical cores of his presentation. Get outside soon after waking. Let the eyes and skin register real daylight. Build the day around brightness and activity rather than beginning it under artificial bulbs and screens.
Cohen argued that sunlight affected far more than vitamin D. He linked it to nitric oxide, blood flow, inflammation, dopamine, serotonin, metabolism, and even longevity. “Sunlight is one of those things that can increase life expectancy dramatically,” he said. “It lowers inflammation, increases blood flow, and increases metabolism. The amount of benefits from the sun is tremendous.”
His warning was as clear as his prescription. Humans, he said, now spend most of their days indoors under weak light, then flood the night with wavelengths the brain interprets as daytime. In that reversal, the body loses the clarity of when to be alert and when to wind down.
The Timing Of Food Mattered As Much As The Food Itself
Cohen’s approach to nutrition was not only about what one ate, but when.
He suggested that metabolism should be driven upward early in the day with protein-rich meals, while carbohydrates were better placed in the evening, when glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity peaked. Morning fasting, popular in some wellness circles, was something he strongly criticised in circadian terms. To skip food early, in his view, was to miss a vital daytime cue.
The body, he argued, should be metabolically assertive by day and quieter by night. Protein in the morning, more carbohydrates and fat later, no heavy late meals, and ideally no food after early evening. Behind the advice was an old biological logic: daylight was for expenditure, darkness for repair.
He also offered a more unusual observation from his own self-experimentation. If he ate foods that triggered inflammation, he found the reaction stronger in the morning, when he believed immune activity was more aggressive. Evening, for him, softened that effect. It was a small example of a wider theme in the talk: biology was not static across the day, and behaviour should reflect that.
Sleep Was Treated As Debt, Not Preference
If circadian rhythm was the hidden conductor, sleep was the state in which the orchestra repaired itself.
Cohen described sleep as indispensable to detoxification, hormonal regulation, cellular recycling, and brain function. He framed sleep loss not as a badge of productivity but as a deficit with measurable physiological costs. The body, he said, carried sleep debt with consequences that included immune dysfunction, obesity, poor cognition, and heightened cardiovascular risk.
He emphasised that the drive to sleep was shaped both by sleep pressure and by the circadian system’s timing signals. This was why people could feel exhausted yet strangely alert late at night if they pushed past an earlier window of sleepiness. For Cohen, going to bed earlier, around 9 or 10 pm rather than at midnight, was less puritanical than biological.
He urged the audience to dim lights aggressively in the evening, reduce blue and green light exposure, keep the bedroom cool, and avoid stimulating work before bed. In his framework, sleep did not begin when the head hit the pillow. It began hours earlier, with the management of light, food, stress, and temperature.
Stress Was Not An Abstract Problem But A Physiological Disruptor
There was a bluntness to Cohen’s treatment of stress that cut through the polished optimism often attached to biohacking. He described it as one of the most common precursors to illness in the clients he had worked with and said its effects were visible across multiple systems.
“Stress is correlated with eighty percent of the times people get sick,” he said. “It lowers immune function, increases inflammation, and disrupts your sleep. Taking care of your stress is essential so it does not derail your circadian rhythm.”
Here, the talk widened from clocks and light to emotional life itself. Stress was not merely a feeling to be endured. It distorted hormones, sleep, digestion, neurotransmitters, and immunity. It could unsettle the very rhythms on which the rest of health depended.
The implication was stark. No amount of supplementation could fully rescue a body that remained chronically threatened.
Natural Stressors Were Framed As Missing Inputs From An Older World
Yet Cohen did not argue for a life of comfort and insulation. He made a distinction between chronic psychological stress and natural physical stressors, suggesting that humans had evolved with the latter and suffered in their absence.
Exercise, cold exposure, heat, sauna use, plant compounds, and variable temperatures were presented as signals the body expected and used to adapt. In moderation, these were not insults but training stimuli. A life emptied of them, he suggested, became biologically flatter and more fragile.
This idea sat neatly within the wider architecture of the talk. Just as modern lighting had severed humans from natural light cycles, modern climate control and sedentary life had muted the small challenges that once kept metabolic and stress-response systems resilient.
Indoor Air Quality Emerged As An Unexpected Performance Lever
One of the talk’s more concrete and arresting claims concerned the spaces where modern people think, work, and tire themselves out. Cohen pointed to research on volatile organic compounds and carbon dioxide, arguing that stale indoor air could profoundly impair higher cognition.
Lowering those exposures, he said, could dramatically improve cognitive performance, especially in decision-making and complex thinking. His practical advice was refreshingly low-tech: open the windows.
In a culture that often associates optimisation with expensive devices, this part of the presentation had a democratic force. Better thinking, he suggested, might begin not with another app or wearable, but with fresh air moving through a room.
The Big Eight Offered A Wider Philosophy Of Wellness
For all its granular advice on protein timing, lux levels, and supplement schedules, Cohen’s talk at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki ultimately proposed something larger. Health, he argued, was rarely restored by chasing one miracle fix. It was built by identifying the major systems that had drifted out of alignment and then restoring the conditions under which the body could function as intended.
That meant examining what preceded illness. A season without sunlight. A period of acute stress. Months of poor sleep. Toxic indoor environments. Badly timed meals. A body deprived both of challenge and recovery.
His “Big Eight” formula may have sounded broad, but its power lay in that breadth. It invited the audience to stop obsessing over trivia and start with fundamentals: light, time, food, sleep, air, stress, and the rhythms that connect them.
In Helsinki, Cohen made a case not simply for hacking biology, but for listening to it.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki