Special Podcast Episode: How To Biohack Your Home And Create An Unbeatable Environment

Biohacking the bedroom with infrared mats

Ben Greenfield discusses using infrared mats and biomats in the bedroom as part of his comprehensive home biohacking setup, explaining how overnight low-heat infrared therapy supports recovery and sleep quality.

"So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill cutting-edge content from beng Ben Greenfield fitness.com. So biohacking an unbeatable environment is what I'm going to talk to you about today. And before I scare anyone away with the term biohacking, I think a lot of times we hear that word and we conjure up images of like, you know, some guy with electrodes attached to his head or putting like eight sticks of butter and a dead chicken and whatever else into your morning cup of coffee. And really all biohacking is, is it's just tweaking your environment or tweaking your biology to make yourself more efficient or to allow your body to do something more quickly or better perform whatever it is that you want to do. And a big, big part of biohacking is your environment. Frankly, a lot of us spend our day-to-day routine experiencing things like brain fog, slow cognitive performance, weak reaction times, et cetera. And it's because our kitchens, our bedrooms, our bathrooms, our offices, our gyms, they're not tweaked to really enhance physical performance or mental performance, and in many cases, they're holding us back. So what I'm going to do today, and this is going to be fun. I never like to give the same talk twice, so this will be a new one for me, and what I want to show you guys today is just like everything that you can do in your home, in your office, in your workout environment, as far as like little tweaks that you can introduce to make yourself just that much better, right? To get that 5%, that 10%, in some cases, even more than that advantage. So I will allow ample time for Q&A afterwards for anything that I show on the slide as well as anything you guys want to talk about after. So let's just jump right in. Oh, and resources. I made a resource page for you at bengreenfieldfitness.com slash unbeatable14. You enter your credit card information and no, I'm just kidding. It's just all there. And we'll jump right in. So we'll start with the bedroom. Mark sent me a photo of his bedroom just so I could use that as an introduction for this slide. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. It's very homey. I like it. So a lot of us, hopefully, especially after Dr. Parsley's talk last night, we spend a lot of time in our bedrooms now that we know just sleeping and having sex. But it is a place where you spend a lot of your time. And I want to talk about some of the hacks you can use in your bedroom. And we'll just jump right in. Okay, light is the first one. You learned about blue light and its ability to disrupt your ability to release melatonin while you're asleep at night. Exposure to blue light is one of the biggies in people's bedrooms. And even if you're going into your bedroom at night and you're getting ready to sleep and you're making it a point not to have your laptop and your phone and stuff like that on, as you've already learned, a lot of people's lights, like the lights in here, et cetera, they're still releasing blue light. Like most LED and modern fluorescent lighting, there's a big amount of light from the blue light wave spectrum. So one of the things that I recommend you do in any area of your house where you need relaxation, this would primarily be the bedroom, is get lights that don't have the blue light wave spectrum on them. The ones that I have in my house, they're made by a company called Lighting Science. They're called Good Night Sleep Bulbs, and they've eliminated all the blue light from the spectrum, and I can just plug those into the sockets in the bedroom. The other thing that you can do if you want that works a little bit similarly is infrared. You can get a fancy infrared lamp like this, and you can also buy a cheaper infrared bulb off of like Amazon for 10 bucks. And these infrared lights, they're like warming heat lamps. They're like what a farmer would use to hatch chicks or something, right? You'd try to add an egg to keep it warm. You can put it next to your bed. You can plug one of these up above your bed at night, but it's really cool. They've done studies. They did this really interesting study in athletes where they exposed them to infrared light before they went to bed at night, and they increased sleep time by almost 20 minutes in the morning just by basking in this infrared glow. So you kind of get double benefit, a double whammy. You eliminate blue light when you use red light in your bedroom. And if you get one of these infrared lamps or an infrared light and you shine it on your body, like as you're reading a book or doing whatever you're doing in bed at night before you go to sleep, it has that added effect of eliminating blue light and helping you sleep longer in the morning. So the lighting in your room and adjusting the lighting in your room is really important. Somebody asked a really good question last night during Dr. Parsley's presentation about what do you do if you wake up at night and you got to go to the bathroom or whatever and you don't want to disrupt your circadian rhythm, right, by flipping on the light in your house and getting exposed to blue light. This works really well for that too. Like if you need to see your way into the bathroom or you need to flip a light on next to your bed, you keep one of these little infrared lamps on, you put that on and you get no blue light. You get no disruption of your sleep cycles when you get up at night to go to the bathroom. So just a super simple fix. And again, you can jump into that game for nine, 10 bucks off of Amazon for an infrared bulb. This is another really important one, and one that I just introduced recently, the mattress. And I was actually talking last night at dinner to a few guys about mattresses and how much they affect your sleep and your health. How many of you in here are familiar with electromagnetic fields, like Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, and how there's a lot of talk nowadays about being kind of careful with that stuff, about its potential for being a carcinogen, for disrupting the electrochemical gradient in your cells, things along those lines. Well, mattresses that have springs in them, they act as very efficient EMF conductors."

Grounding mats for inflammation and sleep

Greenfield explains how grounding mats in the bedroom connect the body to the earth's electrical field, reducing inflammation and improving sleep quality as part of a holistic bedroom optimization strategy.

"So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill cutting-edge content from beng Ben Greenfield fitness.com. So biohacking an unbeatable environment is what I'm going to talk to you about today. And before I scare anyone away with the term biohacking, I think a lot of times we hear that word and we conjure up images of like, you know, some guy with electrodes attached to his head or putting like eight sticks of butter and a dead chicken and whatever else into your morning cup of coffee. And really all biohacking is, is it's just tweaking your environment or tweaking your biology to make yourself more efficient or to allow your body to do something more quickly or better perform whatever it is that you want to do. And a big, big part of biohacking is your environment. Frankly, a lot of us spend our day-to-day routine experiencing things like brain fog, slow cognitive performance, weak reaction times, et cetera. And it's because our kitchens, our bedrooms, our bathrooms, our offices, our gyms, they're not tweaked to really enhance physical performance or mental performance, and in many cases, they're holding us back. So what I'm going to do today, and this is going to be fun. I never like to give the same talk twice, so this will be a new one for me, and what I want to show you guys today is just like everything that you can do in your home, in your office, in your workout environment, as far as like little tweaks that you can introduce to make yourself just that much better, right? To get that 5%, that 10%, in some cases, even more than that advantage. So I will allow ample time for Q&A afterwards for anything that I show on the slide as well as anything you guys want to talk about after. So let's just jump right in. Oh, and resources. I made a resource page for you at bengreenfieldfitness.com slash unbeatable14. You enter your credit card information and no, I'm just kidding. It's just all there. And we'll jump right in. So we'll start with the bedroom. Mark sent me a photo of his bedroom just so I could use that as an introduction for this slide. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. It's very homey. I like it. So a lot of us, hopefully, especially after Dr. Parsley's talk last night, we spend a lot of time in our bedrooms now that we know just sleeping and having sex. But it is a place where you spend a lot of your time. And I want to talk about some of the hacks you can use in your bedroom. And we'll just jump right in. Okay, light is the first one. You learned about blue light and its ability to disrupt your ability to release melatonin while you're asleep at night. Exposure to blue light is one of the biggies in people's bedrooms. And even if you're going into your bedroom at night and you're getting ready to sleep and you're making it a point not to have your laptop and your phone and stuff like that on, as you've already learned, a lot of people's lights, like the lights in here, et cetera, they're still releasing blue light. Like most LED and modern fluorescent lighting, there's a big amount of light from the blue light wave spectrum. So one of the things that I recommend you do in any area of your house where you need relaxation, this would primarily be the bedroom, is get lights that don't have the blue light wave spectrum on them. The ones that I have in my house, they're made by a company called Lighting Science. They're called Good Night Sleep Bulbs, and they've eliminated all the blue light from the spectrum, and I can just plug those into the sockets in the bedroom. The other thing that you can do if you want that works a little bit similarly is infrared. You can get a fancy infrared lamp like this, and you can also buy a cheaper infrared bulb off of like Amazon for 10 bucks. And these infrared lights, they're like warming heat lamps. They're like what a farmer would use to hatch chicks or something, right? You'd try to add an egg to keep it warm. You can put it next to your bed. You can plug one of these up above your bed at night, but it's really cool. They've done studies. They did this really interesting study in athletes where they exposed them to infrared light before they went to bed at night, and they increased sleep time by almost 20 minutes in the morning just by basking in this infrared glow. So you kind of get double benefit, a double whammy. You eliminate blue light when you use red light in your bedroom. And if you get one of these infrared lamps or an infrared light and you shine it on your body, like as you're reading a book or doing whatever you're doing in bed at night before you go to sleep, it has that added effect of eliminating blue light and helping you sleep longer in the morning. So the lighting in your room and adjusting the lighting in your room is really important. Somebody asked a really good question last night during Dr. Parsley's presentation about what do you do if you wake up at night and you got to go to the bathroom or whatever and you don't want to disrupt your circadian rhythm, right, by flipping on the light in your house and getting exposed to blue light. This works really well for that too. Like if you need to see your way into the bathroom or you need to flip a light on next to your bed, you keep one of these little infrared lamps on, you put that on and you get no blue light. You get no disruption of your sleep cycles when you get up at night to go to the bathroom. So just a super simple fix. And again, you can jump into that game for nine, 10 bucks off of Amazon for an infrared bulb. This is another really important one, and one that I just introduced recently, the mattress. And I was actually talking last night at dinner to a few guys about mattresses and how much they affect your sleep and your health. How many of you in here are familiar with electromagnetic fields, like Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, and how there's a lot of talk nowadays about being kind of careful with that stuff, about its potential for being a carcinogen, for disrupting the electrochemical gradient in your cells, things along those lines. Well, mattresses that have springs in them, they act as very efficient EMF conductors."

Eliminating blue light for circadian optimization

The episode covers removing blue light sources from the bedroom and using blue-light-blocking glasses to protect circadian rhythm and melatonin production for better sleep quality.

"So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill cutting-edge content from beng Ben Greenfield fitness.com. So biohacking an unbeatable environment is what I'm going to talk to you about today. And before I scare anyone away with the term biohacking, I think a lot of times we hear that word and we conjure up images of like, you know, some guy with electrodes attached to his head or putting like eight sticks of butter and a dead chicken and whatever else into your morning cup of coffee. And really all biohacking is, is it's just tweaking your environment or tweaking your biology to make yourself more efficient or to allow your body to do something more quickly or better perform whatever it is that you want to do. And a big, big part of biohacking is your environment. Frankly, a lot of us spend our day-to-day routine experiencing things like brain fog, slow cognitive performance, weak reaction times, et cetera. And it's because our kitchens, our bedrooms, our bathrooms, our offices, our gyms, they're not tweaked to really enhance physical performance or mental performance, and in many cases, they're holding us back. So what I'm going to do today, and this is going to be fun. I never like to give the same talk twice, so this will be a new one for me, and what I want to show you guys today is just like everything that you can do in your home, in your office, in your workout environment, as far as like little tweaks that you can introduce to make yourself just that much better, right? To get that 5%, that 10%, in some cases, even more than that advantage. So I will allow ample time for Q&A afterwards for anything that I show on the slide as well as anything you guys want to talk about after. So let's just jump right in. Oh, and resources. I made a resource page for you at bengreenfieldfitness.com slash unbeatable14. You enter your credit card information and no, I'm just kidding. It's just all there. And we'll jump right in. So we'll start with the bedroom. Mark sent me a photo of his bedroom just so I could use that as an introduction for this slide. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. It's very homey. I like it. So a lot of us, hopefully, especially after Dr. Parsley's talk last night, we spend a lot of time in our bedrooms now that we know just sleeping and having sex. But it is a place where you spend a lot of your time. And I want to talk about some of the hacks you can use in your bedroom. And we'll just jump right in. Okay, light is the first one. You learned about blue light and its ability to disrupt your ability to release melatonin while you're asleep at night. Exposure to blue light is one of the biggies in people's bedrooms. And even if you're going into your bedroom at night and you're getting ready to sleep and you're making it a point not to have your laptop and your phone and stuff like that on, as you've already learned, a lot of people's lights, like the lights in here, et cetera, they're still releasing blue light. Like most LED and modern fluorescent lighting, there's a big amount of light from the blue light wave spectrum. So one of the things that I recommend you do in any area of your house where you need relaxation, this would primarily be the bedroom, is get lights that don't have the blue light wave spectrum on them. The ones that I have in my house, they're made by a company called Lighting Science. They're called Good Night Sleep Bulbs, and they've eliminated all the blue light from the spectrum, and I can just plug those into the sockets in the bedroom. The other thing that you can do if you want that works a little bit similarly is infrared. You can get a fancy infrared lamp like this, and you can also buy a cheaper infrared bulb off of like Amazon for 10 bucks. And these infrared lights, they're like warming heat lamps. They're like what a farmer would use to hatch chicks or something, right? You'd try to add an egg to keep it warm. You can put it next to your bed. You can plug one of these up above your bed at night, but it's really cool. They've done studies. They did this really interesting study in athletes where they exposed them to infrared light before they went to bed at night, and they increased sleep time by almost 20 minutes in the morning just by basking in this infrared glow. So you kind of get double benefit, a double whammy. You eliminate blue light when you use red light in your bedroom. And if you get one of these infrared lamps or an infrared light and you shine it on your body, like as you're reading a book or doing whatever you're doing in bed at night before you go to sleep, it has that added effect of eliminating blue light and helping you sleep longer in the morning. So the lighting in your room and adjusting the lighting in your room is really important. Somebody asked a really good question last night during Dr. Parsley's presentation about what do you do if you wake up at night and you got to go to the bathroom or whatever and you don't want to disrupt your circadian rhythm, right, by flipping on the light in your house and getting exposed to blue light. This works really well for that too. Like if you need to see your way into the bathroom or you need to flip a light on next to your bed, you keep one of these little infrared lamps on, you put that on and you get no blue light. You get no disruption of your sleep cycles when you get up at night to go to the bathroom. So just a super simple fix. And again, you can jump into that game for nine, 10 bucks off of Amazon for an infrared bulb. This is another really important one, and one that I just introduced recently, the mattress. And I was actually talking last night at dinner to a few guys about mattresses and how much they affect your sleep and your health. How many of you in here are familiar with electromagnetic fields, like Wi-Fi routers, cell phones, and how there's a lot of talk nowadays about being kind of careful with that stuff, about its potential for being a carcinogen, for disrupting the electrochemical gradient in your cells, things along those lines. Well, mattresses that have springs in them, they act as very efficient EMF conductors."