A Biohacker Spent $2 Million on His Health, Yet His Simplest Tips Are Basically Free

Dave Asprey has spent the better part of two decades trying to feel better. Along the way, he helped make butter coffee a thing, built the Bulletproof empire, wrote four New York Times bestsellers, and became one of the biggest names in biohacking. By his own estimate, he’s also spent more than $2 million trying to hack his own body in the process.

So when he sat down with Holly Madison on You Wish, you’d expect his advice to be wildly expensive or complicated. Instead, some of his best tips are the kind that cost almost nothing and feel borderline too simple to work.

Dave Asprey Shares Simple, Low-Cost Biohacks for Better Sleep and Energy

Drink your water with a little salt

That nagging tension right where your neck meets your shoulders? Asprey calls it “coat hanger pain.” According to him, it can happen when blood flow to those muscles drops, which can trace back to not getting enough sodium. “I don’t drink water without electrolytes. It’s changed my life.”

The sodium thing also explains that wired-but-tired feeling, where your body is basically scrambling to keep your blood pressure up. Run low and you bounce between exhausted and anxious, never quite landing on rested.

Put creatine in something warm

Creatine isn’t just a gym-bro thing anymore. Research increasingly links it to memory, processing speed, and mental sharpness—but if you drink it cold, Asprey says you’re leaving a lot of that on the table. “If you put creatine in hot liquid of any type, it’ll reach your brain,” he explains. The heat dissolves it fully into solution instead of leaving it as “suspended particles,” and that’s what lets it get absorbed where it counts. Go cold like adding a scoop to a smoothie and “it doesn’t go into the brain the same way.”

Stop chasing more sleep

“People can sleep 10 hours, but if you’re tossing and turning and you never had a dream and you never got any growth hormone, why did you even bother sleeping?” Asprey says. What actually controls how you feel is your deep sleep and your dreaming, not the number on the clock. He also swears that timing matters, telling Madison “every hour of sleep before midnight is worth kind of two after midnight,” so an earlier bedtime gets you more of the restorative stuff.

To get that deep, dreamy sleep, Asprey is a big believer in making your bedroom as dark as humanly possible:

• Hang blackout curtains and seal the edges with velcro or tape so nothing sneaks in. He points to a study tying the glow that leaks around city curtains to a real jump in depression risk.
• Tape over every blinky light, the chargers, the smoke detector, that one glowing dot on the TV. “Anything that’s blinky or glowy, put a little piece of tape over it,” Asprey says. “And you’ll be amazed. It’ll change your life.” He travels with stickers for exactly this, and once draped his pants over a hotel motion sensor just to get some sleep.
• Swap in dim red bulbs for late-night bathroom trips, so a 2 a.m. pee doesn’t blast your body with a midday signal.

Read instead of scrolling into a trance

Asprey isn’t anti-phone, but he’s blunt about what endless video does to you. “It puts you in a trance and that is just bad for you,” he says of the scroll. Reading, even on a screen, keeps your brain working, and his most charming prescription is fiction. “About 20 minutes of fiction a day will improve your life,” he says, because turning words into pictures in your head is the whole point. Audiobooks count too, as long as you keep the speed reasonable so it actually sticks.

None of this requires a supplement room or a five-day retreat, which is exactly why it lands. As Asprey sums up his whole philosophy, the goal is to “make you feel better now and heal over time.”

Listen to the full episode on You Wish, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Read Next:

• Maria Menounos on Health Anxiety, Burnout, and the Moment She Finally Slowed Down
• 9 Gut Health ‘Habits’ a Surgeon Says You Should Stop Immediately
• Tiny Health Habits a Doctor Swears By That Don’t Require a Gym, a Juice Cleanse, or Willpower