☕️ Zes’presso: Andrew Hill - Instant actionable ways we can improve our brain

I sat down with Tony Wrighton on his show for a short midweek episode pulled from a longer Zestology conversation. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is drawn from what I shared there about the cheapest, highest-yield things you can do for your brain right now.

What Are the Highest-Yield Levers for Brain Health?

People reach for expensive biohacking gear when the heavy levers are sitting in their kitchen and their backyard. Sleep is the foundation. Get that on track first, because deep sleep drives clearance of metabolic waste from brain tissue (Xie et al., 2013) and locks in the day's learning. Once sleep is handled, two interventions give you the most return for the least money and effort: the timing of your eating and regular heat stress from a sauna.

Both work through the same underlying principle. You apply a mild, controlled stress, and the body adapts by getting stronger. The technical term is hormesis. A dose of stress that, at the right level, improves the system rather than damaging it.

For the broader framework on prioritizing your inputs, I cover this in Biohacking Intelligence and Biohacking Sleep.

How Does Meal Timing Change Your Brain?

When you eat matters as much as what you eat, and the timing is the easier variable to control. Compressing your daily eating into a slightly shorter window is one of the most accessible things you can do for neuroplasticity.

Here is the mechanism. When you stop eating for an extended stretch, insulin drops and the body shifts out of storage mode. That fasting window triggers autophagy, the cell's self-cleaning process that breaks down and recycles damaged tissue. The same fasting state supports deeper sleep and steadier insulin regulation. You are telling the body it is under a brief, positive stress, and the system responds by clearing house and rebuilding with more elasticity.

You do not need a dramatic protocol. Pulling your eating into a tighter window gives the fasted side of the day room to do this work. The research finds effects on inflammatory markers, body fat composition, and metabolic measures (Sutton et al., 2018). This is physiological reasoning grounded in the metabolic literature on time-restricted eating, and the individual response varies, so test it on yourself rather than assuming the textbook number applies to you.

I get into the protocols and the trade-offs in Strategic Fasting and the morning-routine version in Biohacking Your Morning.

Should You Eat Carbs for Brain Function?

Your relationship with food is more complicated than a macro spreadsheet. There are ethical, cultural, and religious considerations, plus your own physical response. For long-term brain health and aging, the general direction I point people toward is minimizing starches and sugars and maximizing good fats. That gives the brain a steady fuel source and keeps insulin signaling clean.

The individual piece matters. Some people function better when they reintroduce more carbohydrates at specific times of day. The way to find your answer is to test it directly and track how your cognition and energy respond. Treat your own diet as an experiment with measurable outputs, not a fixed prescription.

Why Is the Sauna One of the Best Cheap Brain Interventions?

The sauna is near the top of my list of first interventions to try. The research, mostly from the long-running Finnish cohort studies, shows reductions in all-cause mortality (Laukkanen et al., 2015) and lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease with frequent use (Laukkanen et al., 2017). The associations are sizable, scaling with frequency of use, though these are observational findings and the precise figures vary by outcome and population. This is well-established observational evidence.

Heat stress is a hormetic input. The elevated core temperature triggers a cascade of repair and protective responses, including heat-shock proteins and improved vascular function, and the brain benefits from the better circulation and the adaptive stress response. The same logic applies to cold exposure, which is a different flavor of useful stress, though you get the bulk of the benefit from heat alone without needing the cold end.

The cost is the reason I like it so much. A backyard cedar unit with a heating element runs you the price of the element. No expensive lab equipment, no subscription. Build it and use it.

How Should You Use a Sauna?

The pattern with the best support is every other day, running two or three cycles of roughly 10 to 20 minutes each. You can cool down between cycles, a cold shower if you want the additional hormetic hit, though that step is optional.

Watch your own response. Most people feel a clear glow of well-being later the same day. If instead you feel wiped out, like you were hit by a truck, you are likely dealing with a hydration problem or an inflammatory response. That is your signal to address the underlying issue before you push the dose higher. If you feel worse after a session, do not do more.

This caution applies across hormetic interventions. The stress is only useful at the dose your body can recover from. For some people, heavy sauna use is contraindicated or genuinely stressful rather than beneficial, so build up gradually and read your own feedback.

Where to Start

Handle sleep first. Compress your eating window to give autophagy and insulin regulation room to work. Add a sauna every other day and watch how you feel later that day. None of these cost much, and the return on attention and long-term brain health is the largest you will get for the money. Test each one on yourself and keep what measurably helps. If you want to understand the aging side of why this matters, I cover the timeline in The Critical Aging Window.