Biohacking is the deliberate use of habits, measurements and technologies to change how you sleep, recover, feel and perform. Some of it is well supported. A lot of it is a mechanism that sounds convincing wearing the clothes of a result. This library sorts one from the other.
I am a dentist whose practice is limited to jaw joints, facial pain and breathing during sleep. That is a narrower lane than “wellness”, and it is the reason this library exists. Patients kept asking me about red light panels, cold plunges, sauna, breathing protocols and peptides, and the answers they were finding online were written by people selling the thing.
So I started writing them down. Each guide says what the evidence shows, what it does not show, what I have actually used, and what I have not.
What biohacking actually means, and what it does not
It means changing an input and watching what happens to an output. Light exposure, temperature, breathing, sleep timing, training load, food, measurement.
It does not mean any of these things are treatments. Most of what is on this site is not something we provide at our practice, and several of the subjects here are ones I write about precisely because I think the marketing has run ahead of the evidence.
There is a section further down that spells out which is which.
Start with the foundations, not the gadgets
If you are not sleeping, not moving, eating badly and permanently braced, no device is going to rescue that. This is not a moral point, it is an order-of-operations point. The foundations are where the effect sizes are, and they are free.
Sleep and breathing
How you breathe at night is upstream of most of the rest. If you snore, wake unrefreshed, grind your teeth, or wake with a headache or a sore jaw, that is worth investigating properly before you optimise anything. A wearable does not answer this question. We provide sleep testing and oral appliance therapy for sleep apnea.
Movement
Joints need to move to stay healthy. Motion is the lotion.
Nutrition
Whole food, enough protein, enough water. The interesting arguments are downstream of the boring parts. We offer nutrition and lifestyle support as part of a treatment plan.
Stress regulation
Clenching and grinding are your body’s alarm system. They are a signal with more than one possible driver, including pain, difficulty breathing during sleep, and anxiety. They are not the problem itself.
Work on those four for a season and then come back to the devices. They will work better, and you will be able to tell whether they are doing anything.
What are you trying to change?
Pick the outcome you actually care about, and the guides follow from there.
Better sleep. Start with breathing, then light timing, then temperature, then everything else.
Pain and recovery. Light, heat, cold, load management, and knowing when a symptom needs a diagnosis rather than a protocol.
Energy and performance. Mostly sleep, wearing a different hat.
Stress regulation. Breathing, cold, and the honest limits of both.
Healthy aging. The area with the loudest marketing and the thinnest human evidence.
Browse by method
Each method below gets its own guide. Where a guide is not written yet, this page says so rather than linking somewhere that does not exist.
Light. Red and near-infrared light, in the clinic and at home. These are related and they are not the same, and the difference is mostly about how much light reaches the tissue. The clinical side is photobiomodulation in Rogers. For the home side, read red light therapy at home versus clinical photobiomodulation.
Heat. Traditional sauna and infrared cabins. Studied differently, in different people, with different results. Anyone who tells you the evidence for one is the evidence for the other has not read it. Read why the famous study is not about infrared. Not provided at our practice.
Cold. Cold showers and cold water immersion. Popular, pleasant for some people, and the trial evidence is smaller and more mixed than the marketing suggests. Read what the evidence actually shows. Not provided at our practice.
Breathing. Nasal breathing, slow breathing, and Buteyko-style work. This one is close to my clinical work, which means I am more careful with it, not less. Read what the evidence shows, and where I stand on mouth taping.
Measurement and wearables. Useful for trends. Not a diagnosis. Read what a sleep wearable can and cannot tell you. Not provided at our practice.
Supplements and nutrition. Where the gap between what is claimed and what is shown is widest. Read what the trials actually show, and why I will not recommend one.
Peptides and emerging therapies. Educational pages, with no products and no protocols. We do not prescribe, dispense or administer any of these, and I am not the right clinician to advise you on them. Guide in preparation.
Regenerative treatments. PRF and PRP. These we do provide, for specific joint problems, and the clinical pages explain who they are actually for. See regenerative treatments we provide and PRF for the jaw joint.
How I score the evidence
Every guide gives each method one of five scores.
Established. Good randomized evidence, in people like you, measuring something you would care about.
Moderate. There is randomized evidence. It is mixed, or small, or short, or it studied a different group.
Preliminary. There is a plausible biological story and some early human work. There is not a good trial yet.
Insufficient. Somebody asked the question and the answer is not in.
Not recommended. Either the risk outweighs anything shown, or a regulator has raised a concern.
Next to the score you get the likely benefit, the downsides, the cost, the hassle, who should avoid it, and how much first-hand experience I have. That last one includes “none”, and several pages here say it.
One distinction does most of the work on this site. A mechanism is a reason something might work. A result is what happened when somebody tried it in people and counted. Almost all overclaiming in this field is a mechanism described in the grammar of a result.
What we treat here, and what I only write about
This is the part most health sites leave vague, so here it is plainly.
Provided at our practice in Rogers. Diagnosis and treatment of jaw joint and facial pain problems. Custom decompression and stabilization orthotics. Sleep-disordered breathing and oral appliance therapy. Clinical photobiomodulation, which is red light and near-infrared therapy delivered in the office. MLS and low-level laser therapy. PRF and PRP regenerative injections. SPG blocks. Breathing instruction, and nutrition and lifestyle counselling as part of a treatment plan. You can see everything we treat.
Written about here and not provided by us. Home red light devices. Cold exposure and cold plunges. Sauna, traditional or infrared. Wearables. Peptides of any kind, approved or compounded. Exosome and stem cell products. Retail supplements.
If a page is about something in the second list, it says so at the top. There is no consultation button on those pages, because there is nothing here to book.
Products I recommend, and how I choose them
Some pages here recommend products, and some of those links earn a commission. Every one says so next to the link, and our financial disclosure sets out every relationship we have.
Each product says what I actually did with it: tested, used, or researched without using. It says who it is for, who should skip it, the criteria I used, what the specifications actually mean, and what I would buy instead if the price is out of reach. If I have not used something, the page says that rather than implying otherwise.
About the author and how this site is reviewed
I am Kyle Benton, DDS, FAACP, Fellow of the American Academy of Craniofacial Pain. I spent fourteen years as a general dentist before limiting my practice to TMJ and TMD, orofacial and craniofacial pain, sleep-disordered breathing, and regenerative dentistry. I have been treating these conditions since 2012. More about my background.
I review what falls inside that. When a subject falls outside it, a clinician in the right field reviews the page and is named on it. Where we have not found the right reviewer, the page is not published, and there are subjects on my list right now that are sitting unpublished for that reason.
Our editorial standards, financial disclosure and corrections list are all public.
Where to go next
If something hurts, or you are not sleeping well. Jaw pain, facial pain, headaches, snoring, waking unrefreshed, clenching or grinding are worth a proper look rather than a protocol. Book a consultation.
If you want the guides. They are being written now, and this page is where they will be listed as each one goes live.