(This article by Lt. Col. Nick Barringer, USA (Ret), originally appeared in the November 2026 issue of Military Officer magazine.)

There’s a sauna in my garage and a red-light mask in the closet, and I enjoy a cold plunge.

So understand where I’m coming from when I say most people who ask me about that gear are asking the wrong question.

A while back, a retired O-6 walked me through his morning protocol: plunge at 5:30 a.m., followed by red light and three supplements I had to look up. Then I asked what time he went to bed. “Usually midnight,” he replied. And how much he was drinking? “A couple glasses of bourbon. Maybe three.”

He was polishing the brass on a ship with a hole in the hull.

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Biohacks are fun, measurable, and obtainable. What they are not is a substitute for the three factors that determine how you feel into your 40s and beyond — and they don’t cost thousands of dollars.

Sleep Is the Mission, Not the Recovery Period

You spent a career treating sleep as the thing you sacrificed when the timeline got tight. That made sense downrange. It makes no sense now.

Short sleep raises blood pressure, drives insulin resistance, and makes you hungry for exactly the food worth avoiding.

Get seven to nine hours of sleep. Almost nobody is fine on six; they’re just used to being tired. So fix the boring stuff: Maintain the same bedtime and wake time, Saturday included. Keep a cool, dark bedroom. Stop consuming caffeine eight hours before lights out; its half-life runs about five to six hours, so that 3 p.m. coffee is still working at 11 p.m.

If you snore and wake up unrefreshed, get a sleep study. Undiagnosed apnea is prevalent.

Eat Like Someone Who Plans to Still Be Lifting at 70

Consume 30-40 grams of protein at every meal. Most individuals I assess get a rounding error at breakfast, a sandwich at lunch, and try to make it up at dinner. A 2014 study in The Journal of Nutrition tested exactly that using the same subjects, the same 90 grams of daily protein, and two schedules.

Spread evenly at about 30 grams per meal, 24-hour muscle protein synthesis ran 25% higher than a skewed approach of about 10 grams at breakfast, 15 at lunch, 65 at dinner.

However, the caveat to this study is that it involved only eight subjects and one day of measurement, and longer trials in older adults haven’t reproduced the findings. Still, the combination of protein and lifting will reliably keep muscle on you.

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I push distribution anyway for a practical reason: You cannot backfill 130 grams at dinner. Aiming for 30 grams at breakfast is how you hit the daily number.

Also, include plants at every meal, since most carbs come from things that grew, and stop drinking your calories. Lift heavy twice a week, and walk daily.

Be Honest About Alcohol

While this topic can make people defensive, it’s also where the evidence is cleanest. A study published in 2018 by the journal JMIR Mental Health tracked 4,098 employed Finns with an average age of 45 who wore heart monitors while going about their lives, each person their own control.

The moderate-drinking group averaged 2.9 drinks per day. Across the first three hours of sleep, their heart rate ran four beats per minute higher, and overnight recovery dropped 24 percentage points.

Even for the low-drinking group, with a daily average of 1.1 drinks, it cost 9.3 percentage points in measuring recovery.

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But the finding that should get your attention: Being physically active protected no one. Fit subjects took the same hit as sedentary ones. You cannot train your way out of this, and you certainly cannot sauna your way out of it.

I’m not telling you to quit. I’m telling you to count. Cut your intake in half and see what your mornings look like.

The Bottom Line

Cold, heat, and light have real research behind them, and I use all three. But they’re the last 5%, and it only pays once you’ve secured the first 95%. Treat it like a range card: sleep, food, and alcohol are the data you plot before you ever take a shot. Everything else is windage — small corrections made on the fly.

So answer these three questions honestly: What time did you go to bed this week? How much protein did you consume before noon? How many alcoholic drinks have you had?

If those answers are ugly, you don’t have a biohacking problem — you have a basics problem, and no red light fixes it. Do the boring things for six months, then buy the gadget if you still want it. Only then might you actually feel what it’s doing.

Lt. Col. Nick Barringer, USA (Ret), is a founder of human performance consultancy Enkrateia.