An Expert Neurohacker's Tips: This Is How To Upgrade Your Brain In 15 Minutes A Day 

So, let's dive into the work: Below, Ricker breaks down the four steps of what she deems the "neurohacker's ladder," F-S-T-R. She explains further, "F is for focus, S is for select, T is for train, and R is for reflect."

"Focus is for picking a mental target and focusing on what aspect of your mental performance you actually want to improve," says Ricker. You see, there are tons of subsets that fall under optimal mental health: IQ, learning and memory, creativity, etc. You can't exactly target them all in one fell swoop—that would be way too overwhelming, says Ricker. 

"You can't improve everything at once," she continues. What's more, if you do manage to incorporate multiple interventions at once, you don't know which intervention actually helped. "What I recommend, since I'm only talking about 15 minutes a day, is to just pick a single mental target that you're trying to improve, a main intervention that you're trying to work on," Ricker says. For example, let's say you want to focus on creativity—keep this mental ability in mind as you move along to the next rung. 

"Pick a protocol that says, 'I'm going to work on this particular intervention,'" says Ricker. And if sifting through the research sounds a bit too time-consuming, Ricker does the work for you, offering tons of research-backed interventions in her book. 

For example, if you're trying to enhance your creativity and testing whether HIIT exercise will help, make sure to implement 15 minutes of HIIT exercise every single day for your training period (Ricker suggests a 12-week program as a good timeframe to track any benefits).  

So, to circle back to our example: Is your creativity better than it was before? If so, great! If not, you may want to select a new intervention and start the process anew. Be patient: "You start again, you do a new self-experiment, and the adventure begins again." 

By spending time on each of these steps, Ricker says you can isolate your mental health goal and eventually upgrade to the best version of your brain. "Hopefully all of this has worked beautifully, and you're over the ladder," she says. "But if you're not, then it's fine." There are myriad ways to practice self-experimentation, after all—over time you'll find the intervention that works like a charm.