Longevity levers - A Framework For Living Better Longer
“The pyramids have longevity because they were carefully built upon a solid foundation of knowledge and patience.”
Most men I know are good at planning for their retirement.
They save and invest, making sure they have all the money they need to live the life they want after the’ve stopped working.
The problem is, while they might have enough money to live well for 20-30 years after they’ve retired, their body and mind might not last as long.
In fact, most men retire between 65-70 years old, but the life expectancy for males in the United States is around 75!
Most men retire between 65-70 years old, but the life expectancy for males in the United States is around 75…that’s not long!
That’s not a long time to enjoy the fruits of your labors or to watch your children and grandchildren grow to have families of their own.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve talked with countless men, many of them in their late 50’s or early 60’s, who barely survived a heart attack or stroke.
The thing is, none of them saw it coming. They never expected it would happen to them…especially not so young.
They weren’t habitual smokers, didn’t drink heavily, and weren’t severely overweight. They didn’t fit the typical image of the high-risk heart attack or stroke victim.
They just assumed they were in good health and had a lot of years ahead of them, yet it still happened to them.
They also never planned on living a life filled with doctor’s appointments, multiple surgeries, or having to take 10 to 15 medicines with adverse side effects just to keep from having another heart attack or stroke.
While you can’t prolong your life indefinitely, you do have a lot more control over your health and longevity than you may realize, and it’s never too late to start!
I’ve written this article to give you a framework of practical things you can start doing now to improve your health and add more good years to your life.
I call them Longevity Levers because these are the 6 actionable areas of your life where you can have the biggest leverage over how you feel, how healthy and vital you are, and ultimately how long you live.
I like to use this system with all my clients because it gives them a simple framework for prioritizing their focus and efforts.
If you notice the pyramid diagram, the sequence of the 6 different areas, starting from bottom to top, is additive.
Each area adds additional leverage and support to the areas above it creating a MEGA LEVER.
And, just like Voltron, guardian of the Universe, is greater than the sum of his feline parts, the longevity levers all work together to accelerate progress toward living a long and healthy life.
I hope you find these articles helpful and invite you to start a conversation with me directly on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X to learn more about living better longer.
The 6 Longevity Levers
1- Sleep: The Master Controller Of Your Health, Longevity, and Performance
As a young paratrooper medic in the U.S. Army, I was often told “you’ll get enough sleep when you’re dead, soldier.” A similar sentiment is echoed in medical schools, corporate culture, party culture and pretty much every group that feels they just don’t have enough time in the day. The problem is that habitually squeezing in a few more hours of work, study, video games or television could actually squeeze good years off of your life.
The most current research on health and longevity is clear: high-quality sleep is the most important thing you can do to feel better now and improve your longevity. This is why it’s the base of the pyramid. Good sleep can improve fat loss by up to 40% and muscle gain by 30%. Poor sleep, on the other hand, can increase your body fat, reduce testosterone, and increase your blood glucose, all of which are associated with a wide range of chronic disease and a shorter life expectancy.
High-quality sleep is the most important thing you can do to feel better now and improve your longevity.
Look out for the upcoming Sleep Optimization Guide where I’ll distill the science and suggestions from the world’s top sleep experts into an actionable guide to help you get a better night’s sleep.
2- Fitness And Exercise: The Biggest Health And Longevity Booster
Fitness isn’t just about feeling healthy, strong, and looking good in a bathing suit. It’s scientifically the most robust predictor for your longevity. Your fitness is the one thing, besides sleep, that you have direct control over for boosting your longevity. According to the science, every time you increase your aerobic fitness or gain more strength, you’re actually adding more good years to your life!
Also, gone are the days when people leave their longevity up to their genes. Improving your fitness can actually change your genetics!
The problem is most people don’t know what to do, where to start, and how to stay consistent once they get going. And of course most people make it way harder than it needs to be.
To help with this, I’ve already written a few articles like this one and made some videos to help you get fitter you can find on my website and Youtube channel.
Also, look out for the upcoming Longevity Fitness Guide where I’ll give you a simple, science-based program to help you build muscle, lose fat and improve your heart health.
3- Microbiome-Based Nutrition: Feed Your Gut To Feed Your Life
There’s a lot of controversy and tribalism in nutrition these days- way more than when I first started studying it as a nutritional biochemist in the 90’s.
One benefit from having studied nutrition for so long is that I’ve seen a lot of diet fads come and go over the decades. Regardless of all the bandwagoning about keto diets, carnivore diets, vegan diets, mediterranean diets, blue zones….there’s one science-based nutrition principle I feel is king and always rises well above the noise.
Feed your gut! I don’t mean stuff your gut with anything and everything you can find. I mean feed and nourish the 100 trillion little microanimals that inhabit your digestive tract.
The thing is, there are specific foods (and supplements) that make your commensal, symbiotic microbes very happy, and there are foods (and drugs) that make them sad, and can utterly destroy them.
Here’s the weird thing about your microbiome. Your collective microbiota has a lot of influence over your health, your mood, your choices, and even your behavior than you’re probably ready to believe.
When you feed your good, symbiotic microbes what they need to thrive, they will support you and help you to thrive as well!
When you fail to feed your gut what it needs to be healthy, a wide range of chronic diseases including heart disease, autoimmune disease, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are more likely to happen, and much earlier than usual.
Look out for the Microbiome-Based Nutrition Guide where I’ll share my favorite protocols, strategies and recipes for losing fat, improving metabolic health and preventing chronic disease, all by taking care of your gut microbiome.
4- Beyond Stress Management - How to build life-long physical and mental resilience
The majority of health and longevity experts say that stress is a silent killer, but what do they actually mean by that?
It’s not always obvious when you’re over-stressed, especially if you’ve been stressed for a long time, because it can become a normalized dysfunction.
But, just like all normalized dysfunctions like poor sleep, sedentary lifestyles, poor diet, binge drinking, smoking, and environmental pollution, unmanaged stress will eventually take its toll on all aspects of your health, slowly eroding your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.
It can be a helpful and important exercise to inventory all sources of stress, decide what you have control over, and make the life changes necessary to reduce your stress…this is called stress management.
Also, when you have a solid foundation of sleep, fitness and a healthy diet, you’ll be more naturally resilient to stress.
But we can go even beyond that where you can actually learn how to tune your nervous system like a musical instrument. This way when stressful experiences happen you’ll have more control over how you experience them, and more importantly, you’ll be able to choose how you want to respond.
I call this Beyond Stress Management, and I’ll be providing a complete guide to helping you better assess, reduce and respond to the stressful situations in your life.
5- Supplements - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
75% of Americans use dietary supplements and vitamins. The problem is most people don’t know:
Why they’re taking them
What they’re useful for
Potential side effects and drug interactions
How much they should take
How often and long they should take them
What’s actually in the bottle or pill
Here’s the scary truth.
The supplement industry in the U.S. is a multi-billion dollar business, and since it’s completely unregulated, they can use fear-based marketing and unrealistic claims to trick people out of their hard-earned cash.
While this is obviously unethical, it can also be harmful to your health and undermine the very goals you’re taking the supplement for in the first place.
Some vitamins and supplements can be harmful to your health and actually undermine your health and longevity goals.
This isn’t to say there aren’t good supplements out there made by ethical companies who spend the money to design and manufacture their products with similar strictures that pharmaceutical companies use to make drugs.
I do believe that many people can really benefit from using specific supplement protocols for specific health conditions and for specific periods of time.
One of my goals is to help my clients and readers choose their supplements for safety and effectiveness, this way they’re taking only what they need and nothing they don’t.
Look for the upcoming Evidence-Based Supplement Guide where I’ll share my favorite protocols including what they do, how they work, standard dosages, and which companies I use for myself and all my clients.
6- Peak Performance - Finding Your Flow
Life feels so much better when you’re in flow!
Remember those times where everything seemed to happen easily and without much friction? Even if you were up against big challenges, you just seemed to move through life and the situations effortlessly like threading a needle.
For most people I talk to, these experiences seem to happen randomly and often by accident. The truth is you can access deep states of flow and peak performance every day. You just need the right foundation.
Flow and Peak Performance are the rewards at the top of the pyramid that result from:
Sleeping well
Improving your fitness
Feeding your microbiome
Building resilience to stress
Using the right drugs or supplements
Then, once you have a solid foundation, all you need are some simple triggers to evoke an altered state of consciousness where you feel you best and perform at your best.
Look out for the upcoming Flow Forward Guide where I’ll give you science-backed tools for creating more flow in your life and performing at your peak.
Summary:
Sickness, old age and death are intentional blind spots for many of us, and while we prepare diligently to retire in a good financial state, we often neglect our health until we’re forced by some injury or disease to make some change in our life.
While it’s never too late to start improving your health, the earlier you get started the better…and there’s no better time like now.
It’s also good to have a system to help you organize and prioritize your efforts.
Sleep, fitness, a microbiome-based diet, stress-resilience and personalized drug and supplementation protocols, and a flow-based lifestyle can build a solid foundation so you can live a long life and thrive well into old age.
In future articles of this series, I’ll give you practical and actionable tools you can use to build your own health and longevity program so you can work toward the life and retirement you really want, and not the one that you’ll get if you leave it to chance.