Experts Reveal the 6 Surprising Indicators of Longevity You Should Know
If you haven’t been following the biohacking mania, there are 24 viral seconds of Bryan Johnson on TikTok that are a good place to start. As the video begins, he turns longingly to his then-17-year-old son. “I’m feeling a little low,” he says as the two sit side by side, shirtless, arms extended, phlebotomist-style. The teen makes a fist and (with the help of a few sci-fi video tricks) a metallic compartment in his forearm opens, revealing a vial of blood. “I got you, Dad,” he replies, taking it and handing it to his father.
The clip, posted in April, is a play on a real-life plasma infusion Johnson, 47, got from his son—one of his many attempts to reverse aging at all costs, which for him, apparently runs $2 million a year. He is definitely one of the most extreme biohackers, and, I confess, a little addicting to follow. An ex-Mormon farm boy who sold his company, Braintree Venmo, to PayPal for $800 million, he’s turned his obviously bright mind on the business of himself—constantly testing, scanning, and monitoring everything from testosterone to telomeres to calculate how fast he’s aging, including the number of nighttime erections (“Better than the average 18-year-old,” he boasts). At times, he’ll post nudes, his bulging musculature courtesy of 800-pound leg presses, a strict diet (mostly vegan, no wine—too many calories), and some 100 supplements a day. Perhaps most notable, and widely discussed, is his skin, which can only be described as #vampirepale with a Madame Tussauds waxy sheen.
Johnson’s regimen might sound bizarre, but he has lots of company. The biohacking world is backed by investors including Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Peter Thiel (founders of Amazon, Alphabet, and PayPal) and populated with cultural hitters like Bulletproof’s Dave Asprey, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, megapodcaster Andrew Huberman, and David Sinclair, PhD, at Harvard Medical School, who got major backlash from longevity scientists after promoting a supplement as “proven to reverse aging in dogs” (a wild claim he was forced to dial back). Their protocols variously include cryotherapy, intermittent fasting or eating all your daily food in a two-to-three-hour window, and pounding the exercise. And these tactics are finding their way into the general population, at least the 1 percent-ish, thanks to a whole new longevity industry of pricey clinics and services offering ice plunges, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, IV vitamin drips, infrared light treatment, full fMRI scans, and body-tracking wearables that put the CIA to shame.
But even for the rest of us, the anxiety of all of it has trickled down. It’s impossible to scroll through Instagram or TikTok or check your Apple Watch and not feel the relentless drumbeat of shoulds: what you should eat, how long you should sleep, and how much more you should work out, meditate, and motivate to live longer, better, younger. We live in this culture where hyped ambition is pumped into our reality like Muzak. We’re never doing enough. And the pressure to optimize is so pervasive, it’s stressful…which, of course, is a catch-22 and a laughable irony. Because it’s Nobel Prize–winningly clear (thank you to the women scientists who did the groundbreaking research) that stress itself is one of the most ferocious agers around. It literally eats at your DNA.
Thinking about all this, I recently watched my friend Ginny Brooke take the stage with her guitar at an open mic night. This is a woman who rides her age like a trusty horse. She stands there in her jeans and cowboy boots, the lines on her face laid melodically like tracks of a song—of her loves and losses, the hitchhiking to Alaska, the raising of a son. At 72, she had the rapt attention of every man in the room.
“Longevity is not a competition,” she tells me later. “Why chase youth? If I’m clinging to what is already there, then whatever’s next doesn’t come in.” A longtime bodywork specialist, Brooke recently gave up the cello because it aggravated her arthritis, and then felt the urge to play with art pencils, which led to a gig doing drawings for a short film. At 71, she took up figure skating and went to guitar camp. She volunteers, seeks spiritual wisdom, and always asks her body what it wants. Yoga? Hiking? Maybe a good book? Brooke’s attitude is something scientists actually have a name for: “aging satisfaction.” According to a 2022 study, among 13,752 participants, those with the highest level of satisfaction compared with the lowest (accounting for how their levels had changed over previous years) had a 43 percent reduced risk of mortality.
Brooke is such the antithesis of the biohack brohood and its punishing ethos of discipline, control, self-focus, and deprivation. And okay, it’s not just men who do it, and we need to be mindful of gender stereotyping, even binary labeling at all. But studies—piles of them—have proven a radically different protocol for youthful longevity that women tend to embrace and most of us know in our bones. It involves friends and aunties, giving back, learning new things, spirituality, and a good dose of pleasure as it all unfolds. Maybe it’s not as splashy or (let’s face it) monetizable as plasma infusions and EEG readings, but these things are biohacks in their own right, and it’s time they got their respect.
Here’s what we know about extending your health span—or as Susan Golden, author of Stage (Not Age), puts it, your “joy span”—which, by the way, is nothing to sneeze at since women do live longer than men, and the gap is widening.
We don’t white-knuckle it.
First, to be fair, Huberman and his cohort deserve credit for sparking interest and hustling the science along, because there is promising research behind many of their techniques—even plasma exchange, at least in animals. But there are no long-term studies to prove these antics extend life or even health span. “None of this is ready for prime time,” emphasizes John (Jack) Rowe, MD, professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University, who was a founding director of Harvard Medical School’s division on aging. “Now, someone might tell me, ‘Jack, I can’t wait.’ And it’s their money and their body. But that doesn’t equate to a statement that what they’re doing should be widely adopted.”
Even if it should, we’re back to that question of stress. At what point does all the deprivation, punishment, and control in the pursuit of longevity tip into diminishing returns? Or totally backfire? As Rowe points out, caloric restriction has been shown to reduce aging, but to get the effect, it’s miserable; you basically feel like you’re starving. “People joke about it and say that it didn’t lengthen life,” he notes, “it just seemed to.”
“To me,” says Laura Carstensen, straight from the valley of the biohackers, “this is a 50-something rich white male phenomenon. I mean, a lot of these people are my friends, and I think the world of them. But frankly, I’m not going to give up my wine.” Like Rowe, Carstensen knows a thing or two about aging. A PhD and the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, she’s a widely respected leader in the field. Her body of work suggests that as our time horizon gets shorter, we naturally see the bright side, feel more positive emotions, and focus on savoring experiences in the moment they occur. At age 70, that includes her wine, though, yeah, she’s up on the risks. “When the doctor asks, ‘How many glasses a day?,’ I totally tell the truth, so I sound like a blatant alcoholic,” she says, smiling. “But I’m not drinking and driving. I’m having a couple glasses with my healthy dinner. Also, what never gets factored into the studies is the joy I get from that.”
And while we’re on the topic of a healthy dinner, distilling it down into a slug of Athletic Greens and a supplement stack you choke down on the way to the gym misses a critical nutrient of longevity—the enormous social and emotional benefit of sitting down to a meal with others. The Mediterranean diet doesn’t keep coming up as number one just because of its ingredients. Part of its impact is the whole approach of gathering around a table for the ceremony and unrushed ritual of sharing food. “If you aren’t enjoying the life you’re living,” says Carstensen, “what is the point?”
We treat our friendships like muscles.
Beyond good genetics and a modicum of luck, at 92, Myra Shapiro must be onto something. A poet featured in the new book When a Woman Tells the Truth: Writings and Creative Work by Women Over 80, she tells me, “Old age isn’t what I expected. It seems vital.” She writes daily, teaches workshops, walks and takes the bus around New York City, and exercises with a trainer every week. When I ask where the energy comes from, she says, “It’s community—the friendships you make, family, the poetry world. It’s really about having others close to you.”
You’re likely thinking that this is a no-brainer: Life is short without good friends and family. Not just that, but strong relationships take nurturing, or what Robert Waldinger, MD, calls social fitness. He’s the current director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-known longevity project of its kind, still tracking the same group of people and their families since 1938. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the investigators started noticing something surprising. Among everything they were measuring, the most powerful indicator of those who survived well was having good relationships—and ones they worked at. “We didn’t believe it at first,” Waldinger says. “You can imagine how exercise would affect your physiology, but how could the quality of your relationships get into your body and change it? Like, how could that even be a thing?”
Indeed, a growing body of research has shown that having no one to lean on is like taking paint stripper to your longevity. When something upsetting happens to you, your whole nervous system goes, Quick! Fight or flight, and just telling a good friend or spouse can calm you and bring you back to center, explains Waldinger, who’s also a Zen priest and coauthor of The Good Life, a book about the Harvard study. If you don’t have anyone to talk you down, you stay jacked up much longer. “What that means,” he says, “is there are higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol, which leads to higher levels of chronic inflammation and weaker immune systems.” Consistent loneliness is associated with a 56 percent increased risk of stroke. And social isolation can lead to a 74 percent higher risk of dying prematurely.
Men do tend to be lonelier and more isolated than women, although factors like marriage and circumstance can make a difference. Even Robert Putnam, who wrote the groundbreaking book Bowling Alone on the topic 24 years ago, confessed to The New York Times with some embarrassment, “I write about and talk about the importance of connections, but my wife actually does it. She is actually the one who joins everything.”
If you are feeling socially stranded, Waldinger suggests that one of the easiest ways to connect is finding a group involved with something you care about—gardening, training for a race, fighting climate change—so you have an instant conversation starter. Intergenerational relationships seem to be particularly fortifying, since younger friends and relatives keep you plugged into the culture, while older ones can offer perspective.
Seeing that value for Black women, Nicole Kenney, a former senior communications associate for the NAACP, started Hey Auntie! in 2021. “All aunties are amazing,” she says, “but the Black auntie is unique because she extends beyond biological kinship.” Traditionally in Africa, Kenney explains, each child was considered every woman’s child. When people were brought here as slaves and families were torn apart, wherever the kids landed, women on that plantation became their aunties. Modeled on that history of resilience, Kenney’s free platform connects members from their 20s to 70s, women who, for example, may be going through a divorce or who are the only Black person in the C-suite, to share support and wisdom. “One of the biggest pieces of advice my auntie gave me was, ‘Instead of investing in the stock market, you need to be investing in your relationships,’” Kenney says. “Because that is where you’re going to have the greatest return.”
We know it isn’t all about us (imagine that!).
Another great longevity investment is giving back. As opposed to the self-absorption required of lifestyles like Bryan Johnson’s, helping others is actually an incredible biohack. Women have this one down, too—we volunteer more than men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly twice as many women than men did it on an average day in 2022.
The science here is advanced. Broadly, research shows that giving 100 hours a year or more of your time to a charitable organization leads to a 44 percent reduced mortality risk. Even helping out informally—babysitting or cooking a meal for someone—has benefits. Julia Nakamura, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia who has done some of that research, conducted a separate study where she posed the question: Is volunteering associated with slower biological aging? Together with researchers from UBC, UCLA, Harvard, and others, she analyzed various “epigenetic clocks,” which estimate cellular aging, in more than 4,000 subjects. Volunteering, they found, is actually associated with slower age acceleration.
Columbia’s Rowe is a big advocate. “It’s about engagement,” he says, urging women not to wait. Earlier research from the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., showed that you’re way more likely (81 percent) to volunteer after retirement if you’ve been doing it before than if you haven’t (only 27 percent start). Not that Rowe suggests you retire. He and I happened to speak the day before he turned 80. When I asked him how he’d be celebrating, he said, “Working! Which is the best possible thing you can do on your birthday if you’re my age.”
That or learning something new.
We keep reinventing ourselves.
Rachel Wu, a former rock violinist known as Echo for the indie band the Outside Royalty who got her PhD and became an associate psychology professor at UC Riverside, has found that learning new things, ideally a variety of them at once, is a powerful brain rejuvenator. In one small study she is now repeating in larger groups, she put men and women ages 58 to 86 through 12 weeks of classes in three subjects like Spanish, music composition, and drawing. A year later, 22 of them were tested, and their cognitive scores were like 19-year-olds. “They did not enjoy parts of it,” she says of the intervention, especially at first, and it was exhausting—seven hours a week, plus homework. But in the end, she says, they were telling her, “It’s almost like we went through a war, and now we feel like we could learn anything.”
The secret sauce for longevity isn’t about mastering a skill, Wu explains; it’s identifying yourself as a learner, or having what she calls a “growth mindset”—the difference between saying, “I may not be good at art, but if I work at it, I’ll probably get better” versus a fixed mindset of “I don’t have the artistic gene, so why bother trying?” It means not competing and controlling and comparing yourself but, rather, being open to what’s possible, and so what if you fail?
Even if you’re still working, Wu suggests learning new skills that could boost your career or, best of all, taking up a new sport or physical activity, which offers a double longevity hit. The benefits go beyond scoring well on a cognition test; you become more able to change with the culture and keep up with things like technology. (Wu stops to laugh at herself. “I’m approaching 40, and I’m not on Twitter,” she says. “I should be. I mean, it’s not even called Twitter anymore.” But she just had twins, so she gets a pass.) Anecdotally, she says, participants who’d been through the classes adapted nimbly when the pandemic hit, learning to fix their own toilets and give themselves manicures.
Golden, the author of Stage (Not Age), takes the learning mindset even further. A former partner at a venture capital firm and manager of investor relations at Genentech who took a long career break to be a caregiver (which she states proudly on her LinkedIn), she participated in a program at Stanford University to reimagine her next chapter. She met others, like an attorney who became a cartoonist and a pediatrician now studying to be a rabbi. For her new career, she became a subject matter expert in longevity innovations and the care economy, which led to the book, consulting, and teaching courses at Stanford’s business school.
Myra Shapiro, the 92-year-old poet, also reimagined herself. She’d been a housewife and mother of two in Chattanooga, Tennessee—at the time, the “prescribed way of living,” as she puts it. But the year she turned 50, after reading Betty Friedan’s 1963 domesticity wrecker, The Feminine Mystique, she left home and took a sublet in Manhattan to write poems, which were eventually published in places like The New Yorker. She didn’t see her first book come out until she was 64. Although she’s had many painful losses—her husband, a young grandson—in the years since, she’s still in that growth mindset, “living to the nth degree, exploring and discovering who you are.”
What it comes down to, says Golden, “is not being defined by what you have been. The gift of living longer is looking forward. It’s rethinking your purpose.”
We welcome the spiritual.
Religion and spiritual practice are commonly understood sources of strength and purpose, and centuries of wisdom tell us that this kind of fluency in the unknowable is important to aging well. Katelyn Long, a researcher at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, was on a team that conducted a systematic review where they took thousands of scientific articles on religion, spirituality, and health and extracted the ones that had used the most rigorous research methodology to see what the big-picture effects were. “At the individual level, these experiences are often very nuanced,” she says. “Some people get hurt in religious communities. But we can now say: Wow, we really do see that at the whole population level, certain aspects of religious and spiritual life tend to lead to well-being and health.”
The benefits are especially strong for religious service attendance, in part because it concretely sparks the powerful community effect Waldinger is talking about. “But social support doesn’t explain all of it,” says Long. “There’s an X factor. A sense of mystery and curiosity and wonder.” Because so much of our fear is rooted in an inability to see beyond our individual experiences, tapping into the collective can offer much-needed perspective and therefore relief. That’s true of spirituality, too, whether you tap in by reading sacred texts, praying, meditating, believing in the divine, or having a sense of transcendence. Many women find communion and belonging—the antidotes to loneliness—through practicing together.
“Seeing our youth fade may bring about very real fear—so much so that we might be willing to hook ourselves up and go to any length to preserve it,” Long says when asked her thoughts on biohacking. “But spirituality and faith give us an opportunity to say that there are things on the horizon that scare us, that we don’t know how to face well, and that we need help. It’s an opportunity to return to old things as opposed to always just rushing toward the new. Things like prayer, things like participating in a religious community. Some of these ideas are very deep and can hold us and carry us. And maybe they’ll start to feel new again.”
We know how to hold two things at once.
Nichol Bradford wants to marry the old and the new. The cofounder of Niremia Collective, a venture capital firm specializing in well-being tech, she hates the word biohacker. “It sounds violent,” she says. And yet, she has to admit she qualifies, given the raft of diagnostic tests and scans she does, the copious supplements she ingests, and the intense weight lifting she has “fallen in love with” along with her wearables. But she also says it’s not just about hacking biology for her. “It’s about your ‘why.’ Like, what are you going to do with the extra time?” she says. “I believe in the ability to use technology to get better versions of the things we already know to work.”
Bradford comes at this with an unusual perspective. The rare African American woman to walk the executive ranks of the video game world, at one point leading operations for World of Warcraft in China, she saw how technology powered connections. A transformative meditation retreat in Japan convinced her to refocus on using tech to make that kind of experience more accessible. Among the many things she’s doing now is investing in well-being and inner landscape start-ups like DeepWell’s video games, which help master stress and build resilience, and Breathwrk’s app of breathing exercises and classes.
If technology like this can facilitate healthy longevity, it was Bradford’s auntie who provided her “why.” When the beloved relative died recently, one of the friends at her celebration of life was a 100-year-old woman who was so energetic, Bradford was stunned. At 52, she suddenly saw herself at 100—she had another 50 years to go. And the rush of extra time shifted her priorities. “I’d had a goal at one point to climb Everest when I was young, but gave it up in my early 40s because I was so busy,” Bradford says. “Talking to this centenarian, I was like, You know what? I’m going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro this year. And if I like it, I’m going to do one mountain every year afterward. The dreams I’ve given up I’m now pulling back out.”
In addition to her biohacks, Bradford meditates and does a daily gratitude practice, often reaching out to her WhatsApp circle to see who’s up for partnering. (One person names something they’re grateful for, then the other does, and you alternate for, say, three minutes. Try it for an instant connection.) Bradford finds apps and wearables especially helpful for getting good sleep, which has a host of longevity benefits. And since wine cuts into dream time, she doesn’t sip just anything: “It has to taste like the grapes were rolled between the thighs of baby Jesus, or I don’t drink. It’s always about making a longevity choice.”
Ultimately, we’re always aging, like it or not. And there are many ways to do it well. Perhaps Bradford has the answer. Or Bryan Johnson will find the Fountain of Youth in his regimen of deprivation and control. Or maybe my friend Ginny has the secret to a long and pleasurable joy span–a recipe she reveals one night halfway through doing it:
“A tiny piece of my friend Mary’s pot brownie, a hot Epsom salt bath, and a good mattress.”
The final ingredient? “You do need to laugh.”
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