How to (enjoyably) mimic adversity for a long and healthy life

I’d love to see the 22nd century. That means I need to reach the ripe old age of 116 (and have enough marbles left to enjoy the achievement). At first glance, this might seem unrealistic, but the more I learn about health and longevity, the more optimistic I become about my chances.

Harvard professor David Sinclair’s Lifespan podcast was the latest in a long line of learning. Much of the lifestyle advice he offers will sound very familiar, but there are plenty of insightful explanations about why these lifestyles work. Speaking from experience, such an improved understanding really helps to motivate positive action.

So, let’s dive straight in, starting with the most important thing I learned from David Sinclair.

How to Think About Aging

Aging is the fundamental disease

Sinclair makes a strong case that aging is the foundational reason behind most serious degenerative diseases plaguing society today. Moreover, we can slow this root-cause disease considerably, and we’re working hard to stop and even reverse it in the future.

Aging is caused by something called ex-differentiation, where cells struggle to read our genetic code and forget their function. It’s easy to imagine how such confused and malfunctioning cells can cause everything from heart disease to cancer to Alzheimer’s disease.

Thus, these degenerative diseases are just symptoms of the underlying disease of aging. And we’re now starting to understand how to ramp up the body’s natural defenses against this fundamental disease.

Adversity memetics

A key theme running through all the recommendations in the podcast is the importance of making our bodies think we’re in a state of adversity. The different ways we can do this are called “adversity mimetics,” i.e., ways to mimic adversity without really experiencing it.

Such perceived states of adversity activate the body’s natural defenses to fight the disease of aging. Science has identified three primary defense pathways: mTOR (which responds to low amino acids) and AMPK and Sirtuins (which respond to low energy or glucose levels).

There’s an understandable evolutionary explanation behind these findings: We were frequently hungry, exhausted, cold, and exposed to pathogens across 99.9% of our evolutionary history. Our bodies had to learn to survive under these harsh conditions, and we evolved multiple potent repair mechanisms that get triggered by these states.

Today, science and fossil fuels have given all of us rich folks a totally different world — one that’s all about comfort and abundance. Unfortunately, this environment turns off the body’s defenses and tells it to grow instead of repairing itself. In the long run, this creates many problems.

The challenge of maintaining a healthy lifestyle

Obviously, it’s much more fun (at least in the short term) to live in a state of comfort than a state of adversity. But unfortunately, the near-irresistible allure of our modern comforts is the core reason behind the global degenerative disease epidemic.

And that’s where the idea of adversity mimetics starts to make practical sense: We don’t actually have to experience serious adversity to get the benefits. Thus, the trick is to mimic adversity as enjoyably as possible.

So, from this adversity mimicking mindset, let’s take a quick tour through David Sinclair’s lifestyle recommendations for maximizing lifespan. Following that, I’ll chime in with some of my own research and experience on making healthy living as natural and enjoyable as possible.

Lifestyle Recommendations

Diet

Sorry carnivores, but the central longevity diet recommendation is to eat plants. The rich protein in meat is exactly the kind of abundance mimetic you want to avoid if you want to slow aging. Since our bodies need to work harder to get sustenance from plants, vegetarianism is a good adversity mimetic.

A little bit of unprocessed meat is fine, especially fish. For example, the Mediterranean diet gets several mentions as a very healthy alternative. Furthermore, Sinclair frequently echos the well-known recommendation of dropping sugar from the diet. Sugar totally deactivates the body’s protective mechanisms and causes many other health problems.

One interesting novelty he mentioned is the idea of xenohormesis: plants that experienced adversity contain more anti-aging benefits. A good example is organic produce that does not benefit from all the pesticides and herbicides that make the lives of regular crops much more comfortable. Eating these plants, especially ones rich in color, could transfer some of these beneficial adversity compounds to us.

In a later episode about brain health, Sinclair also emphasizes the importance of B-vitamins and Omega 3 fatty acids that are more challenging to get from a plant-based diet. The Mediterranean diet naturally offers these nutrients, but vegetarians may need to take special care in this area.

Fasting

It’s easy to understand how fasting mimics adversity. If the body thinks that times are tough and there’s not enough food around, it will obviously be motivated to hunker down and protect itself.

There are many different ways to fast. Multi-day fasts offer a valuable deep cleanse, but they are very difficult to complete. Still, making this sacrifice every once in a while can be worth it because it supercharges a crucial process called autophagy: the recycling of old and potentially toxic cells.

For day-to-day use, Sinclair advocates for time-restricted feeding, where you restrict your food intake to a window of fewer than 8 hours each day. He eats in the evening, but the morning can work just as well.

Crucially, we must ensure that we get adequate nutrition with our fasting. Time-restricted feasting on junk food will do more harm than good.

Exercise

Physical exertion from exercise is a great way to mimic adversity. The 10000-step per day rule is a useful target, but 7000 steps already provide substantial benefits. It’s particularly important to move after a meal to remove the glucose from your bloodstream and make new blood vessels.

Gentle exercise like walking is a good place to start, but we also need vigorous exercise that gets the heart rate up. Sinclair recommends that you get yourself out of breath to the point where you cannot speak in full sentences for about 75 minutes per week (spread over several days). This powerful adversity memetic activates the body’s defenses and makes more energy-generating mitochondria.

Weight training is also essential, especially when it comes to keeping the muscles strong in older age. Adequate muscle mass is particularly important for older folks to protect against bone fractures caused by falling, especially hip breaks that are often a death sentence.

Hot and cold

Purposeful exposure to uncomfortable temperatures is another great way to mimic adversity within our air-conditioned world. Hot and cold both work, albeit through different mechanisms. Cold activates the production of brown fat, which appears to be much better for us than our standard white fat, whereas heat builds HSPs (heat shock proteins) that do good things to our bodies, similar to exercise.

Regular heat and cold exposure can easily be built into any modern lifestyle. For example, you can take cold or very hot showers, save energy by doing less heating or cooling of your home, and spend more time outside in natural temperatures (being careful to avoid sunburn, which significantly shortens lifespan). A cold sleeping room is also recommended.

Saunas and ice baths are the next steps, but the simple do-it-yourself-at-home guidelines above will give you most of the benefits.

Sleep

The importance of sleep gets some airtime in the podcast episode about brain health. Although not clearly linked to adversity, sleep is well known to be a state of bodily repair.

It’s been thoroughly proven that a lack of sleep accelerates aging, especially in the brain. The plaque buildup responsible for dementia is a core problem here, and cleaning out these dangerous wastes is an essential function of the repair states offered by sleep and all the other protective mechanisms that respond to perceived adversity.

How to Enjoy Mimicking Adversity

Now we get to the real trick: mimicking adversity in an enjoyable manner. That’s the point where this podcast beautifully tied into my fascination with the art and science of optimal lifestyle design.

Hedonic adaptation

The first key concept to grasp is the way our happiness levels quickly adapt to almost any environment. Say someone invents a magic pill that staves off any adverse effects of junk food and sedentary living. Obviously, such a pill would fly off the shelves, and millions of people will use it to waste away their days gorging on chocolates, chips, and ice cream in front of Netflix.

Aside from the socio-environmental disaster that will result from such unchecked food consumption, this scenario will also cause a mental health crisis. Thanks to hedonic adaptation, the happiness boost from a pure hedonic lifestyle will quickly fade. And now that we’re conditioned that peak sensory experience is normal, it will become exceedingly hard to find any joy in life.

No, to really enjoy life, pleasure should be varied, intermittent, and earned — a philosophy that gels perfectly with healthy living. In addition, we can safely rely on hedonic adaptation to keep our basic happiness levels constant in the environment of mild discomfort needed to mimic adversity.

Diet

Healthy eating habits are all about healing the brain’s broken reward system. All the addictive junk food society surrounds us with has totally desensitized us to sweetness. But here’s the good news: Heal this miscalibration, and you’ll get the same pleasure from a good apple as you currently get from chocolate.

Indeed, once your senses are correctly calibrated, mimicking adversity via a sugar-free plant-dominated diet is no sacrifice whatsoever. Quite the opposite: it creates loads of headroom for peak sensory experiences from the occasional luxurious indulgence.

Of course, the time needed for hedonic adaptation to adjust from the Standard Americal Diet (SAD) to something like the Mediterranean diet will be tough. But rest assured that it gets much easier on the other side.

Fasting

I’ve been quite hesitant to join the fasting craze thus far. Although I usually ate within a 10–12 hour window, I frequently snacked outside this window to keep hunger from distracting me from my work.

Inspired by this podcast, I decided to restrict my eating to the time between breakfast (around 7:30) and my siesta (around 14:00). As Sinclair promised, my body quickly adapted to supply me with a constant stream of energy throughout the 17+ hour daily fast to maintain high productivity and focus without strong hunger pangs. The occasional evening food craving is easily handled with some lemon-infused Rooibos tea.

Overall, restricting my eating to a 7-hour window proved easier than I thought. The freedom to eat as much as I want within that period is also quite enjoyable, and my body naturally wants to stop eating by the end. However, I should reemphasize the importance of healthy food here. If you eat junk, it will be easy to eat way too much in seven hours of unrestricted feasting.

Exercise

While I’m a bit of a noob when it comes to fasting, I’m a veteran at making daily exercise as easy and natural as breathing. Lifelong fitness is all about creating the right environment. And the shortest route to the perfect fitness environment is to select your home in the right location, granting easy access to nature and safe options to walk/cycle wherever you need to go.

But even if your home is currently positioned in a bland concrete jungle that makes it impossible to go anywhere without a car, all is not lost. With a few simple skills and a couple of easy habits integrated into a good morning routine, daily exercise will come more easily.

Hot and cold

Over here in Norway, being cold is quite easily done. Sadly, most people compensate by heating their homes to a balmy 23 °C, wasting loads of energy just to shave years off their lives.

Like all other adversity memetics, cold can be fun. For example, my winters are spent working under a cozy duvet at an indoor temperature of 15-17 °C, punctuated by regular walks and ski trips in the frozen outdoors. In summer, I take regular swims in the cold lakes close to my home.

Following the podcast, I also started turning the shower up really hot. When summer rolls around, I plan to give cold showers a try. This burst of cold should be quite refreshing after the 150 m elevation gain cycling back from the office or after a high-tempo rollerblade trip.

So, if you live somewhere that regularly gets uncomfortably hot or cold, quit complaining and use it as a free tool to boost your health and longevity. If it’s hot, sweat a little and then jump in a cold shower to cool off. If it’s cold, let it be and heat up under some cozy blankets and the occasional hot shower.

Sleep

Getting enough sleep is all about prioritization. Know this: If you try to get more out of the day by cutting back on sleep, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. A well-rested brain can get way more out of 17 waking hours than a sleep-deprived brain can get out of 19. Furthermore, chronic sleep deprivation causes a dizzying array of health and performance problems.

Build your life around sleep and not the other way around. Truly, life becomes much richer when experienced through a well-rested body and mind.

An Alluring Ageless Future

The podcast dedicates plenty of time to anti-aging supplements, drugs, and treatments. Sinclair is open about the fact that scientific evidence for the benefits (and safety) of these treatments in humans is still emerging. I’m not yet convinced and prefer to stick to lifestyle design for the time being.

That being said, anti-aging research is progressing at breakneck speed. There’s also loads of self-experimentation going on with many different methods. Thus, millions of minds and hundreds of billions of dollars are being thrown at the problem of aging, driving some real progress.

Another promising development is our growing ability to accurately, practically, and affordably measure the true biological age of various parts of our bodies. Imagine you had a little device that could prick your finger every morning and tell you your exact biological age. Such information would allow you to experiment intelligently with all sorts of lifestyle and biomedical interventions to figure out the best way to bring that number down.

Based on all these rapid developments, David Sinclair firmly believes that aging is curable in the long run. It’s impossible to tell when this cure will arrive, but progress seems to be accelerating. Thus, another big reason to maintain a healthy lifestyle is to stick around long enough to benefit from these advances.

Apparently, we can currently expect about 30% of extra life expectancy from scientific progress for every one year of life expectancy we win via healthy lifestyles. This number is expected to continue increasing, and eventually, it might reach a point where we no longer age (and older people can even age backward).

Yes, it sure sounds like science fiction today, but it could well be the new normal a few decades down the line. I will certainly do all I can to make sure I’m around to experience that new reality. Who knows, perhaps I even get to see a couple more centuries after the 22nd!