2.6 – Self Mastery

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The Path to Greater Life Efficiency

Finding health and happiness in a smaller ecological footprint

Image from Pixabay

Here’s an interesting question: If we could get everyone fully invested in one metric of individual success, which metric would do the greatest good?

To me, it would have to be “Life Efficiency,” conveniently estimated using this new online calculator.

Simply put, your Life Efficiency is the number of happy and healthy life years you gain from each dollar of daily spending. It’s built on two basic truths:

  • We all want happy and healthy lives
  • The world has a finite amount of productive and ecological capacity for supporting the health and happiness of 8 billion people

As estimated in a previous article, the average rich-world citizen could boost their Life Efficiency by as much as 500% relative to today’s level. In other words, we’re consuming a massive amount of effort and resources for relatively poor returns in health and happiness.

Given that around 6 billion world citizens remain below decent living standards, such waste cannot continue. We must do better.

Six out of every seven world citizens live on less than $1000 a month (the vertical line) and one out of every four on less than $100 a month (please take a moment to imagine what that must be like) | Gapminder

But how should we go about it? Grudgingly give up the things we love for the sake of the natural world and poor communities in faraway countries?

No, that would never work. The human race will always strive for better lives. But there is a solution: We can leverage the intelligent curtailment of wasteful spending as a springboard to happier, healthier, and more productive lives. That’s what Life Efficiency is all about.

The paradigm of building a good life on the foundation of sustainable consumption leads to an intriguing list of interconnected best practices. Let’s take a tour through the list of seven proven pathways to a more Efficient Life.

1. Remember: The Best Things in Life are Free

It’s an old cliche but so very true. Many of the things that give human beings the greatest happiness and the longest lives don’t cost a thing. Sadly, we’ve been losing touch with these basic sources of fulfillment recently, seduced by the instant gratification of social media feeds and all the (mostly useless) stuff their personalized advertising algorithms tell us we need.

Efficient Living requires that we find our way back. Here are some proven paths to health and happiness you can access for free.

Prioritize relationships

Humans are social creatures. It’s hardwired into our beings through millennia of evolution. Thus, even though vegging out in front of Netflix by yourself is far easier, quality relationships will give you far greater health and happiness.

You don’t need many relationships, but you do need a few good ones. Thus, take special care of those dearest to you. Make time for them, and make sure you are 100% present during that time. Aside from the obvious direct benefits of being part of a loving family, the age-old biochemical responses of your body will reward you with a lasting sense of wellbeing.

Get into nature

Spending time in the natural world has been scientifically proven to boost our health and wellbeing. And no, you don’t need to book an expensive trip to some exotic jungle. Regular strolls in your local park will do just fine, perhaps augmented with the occasional trip to the closest bit of untouched nature in your vicinity.

Read a book

So, when was the last time you saw the inside of a library? In our age of ubiquitous digital video, chances are that you can’t even remember. Yet, science is uncovering many ways in which reading benefits our wellbeing. It can even help us live longer. So, pick up a good book and break through the little bit of initial resistance required to get into it. From personal experience, reading in nature takes the experience up another notch.

Sleep

Hustle culture makes sleep sound like wasted time when the truth is that it’s one of life’s healthiest and most enjoyable indulgences. The central importance of sleep to human health is clearer than ever, but it should not be viewed as some sort of medicine to be taken out of necessity.

A contented mind on a personal schedule that prioritizes sleep can derive great pleasure from this activity. See what happens when you replace your evening screen-staring session with a warm shower, some gentle music, possibly some slow yoga and/or a guided meditation, and an earlier bedtime. And when sleep occasionally refuses to come, have a good book standing by.

Create

Humans have an innate desire to create. As we’ll get to in Section 6, the ultimate goal is to shape your occupation into a set of creative activities you would happily do for free, but until that time comes, a fun hobby will do.

Subtract before you add

Finally, a heads-up: Don’t try to force these things into an already overcrowded life. First, make space by scaling down the (often self-sabotaging) ways in which you try to buy happiness today. You know, stuff like digital entertainment, sensationalist media, retail therapy, overeating, and other addictive substances.

If your attempts to make a change for the better leave you feeling overwhelmed, you’ll quickly revert back to these instant-pleasure vices. Be very mindful of this threat, and be sure to subtract before you add.

2. Develop a Deep Interest in Your Family’s Health

The internet and the world’s bookstores are filled with quality health advice capable of adding many good years to our lives. Yet, we’re in the midst of a lifestyle disease epidemic — one of the most vicious destroyers of Life Efficiency. Indeed, our unhealthy habits shorten our lives and make us spend massive amounts of money on reactive healthcare, often to accomplish little more than needlessly prolonging intense suffering.

Lifestyle diseases dominate the global death count | Our World in Data

Reversing this terrible global trend holds the key to rapid permanent improvements in Life Efficiency worldwide. Let’s see how it can be done.

The four pillars

The wealth of information at our disposal makes it clear that excellent personal health rest on four pillars:

  1. Healthy diet: Whole foods, mostly plants, with little or no refined sugar
  2. Regular exercise: The equivalent of at least 7000 steps per day
  3. Enough sleep: Giving the body the amount of sleep it naturally demands
  4. Mild stress: Avoiding the chronic presence of fight-or-flight hormones

There are also more advanced health-promoting practices that stimulate the body’s natural repair mechanisms to extend healthy lifespan. These include fasting, occasional vigorous exercise, and hot/cold exposure.

A self-sustaining interest

Although I have written extensively on the topics of diet, exercise, sleep, and mental health, this article is not the place for details on how these four pillars can be securely planted. Instead, I want to condense matters into two fundamental guiding principles:

  1. Strive to build an environment where healthy actions happen naturally
  2. Do all you can to kindle a genuine interest in the field of personal health

Everyone’s situation is unique, so we all need to follow subtly different paths to sustainable healthy living. And the key to finding your own path is to develop a lasting interest in the fascinating challenge of building a healthy environment for yourself and those you care about. Spark this interest, and the rest will take care of itself.

Efficient Living promotes health

As stated earlier, our lifestyle disease epidemic is the very antithesis of Life Efficiency. Thus, it follows that a focus on building an Efficient Life would naturally promote healthy living.

Here, it’s important to understand how unhealthy habits reinforce each other. For example, someone who is stressed or suffering from chronic sleep deprivation is more likely to consume unhealthy food, while those suffering from obesity and other effects of a poor diet are less likely to exercise and more likely to develop self-sustaining mental health problems.

Life Efficiency practices will interrupt such self-sustaining self-destruct cycles by creating a natural environment for more physical activity, better sleep, and better mental wellbeing. And the relationship goes both ways: Enhanced vitality and awareness cultivated by a healthy lifestyle make it easier to build a truly Efficient Life. Activating this virtuous cycle is highly recommended.

3. Forget About the Joneses

Be honest now: How many of the things you own were bought more for their promise of impressing other people than their practical function? Humanity wastes an astounding amount of effort and resources on this phenomenon of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Trying to prove your worth to the world through the possessions and experiences you buy is pointless. In fact, it’s beyond pointless — an act of spending more money on lower wellbeing.

“Most strikingly, those who are worst off in society are no longer those on the lowest wage. The worst off will be people with a sufficiently high wage that they are induced into work because of the Keeping up with the Joneses Effect.” | Ulph (2014)

Don’t fall into this trap. Whether your status symbol of choice is a fancy car, a big house, or anything else, it will give you little other than a big debt burden and an even bigger ecological footprint. It’s not worth it.

4. Location, Location, Location

Everyone knows the three most important things to consider when moving house: location, location, and location. But defining what exactly the ideal location means for you is no simple task. There are so many things to consider that rational prioritization can feel impossible.

But what if you simplify it by locating your home solely for the purpose of maximizing Life Efficiency? Let’s see what that might look like.

Car-free living

The typical car-centered suburban lifestyle is another powerful destroyer of Life Efficiency. Indeed, if the location of your home forces you to spend an hour or two each day trapped inside an expensive metal box, navigating stressful and dangerous traffic, it severely handicaps your ability to build an Efficient Life.

The car-free future cannot come soon enough | Images from Wikipedia and Dutchreview.

In contrast, a car-free lifestyle where you are intelligently positioned within safe and convenient walking/cycling distance of everything you need will create a large and immediate boost in Life Efficiency. If you have kids, living in a city where they can safely and independently move around strongly enhances the positive effects of this smart lifestyle choice.

Let’s see how car-free living benefits the three components of Life Efficiency:

  1. Spending: A car is the average consumer’s second-largest expense. Dropping it instantly boosts Life Efficiency and accelerates your journey to the joys of creative freedom (Section 6).
  2. Health: Travelling by human power instead of fossil power uses the body as it was designed to be used, naturally promoting health. No more need to pay a gym for the privilege of running on a treadmill like a hamster.
  3. Wellbeing: No more traffic jams, car maintenance hassles, or money problems from car and gasoline payments.

The unfortunate reality is that car-free living remains outright impossible in many cities, but, as the old wisdom goes; seek, and you shall find. The range of options is expanding, and the vast rewards of a car-free lifestyle are well worth some focused seeking.

Access to nature

As mentioned in the first section, spending a good deal of time in the natural world brings a range of benefits. Unfortunately, accessing nature is difficult for most of the world’s growing urban population.

That’s why nature should be high on your list of things that must be within walking/cycling distance of your home. A safe and well-maintained park is good, but untouched nature is even better.

Luckily, the digital age makes it possible for many workers to avoid regular trips to an office or a busy city center. An increasing number of people can now work from a home office and order most of the goods they require online, greatly expanding the number of suitable locations for their next home.

The autumn view from my favorite reading spot located a mere 10-minute walk from home

If these possibilities are open to you, give them careful consideration. Yes, being trapped in a home office in a noisy inner city apartment is no fun, but I can attest that a home office in a quiet semi-urban neighborhood with nature in your backyard is pretty much the ideal working and living environment.

Living closer to nature can also cut our greatest expense: housing. Property away from the city center is often cheaper and, more importantly, the possibility to step out into the natural world whenever you want makes it easy to live in a smaller home. Thus, nature presents an excellent avenue for building a better life on the basis of intelligently curtailed spending.

Family

If you have a close bond with your family (or some special friends who feel like family), living in close proximity offers a big Life Efficiency boost. Those with young kids can get a particularly large benefit from having their parents nearby. Grandmothers in particular benefit greatly from regular interaction with their grandkids, and most young parents could really use such free and trusted childcare services.

You might even consider joining the reviving trend of the multi-generation household. Having more people under the same roof is also a great way to reduce spending on housing, the #1 expense for most families.

Inspiration

Finding the Life-Efficiency-enhancing creative flow that flips your mind from consumer mode to creator mode (Section 6) will come more naturally when you live in an inspiring environment. Where that inspiring environment can be found will depend entirely on the type of creative expression that speaks to you, but whatever it is, finding the location that houses the people and places most likely to fuel your creative fire is a great idea.

Peer pressure

Aside from locating your home somewhere that allows car-free living, access to nature, close family ties, and natural inspiration, it would also help to become part of a society that already values health and community over wasteful consumerism.

Living among people who lead relatively Efficient Lives will make it considerably easier to maximize your own Life Efficiency. From my experience, the Nordics offer some good possibilities.

Broaden your horizons

When considering the location of your next home, don’t limit your scope to your current city or even your current country. The world offers an almost infinite range of possibilities, many of which will allow you to build a truly Efficient Life. Spending the time and effort required to find the ideal location for your unique life could be the best investment you ever make.

5. Purposefully Approach Financial Freedom

While wastefully spending money in attempts to buy happiness and status will only harm long-term health and happiness, saving and investing money is a different story. Indeed, wealth appears to be a good predictor of happiness and even life expectancy.

Wealth and financial freedom

Clearly, financial security is an important part of a good life. Money worries can be highly stressful and frustrating. Thus, having a solid rainy-day fund and low debt is an important part of wellbeing.

But far greater life satisfaction awaits as your wealth grows. When your investments eventually start yielding returns comparable to your income, a whole new world of possibility shows itself: the world of financial freedom.

Financial freedom is the point where money no longer needs to have any say in the way you spend your time. Most importantly, you get to work more on things you want to do and less on things you have to do. Furthermore, you get to put your wealth to work in investments that align with your values. All this makes financial freedom a very pleasant place to be.

Automate saving and investment

So, why do so few people enjoy financial freedom? Well, the primary reason is that our consumer economy is designed to generate a constantly growing desire for more stuff. Resisting this pull is the key to building wealth. And the best way to do that is to implement a fully automated plan that invests a gradually increasing sum out of your salary the moment it hits your bank account. It must be like it was never even there.

Once this is set up, the next thing to decide is how much you want to save. As illustrated next, the point at which your investment income covers all your spending needs can come surprisingly soon if you save aggressively.

Pathways to financial freedom

For example, the solid blue line in the following graph shows that, if you keep your savings rate at 10% of your growing income, you will have to keep a steady job for the entirety of a 40-year career and scale down significantly in retirement (unless you get a solid state pension). In this scenario, the passive income from your investments only reaches half your spending by the end of your career.

However, if you manage to keep your real (inflation-adjusted) spending constant, you will reach financial freedom halfway through your career (dashed blue line). This timeline can be accelerated strongly through higher savings rates, as indicated by the orange lines.

Illustration of the time required to reach full financial freedom (the point where passive income surpasses the spending needed for a good life) at different savings rates. Solid lines = spending grows with income; dashed lines = spending is kept constant. Assumed real investment returns = 6% and real income growth = 3%.

Efficient Living promotes wealth

Increasing Life Efficiency is all about boosting health and happiness while reducing spending. Thus, Life Efficiency would naturally increase your savings rate and accelerate your journey toward financial freedom.

And once again, it goes both ways. As we’ll see next, financial freedom can be leveraged to strongly increase Life Efficiency.

6. Free Creative Expression

While an automated investment program will help, the very best (and most enjoyable) protection against wasteful consumption is the freedom to spend your days on creative activities you find naturally inspirational. And here’s the good news: With a focus on Life Efficiency, this ideal is much closer than you might think.

The virtuous cycle

Life Efficiency at work creates a virtuous cycle like the one shown below. The more meaning and enjoyment you get from your work, the less you will be tempted by the advertising industry’s false promises of “happiness through consumption.” This, in turn, accelerates your journey toward financial freedom, which holds the key to a naturally inspirational career.

The virtuous cycle of creative expression | More detail in a previous article

Sadly, most people are stuck in a vicious cycle going the opposite way: Stressful work leads to more attempts to buy happiness, creating debt burdens and spending habits that trap us in soul-killing jobs. This cycle is another renowned destroyer of Life Efficiency around the world. An escape into the virtuous alternative shown above offers a fundamental solution.

Claiming creative freedom

You don’t need to wait until full financial freedom to claim your creative freedom. In fact, it’s safe to start even when you’re only about 20% there.

The idea is to leverage your growing stream of passive income to gradually shape your work into something you do because you want to, not because you have to. There are two main practical avenues:

  1. Ramping down your present level of employment, negotiating that you give up your least enjoyable activities in exchange for a lower salary
  2. Taking a new and more enjoyable job (or even starting your own venture) even though it might pay less

And rest assured: In most cases, the salary you give up will only be temporary because you will naturally create much greater value when working on truly inspirational tasks. More importantly, you won’t even miss the income you temporarily gave up because you’ll be far too busy creating inspirational value to worry about trying to buy happiness.

Taking the first step

Any journey starts with the first step. And this journey’s first step is particularly difficult. I’m sure you can feel deep down that willfully giving up some salary comes about as naturally to us as breathing underwater, even if you fully understand the promise it holds.

But it only takes a few short weeks of discomfort to get this ball rolling. In the context of the rest of your life, these few weeks are well worth it. If done responsibly with the philosophy of Life Efficiency gradually reshaping your spending habits, the risks are small and the potential rewards spectacular.

7. Invest in the Greater Good

As outlined in the previous section, the journey toward free creative expression is a central characteristic of an Efficient Life. This journey marks the life-changing transformation from chasing happiness through consumption to finding lasting purpose in creative expression.

Once this transformation takes hold, we get to enjoy another feature of an Efficient Life: its large productive surpluses.

Creating without immediate reward

While the rest of the world consumes as much (or even more) than they create, those maximizing Life Efficiency will naturally create much more than they consume. The reason is simple: inspired creation is a reward in itself, thereby increasing productive output and reducing the desire to consume.

And that’s where the final test of an Efficient Life emerges: The world rarely offers immediate rewards for truly purposeful work. Instead, it pays those who can satisfy the engineered consumer desires of the masses, often through meaningless “bullshit” jobs.

Thus, truly inspiring work will rarely earn you a large salary. It might even earn no salary at all, implying that the market places no value on your work.

Of course, the market could be right, but if you’re truly inspired by what you are doing, that’s highly unlikely. The far more likely scenario is that the value you are creating targets a long-term problem/opportunity instead of providing the short-term instant-pleasure fixes most consumers demand.

So, don’t be discouraged by a lack of immediate recognition for your efforts. As long as your creative endeavors do not feel like work, you’re on the right track toward a truly Efficient Life.

Practical matters

Of course, we all need to earn a decent living, so it’s important to approach the journey to creative freedom responsibly (Section 6).

Also, keep in mind that, although rare, meaningful well-paying jobs do exist and are well worth searching for. If you ever get the opportunity to earn a good living doing work you would happily do for free, grab it with both hands.

Invest time, money, or both

If the surplus value you create is not being recognized financially, rest assured that your creative time is not being wasted. Your work can only feel truly meaningful if you know deep down that it adds real value to the world. And such work is far more valuable than any high-paying “bullshit” job.

But if you keep delivering real value to society year after year, it is highly likely that the rewards will come. Your growing skill level, social capital, and creative portfolio will keep increasing the likelihood of a breakthrough.

When that time comes (or if you are lucky enough to already have a well-paying and truly meaningful job), you enter that glorious realm where you can freely direct both your time and money. Investing in funds aligned with your values is one possibility, but financial investments in your own creative initiatives offer a far more exciting prospect.

I see this as the ultimate reward offered by a truly Efficient Life, both to the individual and broader society. When you reach the point where you are the master of your own time, and you have full control over a sizable fund to finance your inspiring creative endeavors, Life Efficiency shines at its brightest.

Final Thoughts

There are many intricate connections between the actions covered in the seven sections above. As you steadily progress toward greater Life Efficiency, you will enjoy how they naturally flow into each other, binding together into a self-sustaining whole.

All the actions described in this article are implemented in my own life, and I can honestly say the rewards have been tremendous. This experience gives me hope that Life Efficiency can grow organically on the simple fact that it makes people’s lives (a lot) better.

From such organic growth in Life Efficiency, a more sustainable and equitable society will follow as a natural side-effect. We will simultaneously reduce our negative impacts by curbing wasteful consumption and accelerate our progress on key global challenges through our growing creative surpluses. In other words, Life Efficiency can help us build a healthier world out of millions of happier lives.

Today, all this remains little more than a hypothesis, proven only in a couple of cases. But it has the potential to make a real difference in the world. So, if you found this interesting, please share our new Life Efficiency calculator. It will be very interesting to see where this adventure leads.

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Your Health: A Big Picture View

A healthy lifestyle goes far beyond losing weight and feeling good; it’s about building a bright future for you and your planet.

Earth | qimono on Pixabay

Modern society seems determined to ruin our health. We’re surrounded by addictive and convenient junk food, our car-centered cities discourage natural movement, stress from overwhelm and complexity often makes us self-destruct, and artificial light and late-night entertainment disrupt our sleep.

Carving out a lasting healthy lifestyle in this environment is no easy task. But the good news is that, once your healthy lifestyle is established, it becomes self-sustaining. It’s the transition phase that presents the real challenge.

Making the transition to a holistic healthy lifestyle requires a deep desire. And there’s no better way to cultivate that desire than to understand the big picture of healthy living — how it improves every aspect of life and makes the world a better place.

In this article, I’ll paint this big-picture view around the four pillars so health: diet, exercise, stress, and sleep.

Diet

Eat less …

For you: What if you could enjoy 50 years of accumulated skills, wealth, and wisdom from a biologically 30-year-old body? With everything we’re learning about longevity, this is becoming possible. And there’s still no better-known method to stay healthier for longer than a mildly reduced calorie intake.

For the world: Gross food inequality is one of the most embarrassing failures of our global society. In fact, the rich world spends as much trying to lose weight as would be needed to eradicate world hunger. Every rich-world citizen who chooses to consume less food helps right this grave wrong.

… mostly plants …

For you: Healthy plant-based foods work hand-in-hand with reduced calorie intake to maximize healthy lifespan, all while saving you money. And don’t worry, when you use meat as a seasoning instead of a staple, you can get all the enjoyment with none of the drawbacks.

For the planet: Animal products stand for 18% of global calories but take up 77% of global agricultural land and emit 60% of agricultural greenhouse gases. Animal cruelty is also a major concern. Indeed, eating mostly plants is one of the best things you can do for your planet.

… with no added sugar

For you: Sugar screws up our brains’ pleasure sensors, making sweet things taste mediocre and anything without tons of sugar taste bland. Quitting sugar fixes this miscalibration, making natural sweet things like fruit much tastier and the occasional sugary treat a truly magical experience.

For the planet: Sugar is one of the chief agents of the Instant Pleasure Industry responsible for millions of premature deaths worldwide (see Problem 2 here). Everyone who manages to quit sugar takes away a little power from the Instant Pleasure Industry, limiting its ability to harm others.

Exercise

Move intelligently …

For you: Walking or cycling everywhere you need to go is a shortcut to financial freedom and a treasure trove of creativity. All those daily steps will add many healthy and energetic years to your life to enjoy your growing wealth and blossoming creativity.

For the planet: Cities built for cars instead of people are among the greatest inefficiencies in our world (see Problem 8 here). Everyone who chooses self-propulsion (or at least public transport) helps shift us towards human-centered cities.

… and stretch/lift with purpose

For you: Yoga is one of the most powerful anchors for morning and evening routines and all their well-known benefits. Four minutes of daily strength training can make you proud every time you look in the mirror. Both will boost your mental health.

For the planet: In a world of overwhelm and depression, a few simple movements anyone can do in their living room can provide precious stability. Every grounded and confident individual brings some much-needed calm to our anxiety-generating world.

Stress

Get hot, get cold …

For you: Moderate heat or cold stress offers a natural way to activate the body’s defenses for securing a long and healthy life. And as an added bonus, this miracle anti-aging treatment saves big on heating and cooling bills.

For the planet: Our perfectly climate-controlled indoor environments not only shorten our lives, they also harm our economies and our planet. Everyone who turns down the thermostat or takes a cold shower helps with the immensely important megaproject that is the global energy transition.

… and push your boundaries

For you: Stress can be terrible if it is imposed upon you, but it becomes healthy and exciting when you’re striving toward something great. Hence, a proper understanding of eustress and distress offers an invaluable compass to discover your best life.

For the planet: If we’re reactive, our long list of global problems can stress us out to no end. But if we’re proactive, initiatives to solve these challenges offer some of the purest forms of meaning we can ever experience in life.

Sleep

Get sufficient shut-eye …

For you: Sleep is one of the healthiest forms of relaxation out there. Make it into art by designing the perfect sleeping environment with soothing materials, sounds, and smells. Then, indulge to your heart’s content.

For the planet: A tired mind makes bad decisions. Billions of tired minds make a bad world. Everyone who escapes all the hazards of the global sleep deprivation epidemic makes our world a little bit better.

… perhaps twice a day

For you: Do you often fall into an afternoon slump, suffering through the last few working hours without getting anything meaningful done? Try a siesta. It takes all that pointless suffering and molds it into a revitalized evening that feels like a brand new day.

For the planet: Most knowledge workers today can do more in 5 hours of deep work than 8 hours of increasingly unfocused work. Adding another deep work session after a revitalizing siesta can really move the needle. Every brave siesta pioneer can help nudge society toward this far more efficient model.

The Big Picture

Much like John ‘Hannibal’ Smith from the A-Team, I love it when a plan comes together. And a carefully designed healthy lifestyle surely ranks among the most satisfying of plans. Once you reach this point where all aspects of your healthy lifestyle come together seamlessly, you’re set for life.

A smart, healthy lifestyle brings together a set of compounding and mutually reinforcing co-benefits extending far beyond weight loss. You’ll gain energy, creativity, and motivation to get big things done, save money and increase your earning capacity to build more wealth, and add many healthy years to your life to enjoy the resulting growth.

And never lose sight of the long list of large societal benefits. We’re at our best when we work toward something bigger than ourselves. Tap into that source of motivation and you’ll be rightfully rewarded.

Longevity graph
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A Proven Longevity Lifestyle to Fight the Disease of Aging

 

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

Historical gains in life expectancy came mainly from sharply reducing infectious diseases and infant mortality. Future gains could initially come from a growing culture of healthy living, followed by breakthrough treatments for aging. (Image created by Janet Cloete)

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!

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The World’s Toughest Challenge

One guy’s quest to do everything right, consistently.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay.

It’s no exaggeration to call self-mastery “the world’s toughest challenge.” People have been trying forever, but no one seems able to get it right.

When I say “self-mastery,” I mean it in a very practical sense: the ability to consistently do what we know to be right (and not do what we know to be wrong). There are many other philosophical and spiritual interpretations (which may help with the practical side of things), but this challenge is all about real-world, measurable actions.

Taking super easy actions consistently is super hard

If you think about it, there’s nothing physically stopping us from doing the right things all the time. In fact, most right actions are very easy: Get out of bed, go for a jog, say a kind word. Neither is there anything physically forcing us to do things like buying that chocolate we know we shouldn’t.

But we all know from experience that taking these seemingly very easy actions (and inactions) on a consistent basis is near-impossible. Indeed, if self-mastery was easy, we’d all be rich, fit, and very proud of ourselves.

The problem is that every human comes with a set of millennia-old instincts to chase pleasure and avoid discomfort. These instincts have become badly outdated in today’s high-tech world, but they continue to shape our lives. That’s why we keep making counter-productive choices like browsing social media instead of working on a career-boosting project or vegetating in front of the TV instead of raking in all the proven benefits of exercise.

Challenge accepted

I’ve been on a quest to tame these primitive instincts for over a decade now. It was a bumpy ride, to say the least, but over the years I’ve managed to put together an internal and external environment that makes healthy and productive actions come naturally. And now, I finally feel this environment is strong enough to be tested publically.

That’s why, with the start of 2022, I’m formally embarking on the World’s Toughest Challenge (WTC).

The WTC Scorecard

Every month, I’ll give myself a score out of 10 in each of ten clearly defined metrics. Although the long-term goal is no less than perfection, I’d be very happy with cracking 90% on a regular basis during 2022.

The ten metrics are categorized into three themes: health, happiness, and productivity. Let’s break them down.

Health

Health is the basic enabler of everything I hold dear in life, making it my top priority. There are four fundamental pillars of health that also represent the metrics in this theme.

Diet

I’m more prone to emotional eating than most, so the quality of my diet is very closely linked to the quality of my life. Today, my diet is perfect on most days, although I still stumble on the rare occasion when stress and temptation team up against me.

I’ve been tracking the quality of my diet along with many other metrics for an entire decade. Thus, I can easily access my score out of ten for this metric. Any junk food or excess subtracts points, although there is one exception: I don’t lose points for accepting unhealthy (and delicious) food from a friendly host if I apply moderation and don’t feel stuffed afterward.

Exercise and nature

Thanks to the ideal location of my home, exercise and access to nature are the least of my worries. Both happen spontaneously on a daily basis (unless the weather is truly terrible).

My daily tracking uses an exercise metric linked to the number of steps per day, as recorded by my fitness band. I add 1000 steps for every 2 km of cycling, ice skating, rollerblading, or cross country skiing, and 500 steps for a yoga or weights session.

The window of perfection is a monthly average of 10000–15000 steps per day, earning 10/10. Every deviation of 1000 steps from this range loses one point.

Sleep, naps, bookend routines

It took me far too long to give sleep the priority it deserves. But today, my life is rightfully built around sleep instead of the other way around. I also maintain a daily napping habit that boosts my productivity by exploiting the least productive time of the day for sleep.

Here, I’ll target an ideal 6.5–7.5 hours of actual sleep. The average amount of sleep I get each day accounts for 7 out of the 10 points, with every hour out of the range subtracting one point. Then, there is one point for a daily nap and another point each for consistent morning and evening routines.

I also lose points for inconsistency, measured by the standard deviation in the hours of sleep opportunity I give myself each day. If 1.96x the standard deviation is smaller than 1 hour (which means that I stayed within about an hour from the average on more than 95% of the days), there is no penalty. However, I lose a point for every hour this standard deviation statistic increases beyond 1.

Stress and motivation

Whenever I’m stressed or down on motivation, I get this almost irresistible urge to binge-watch and binge-eat. The upside of this unhealthy tendency is that it makes stress and motivation quite easy to track.

Over the years, I’ve picked up many little techniques to manage stress and maintain high motivation (e.g., these seven healthy pleasures). When applied consistently, they successfully keep self-destructive behavior at bay.

Thus, this metric tracks any days with junk food or junk media. Consuming junk every day in the month would give me zero points whereas no junk days would give me a perfect ten. As with my diet, special occasions like birthday celebrations and Christmas dinners are exempted, as long as I don’t feel uncomfortably stuffed afterward.

Happiness

What is the meaning of life? Well, everyone will have their opinion, but I don’t think it’s any more complicated than doing good and having a good time doing it. Here are the three ways I want to add meaning to my life.

Spontaneity and flow

The basic idea here is to simply get out of my own way. Inhibition has always been an issue for me, mainly due to a stuttering problem. Even though my stutter ended up making major positive contributions to my life, it still sours my experience from time to time.

It’s not that I want to become robotically perfect at everything I do. Instead, I need to master the art of enjoying my imperfect, authentically human creative experience to the point where I lose track of time. Such a spontaneous flow state really is pure happiness.

This metric, which will probably be my toughest test, will be equally split between speaking and other forms of creative expression. A daily rating out of 5 for each category will be added up and averaged to get a score out of 10 for the month.

Relationships

As an introvert, I don’t need many relationships, but I need the few I have to be in a good place. Luckily, this happens pretty easily when I stick to the bucket-filling philosophy.

Thanks to this simple idea, I’m in a good spot in this metric. Relationships are hard to quantify, though, so this will just be a purely subjective metric of how I feel I handled the day’s social interactions.

Mindfulness and equanimity

I’ve struggled for a long time to integrate meditation and mindfulness practices into my life. Luckily, something clicked during 2021, and now I find myself spontaneously returning to meditate day after day.

Another aspect of mindfulness I’ve found very valuable is the concept of equanimity — remaining calm and centered regardless of any turbulence in my outer or inner world. It’s an idea closely aligned to living in a beautiful state (as opposed to a suffering state).

I use the Calm app for meditation, particularly the Daily Calm and Daily Trip sessions by Tamara and Jeff (the latter is especially big on the equanimity idea). Calm tracks my meditation practice automatically, and the fraction of days where I meditate represents half of my score in this category. The other half comes from a subjective daily equanimity score.

Productivity

One of the things I’m most grateful for is the incredibly interesting time we’re living in. And my focus areas in the field of sustainable development contain enough interesting work to fill many lifetimes.

Working hours

I work a lot — about 3500 hours per year. Over time, I’ve learned that working double the normal amount can be sustainable, but only if most of it doesn’t feel like work. After semi-retiring in 2019, this ideal has become increasingly real — hence the high number of working hours.

My experience shows that 10 hours per day (weekends included) is a good target to strive for. I can do a lot more on good days, but this usually ends in a slump soon after, even if the work was fun.

RescueTime tracks my working hours automatically and gives me the possibility to add offline meetings manually, making it easy to keep track of this metric. Each hour of deviation from an average in the range of 9–11 hours per day will subtract one point from this metric.

Deep, strategic work

Clocking many working hours is one thing, but doing something genuinely useful with all these hours is something completely different. Here, I want to avoid three classic traps: 1) getting hooked by urgent instead of important tasks, 2) losing efficiency through frequent distractions, and 3) getting stuck in a loop of reacting to problems instead of proactively executing a strategy.

My score in this category will start with 5 points every day and subtract one point for falling into any of the three traps outlined above. An additional point will be subtracted if I did not manage any truly deep work and if any of the traps I fell in were easily preventable.

Workload and proactiveness

Overwhelm is enemy #1 for any productive individual. The more productive you are, the more work you attract. Initially, it feels great to be valued in this way, but burnout soon follows. It took years of painful experiences, but now I’ve fully accepted that the word “no” is central to my career.

Aside from avoiding overwhelm, the stress from deadlines in collaborative projects is another common problem to be avoided. Routinely delivering well before the deadline avoids stress, ensures high quality, and makes project managers give you free rein to shape the work as you please.

This metric will be a subjective measure split halfway between whether I feel pressure from overwhelm or deadlines at the end of each day.

Closing Thoughts

I firmly believe it’s possible to live a perfect life day after day, month after month, year after year. I doubt that anyone has ever done it — it’s the toughest challenge in the world after all — but it must be possible.

This journey will be very revealing. I’m curious to learn what it will take to reach perfection, whether perfection will feel like it’s worth it, and how this exercise will affect my rate of growth.

Let’s see how it goes!

Results Thus Far

January 2022: 93%

February 2022: 96%