Forever Young: Biohacking, Healthspan, and Aging Like a Badass

So, you’ve hit the age when “I slept wrong” becomes a valid medical diagnosis, and suddenly you find yourself Googling, “What are NAD+ boosters and can I drink them with wine?”

Welcome, friend, to the wellness movement’s newest frontier: longevity and biohacking. It posits that if you take enough cold plunges and expensive supplements, you might just outlive your student loans. And, possibly, enjoy good health along the way.

So let’s dive into this brave new world of health hacks. But first …

Some Terms

• Lifespan is how long you live, also referred to as longevity. Here’s the government’s life expectancy calculator, if you want to see your number.

• Healthspan is how long you live well. It’s the number of years you are physically independent, mentally sharp, emotionally stable, and metabolically healthy.

• Biohacking refers to biological experimentation, often done on one’s own body, using science, tech, and lifestyle modification to optimize health. It’s sometimes called “DIY biology” because hacks (a tech term for unconventional solutions to problems) are used to experiment on yourself, track your progress, and refine your approaches to wellness. Biohacks include:

  • Nutrient Modification: ketogenic diets, intermittent fasting, dietary supplements;

  • Wearable Tech: sleep trackers, glucose monitors, smart watches; and

  • Conditioning Practices: high-intensity interval training, hot/cold therapy, red light therapy.

This graph shows two axes—lifespan and healthspan—with curves depicting declining health as we age. The goal of longevity science is to add years to life, but also to add life to years by extending the time we enjoy good health.

Living Well to 100

Dr. Peter Attia is a physician, author, podcaster, and researcher who specializes in longevity medicine. I’m a fan of his work, including his book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, because of its focus on healthspan.

Let’s imagine something that most people never think to plan for: your 100th birthday. Not just being alive to see it, but being there with strength, balance, cognition, and dignity. Blowing out candles, lifting your great-grandchild off the floor, walking unassisted to the dinner table, fully present and fully capable.

That’s the vision behind Attia’s Centenarian Decathlon. It’s a framework he developed to shift our focus from how long we live to how well we function for as long as we live. He frames it like this: What are the ten physical tasks you want to be able to do in your 90s?

Attia’s picks are below. Mine include traveling independently, hiking, sleeping well, and remembering names. You?

Whatever your top ten, reverse-engineer your training. If you want to do those things later in life, you need to begin training for them now, not hope you’ll magically retain function.

Because the hard truth is this: most people don’t die all at once. They die in slow, incremental stages—losing muscle, memory, mobility, independence. The Centenarian Decathlon is about training now for the physical and cognitive tasks you’ll want to perform later in life. It’s not about breaking records. It’s about avoiding a wheelchair. It’s about maintaining autonomy. It’s about preserving the simple, essential joys of life as long as you can.

By the way, Attia isn’t a fan of biohacking, at least not the money-making supplement and exotic therapy variety. The main things you need are free, or nearly so, as he explains here:

Another longevity researcher, Dan Buettner, coined the term “Blue Zones” to describe geographic regions where people live exceptionally long and healthy lives. Here are Buettner’s three simple suggestions for a long and healthy life: friends, cooking, and purpose.

The Fallacy of Waiting

Waiting and doing nothing is a choice, a passive strategy that defaults to the standard trajectory: gradual decline, chronic disease, and years of avoidable suffering. Unfortunately, that’s becoming the American way. Most of us don’t take action until we have to—when the lab results are bad, the scan lights up, or the diagnosis comes in. By then, we’re not on offense, we’re playing defense.

But the work that produces a long healthspan happens years, even decades, earlier. Metabolic fitness, muscle mass, VO₂ max, sleep quality, cognitive reserve—these are all modifiable determinants paying compounding dividends over time. So don’t wait. The best time to start may have been 20 years ago, but the second-best time is today.

Exercise: The Most Potent Longevity Drug

If exercise were a drug, it would be the most effective and underprescribed intervention in medicine. Strength training protects against sarcopenia, the gradual muscle loss associated with aging. Zone 2 cardio, “conversational pace” moderate intensity exercise, builds mitochondrial efficiency and metabolic flexibility. And VO₂ max, a gauge of your body’s ability to deliver and utilize oxygen, is a predictor of all-cause mortality. You can’t overstate this stuff. And you certainly can’t afford to ignore it.

Nutrition and Metabolic Health

You don’t have to follow a rigid diet—keto, paleo, vegan, carnivore—but you do have to eat in a way that supports metabolic health. That means minimizing processed foods, prioritizing protein and fiber, stabilizing blood glucose, and maintaining insulin sensitivity. This isn’t about body aesthetics. It’s about preserving brain function, reducing cancer risk, and delaying cardiovascular disease.

Sleep, Stress, and Cognitive Reserve

Finally, sleep. Another pillar of wellness we undervalue. Seven to eight hours of high-quality sleep isn’t a luxury—for most of us, it’s a biological necessity. Sleep deprivation feeds chronic stress and accelerates aging at the cellular level, including telomere shortening and brain atrophy. Cognitive health isn’t just about crossword puzzles and fish oil. It’s also about protecting sleep architecture, maintaining a sense of purpose, and engaging in lifelong learning.

The End Game

Lifespan without healthspan is a hollow victory. And whether you use biohacking to achieve it is up to you. But you have a say in how you age. That’s the fundamental truth most people don’t realize—or don’t want to. We can’t control every variable, but we can control far more than we think.

Of course, there’s no guarantee you’ll reach 80, 90, or 100. But if you do, wouldn’t you rather arrive like a badass, with strength, clarity, and autonomy? Because that’s what healthspan is all about:

Not just adding years to life, but life to years.💪🫵😉

REFLECT: How do I define "successful" aging, and what steps am I taking to achieve that vision? What challenges do I face in maintaining a healthy lifestyle, and how can I overcome them? If I imagine myself a few decades older, what advice would my future self give about living healthfully now?