|Sci|: Daily Habits—Your Shield in the Aging Rebellion |Fi|: A Singular Panda Ch 4
Science IRL: Everyday aging antidotes + Fic: Our heroine's aging trance snaps, causing a lovers' quarrel--all because of a long-dead alien.
Jump to Table of Contents: Singular Panda +Anti-Aging Science Articles
|Science IRL|: Daily Habits—Your Shield in the Aging Rebellion
Disclosure—None of this is medical advice
I’m not qualified to provide medical advice. Furthermore, neither my mechanical engineering experience nor my technical sales experience lends me any authority on the science and interventions of aging.
This Anti-Aging nonfiction installment of ScifIRL is an edu-tainment style collection of articles informed by my personal goals and research. I’m hoping they will provide you an introduction to this quickly growing field of study and how it may affect your life.
So You Want to Brew Your Own Fountain of Youth?
You’ve joined the aging revolution. You’re still reading (thank you!) and you’re convinced some incredible anti-aging medical interventions are coming.
Last week, you met the Scientists who are hell-bent on defeating ye olde Dragon-Tyrant of aging. If they’re successful, things like gene therapy and broadly-accessible anti-aging drugs prescribed by your very own Primary Care Provider will become available in the next couple of decades, not years.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to preserve your health so you’ll arrive in this bright new era in a body and mind fit enough to receive revolutionary treatments. So it’s time to talk about what you can do now, today, tomorrow, to fight the rebellion on the homefront.
In this Anti-Aging volume of ScifIRL, our story’s heroine, Bridgette, talks about the starving maw that is the time between now and an era when humans aren’t dying of age-related diseases.
So, how can you preserve your body until we have substantial and pervasive longevity health services?
The great news is you may already be doing quite a bit! Many routine things typically lumped under good self-care are incredibly effective longevity tools.
In Dr. Peter Attia’s new book, “Outlive,” he outlines everyday ways you can increase the number of years in which you are healthy, which also contributes to a longer life span—a concept he calls “healthspan”.
1) Exercise
2) Sleep
3) Nutrition & Calorie Restriction
4) Relationships and Emotional Co-Regulation
1] Exercise
Why: It is the single most effective thing you can do right now to reduce all-cause mortality. Read that again. And again. This is THE BEST THING.
“Going from zero weekly exercise to just ninety minutes per week can reduce your risk of dying from all causes by 14 percent. It’s very hard to find a drug that can do that.” (Ref 1)
How:
A) For folks who don’t yet have an exercise habit:
Start with 10-20 minutes of light cardio 3-4 days a week until it’s a habit you crave if you miss it
Increase to 4-5 days, 30-minute cardio workouts every week
Eventually swap 1 cardio day per week for lifting some weights or working with resistance bands
Once 5x 30-minute weekly workouts have become a habit, take a look at phase B
PS: Give yourself a lot of grace and credit here. Building new habits is tough work—it’s a type of exercise in itself! The region of the brain associated with corporate function you lean on for habit forming is one of the most energetically expensive parts of your brain. Give yourself a good year or so to go from 0 to 5 workouts a week without much conscious effort to keep up the habit.
B) For Active folks:
Do your habits serve longevity goals? Check in with these criteria:
5 x 30-45 minute cardio sessions in “Zone 2” or 60-70% of your max heart rate. You can calculate this if you don’t have a heart rate monitor.
1 x 45 minute HIIT or Zone 6-7 (90% of your max heart rate)
5 x 30-45 minute resistance/weights sessions
Check how your exercise habits are contributing to your longevity with these metrics:
Get your VO2max* checked, preferably professionally. Make a plan to increase that number and check in with it annually.
Get a scale that tracks lean muscle, fat, and water %. These may not be perfectly accurate, but over time you will have a trend you can reference that is precise enough to be useful for you to work with. The higher the lean muscle and the lower the fat, generally the better your health.
2] Sleep
Why: Sleep is crucial for healthy brain function, muscle recovery, and emotional regulation. Conversely, poor sleep is linked to dementia and heart disease.
How: Develop a wind-down routine and stick to it. Avoid looking at your phone or other blue light emitters 30 minutes before bed. Use a sound machine. Regulate the temperature in your room to 65-68 degrees. Avoid eating or consuming alcohol within 2 hours before bed.
When: 8 hours, as routinely as possible. Try not to vary bed/wake-up time by more than +/- 2 hrs: if weeknight bedtime is 10pm, try to go to bed before midnight on weekends.
3] Calorie Restriction
Why: Calorie restriction slows the process of aging by 2-3%, as seen in human trials and many experiments with other mammals.
How: Calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), then make a meal plan where you eat only 75% of your BMR. If counting calories is new to you, try out an app to learn to estimate your calories until you have a handle on it. I’ve used MyFitnessPal for years and highly recommend it.
When: 5 days per week. For 2 days, preferably not consecutive, eat 100% of your calories.
4] Relationships and Emotional Co-Regulation
Why: There’s not much point in working hard at prolonging your life if you’re not enjoying it, or if your mind is a constant hellscape. MOST people are significantly happier and healthier with well-rounded relationships. This is a virtuous cycle since happier people tend to be healthier.
Also, I won’t go so far as to call emotional co-regulation a form of hive mind, but the fabulous hosts at Therapist Uncensored podcast have dubbed emotional co-regulation “neural wi-fi.” The phenomenon where one person borrows mental processing resources from someone else. When you’re upset and phone a friend who helps calm you down, you are leveraging their relatively calm nervous system to signal your triggered system that you can relax. This may sound oversimplified and overblown, but take a look at this podcast for more background.
How: Prioritize time developing your relationships with at least 2-3 people you trust, who are supportive and dependable. (Note, these are not your kids or people you’re the primary caretaker for. These should be individuals who have the capacity for healthy, peer-level co-regulation). Also, commit to addressing mental health issues as seriously as you would physical health issues. Get professional help and dedicate time and focus to it.
When: How often do you lean on others when you realize you’re upset about something? How often do you express gratitude about the ways people improve your day or show you kindness? Do you have self-care routines to support/offset any chronic mental health issues? Take note of your baseline frequency for a week, then pick one of these to do more regularly for a month.
*Note on VO2: This is fascinating because it’s readily comparable to activities you want to be able to do as you grow older. It’s literally a measure of how much oxygen your system can take in and use. Because VO2 degrades as you age (if you aren’t exercising as described here to preserve it), this is a singularly useful metric for your longevity efforts. It predicts what you’ll be capable of as you age.
For instance, the average woman in her forties has a max VO2 of around 32, which means 32 milliliters of Oxygen are used in the blood in one minute per kg of body weight. Analogous to a car’s miles per hour—this number literally represents how much work her body can do until her ‘engine’ sputters and she’s forced to stop moving until the cellular O2 tank is refilled. This means at age 40, unless our hypothetical lady is actively working to maintain her VO2, she may not be able to hike by her 40th birthday.
Some common VO2 loads for popular activities you’ll probably want to do be able to do your whole life, ideally:
Playing a light game of soccer with grandkids 35-40 ml/min/kg
Moderate hiking: 30 ml/min/kg
Carrying groceries two blocks 25 ml/min/kg
References
1) Attia, P., & Gifford, B. (2023). 21. In Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity (p. 218). essay, Harmony. https://books.apple.com/us/book/outlive/id1624320842
Stay tuned…next time you’ll hear about genetic scissors: CRISPR and other things that will contribute to longevity treatments!
|Science Fiction|: A Singular Panda Ch 4
Previously…Our heroine, celebrity CEO Bridgette Strand, began a conversation with a chatbot trained on her alien mentor’s journals and learned he voluntarily sacrificed himself by leaving his wayward cruise ship and coming to Earth to help humans solve climate change. Far from the comfort she thought she’d find, Bridgette’s denial about her responsibility for her anti-aging company dissolves and leaves her in throes of a nervous breakdown.
Tarra holds me pressed to her chest, patient and quiet, but I know she's worried.
I owe her an explanation I can barely parse.
"Hyp—he's…he's how we met," I manage to start.
Tarra laughs, her youthful smile just like the day I first saw her in that conference room talking about aligning global grids.
Linking the alien Hypyncretnak to ambassadors across the globe was her first job, and my first real software gig. It justified starting my first company.
If Hyp had been taken seriously, if the first alien contact hadn't been dumped on a rookie White House Correspondent, if the US government hadn't been such a bag of rabid cats led by that oompa loompa liar...
I used to really love how unlikely our meeting had been, how much it had depended on the widespread incompetence, ignorance, and doubt of the time.
I cry harder, remembering how Hyp had looked, feeling a sense of fear and disgust I hadn't felt back then. Now, I see it like he's right in front of me. The whirring machinery of his personal hovercraft. His tiny yellow eyes glowed in the depths of his mask while his big bionic eyes fixed on us intently from their mount on his metal breastplate. Layers of inflated plastics billowed around him.
He was a Picasso meets Andy Warhol collage: a biomechanical curiosity that Barnum & Bailey would have shamelessly collected.
Back then I never imagined I might have to turn myself into something like that just to keep up with the human race.
"Bridge..."
"Tell me again about the first encounter--the surfer guy and the machinist."
"What--"
An urgent pleading look I can't contain makes her rock backward. Her eyes search the room for the old, ludicrous details.
"This stoner surfer saw this creature swim up out of the ocean--"
"--Without the hovercraft, no plasticky suit and mask--"
I motion for her to continue as if I hadn't interrupted her like a toddler impatiently reciting a favorite bedtime story.
"Yeah, surfer guy said it looked like a yellow octopus with a long backbone, and that it asked for tools--"
"--And the bum led him to the abandoned seaport machine shop--"
"And there he built everything he needed to 'live on earth among sentients', and the call he made to the senator came from the payphone outside the seaport."
I nod, feeling crazy as fresh tears flow. "It all feels like a dream now, doesn't it? Doesn't it seem crazy?"
If Tarra was confused before, she's baffled now.
"Yeah...now you're sounding like me. What's wrong, sweetheart? Do you want me to call for the doc? Should I at least cancel our dinner tonight?"
I shake my head no. Then yes. This isn't depression--certainly isn't a manic episode. The doc and his therapies won't help. And I don't want to talk to anyone but Tarra.
She goes to the kitchen to call her family to cancel where I don’t have to overhear their disappointment or her apology.
This is denial catching up with me. Carrying out her vengeance on me for ignoring her all these years, the vindictive bitch.
I catch my breath and let the tears fall. Tears have a way of carving a path for subconscious truths, so I cry freely so I can open up when Tarra comes back.
She brings me my favorite robe and a mug of tea.
"I'm scared of being left behind," I blurt. "I feel like I'm already obsolete. But I don't want to change. I don't want to be--"
Alien? Robot? Inhuman. Sub or superhuman?
Tarra blinks, not understanding. Kisses the top of my head. "Honey, I'm right here, I'm never gonna leave you. Who's leaving you behind? You still have your company, though there's no accounting for Anhil, eh? No one's leaving you behind."
I'd like to laugh, I'd love for her words to make me feel lighter. "But you are," I whisper. Still, she doesn't understand because she thinks I'm taking my pills, taking the first big irreversible anti-aging step alongside her.
I can't bring myself to admit it because I can't explain why I'm avoiding it. Then, I can't bring myself to talk at all.
Tarra makes me a bubble bath and leaves me alone to process. I sink into the heat and feel my body's half-floating lightness.
Clarity begins to seep in.
I'm lonely because I can't talk to Tarra, my Person, about how dwarfed, how indebted, how thankful I am that Hyp did what he did for our planet. She doesn't understand that I need my mentor back. I need someone to tell me I'm doing the right thing.
I'm anxious and starving to know Hyp from these journals. I can't fathom much about his life or his mind, and as excited as I am to finally have the ability sitting right there in my tablet, I'm afraid that his testimony won’t reassure me. What do I do then?
I'm scared I'll learn there really is an entire welcoming universe out there, and that I can't ever go there in this body, currently soaking in warmth and releasing tension under scented bubbles.
I'm sad that I've only just begun to love this body well, and it was a hell of a journey.
Under the bubbles, I hug my arms around my chest tightly, pressing my fingers into the scar tissue from the biggest fight of my life.
Tarra bursts into the bathroom.
"This is what's going on, isn't it?!" She holds up my unopened gene therapy prep pack. "What happened to starting this together? I thought maybe it was just working faster on me but no, you've been lying to me! This is what you meant by being left behind."
I move to stand but being naked in a fight feels terribly vulnerable. I sink back, crouching in the tub. I don't know what to say.
"We started this because of you. Your cancer--" her voice rips apart and with it, my heart. "We know exactly how likely it is you'll have a regression soon. And I know the way you have to think about it, but I can't watch you go through that again."
She grips the packet of pills so hard the thin cardboard packaging bends.
"I'm sorry..."
Tarra glares at me, willing me to put more words together than that pitiful couplet.
She drops the pill pack in the sink and slams the door behind her.
To be continued…
Author’s Note—A dude walks into a lady-studded gun show…
Imagine: I’m lifting weights in the basement of a high rise hotel in a city that’s gently tucking itself in for a cold December night. To my left, a lithe woman with chunky white headphones bobs up and down drinky-drinky bird style, doing deadlifts with a cauldron-sized kettlebell. To my right, a woman’s biceps are winning an argument against the lycra of her shirtsleeves as their proud owner smiles at something only she can hear through her airpods.
Enter a thirty-something dude sans shirt and suddenly sans composure, scuffing the toe of his sneakers nervously. I pretend not to notice him, hoping his apparent discomfort will ebb without an overt audience. He stares openly for a few heartbeats (accelerated due to my own machinations in this iron jungle) at the three of us women dominating the room…unintentionally. Finally he scuttles, head down, over to a bike and gets to spinning.
Though I have some sympathy for the guy—who hasn’t walked into a room and felt distinctly out of place—I also felt rather proud of us three ladies. Over my years of travel workouts in hotel gyms, the number of women in the gym, and lifting weights, has increased. This is just my anecdotal experience, but it made me think of a quote in the show GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling). One of the wrestlers is describing why she is enjoying learning the sport because she gets to live in and use her body for herself. It’s not for her family, not for her kids, not for her job—wrestling is for the pleasure of learning to use her body for something totally about her own potential and embracing the struggle. It hit me right in the feels and I think about it often.
Table of Contents for A Singular Panda + Anti-Aging Science Articles
A Singular Panda Chapter 1 + Science IRL: You’re Invited To Join the Aging Rebellion
A Singular Panda Chapter 2 + Science IRL: Defining Aging—Who’s Holding the Pen?
A Singular Panda Chapter 3 + Science IRL: Meet the Revolutionaries Fighting Aging
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