9 hacks for STAYING 29-years-old
| Ⓒ By Jonathan Roseland |
I'm not a doctor, medical professional, or trained therapist. I'm a researcher and pragmatic biohacking practitioner exercising free speech to share evidence as I find it. I make no claims. Please practice skepticism and rational critical thinking. You should consult a professional about any serious decisions that you might make about your health. Affiliate links in this article support Limitless Mindset - spend over $150 and you'll be eligible to join the Limitless Mindset Secret Society.
This week, I turn 38 years old and (please forgive the not-so-humble brag) I really don't look or feel it!
Check out these photo galleries and videos of me now and nine years ago, and I think you'll agree that I barely look like I've aged a day...
Perhaps it's a bit vain to want to stay looking 29 years old but I see beauty as a proxy for and manifestation of health, self-control, fertility, confidence, self-esteem, and dignity. That's why it's something I aspire to unashamedly! If you still think beauty is silly, I'll add that my energy levels have not declinedsince the time I was 29 (and my cognitive edge has certainly not dulled). If anything, I feel more enthusiastic and motivated than ever going into my late 30s! To quote from one of my favorite novels...
I was young again, as if on the sea or in the air, made lively by having everything to lose and everything to gain, made content only by risk, for in the light of risk every earthly color catches heavenly fire. (p. 366)
In this article, I'll share my top 9 anti-aging hacks and habits, things I've done for years that keep me young.
Coconuts
I eat raw coconut almost every day with a little dark chocolate or blueberries. I started eating coconuts daily when I began my digital nomad adventure in Costa Rica (because the food sucks there!) I'm now a +10-year confirmatory case study of what the research on coconuts overwhelmingly suggests: it's one of the best anti-aging foods - a dense source of healthy MCT fat. It keeps your skin clear, soft, and smooth. As you can see from my photos I've acquired almost no new wrinkles in the past 10 years. So coconuts are a "beauty hack" - that you can replace one meal a day with costing about one dollar!
Fasting
My weight and body shape have changed very little since my 20s, so it might surprise you to hear that I'm not a paragon of discipline when it comes to my diet...
- My wife and I will have a decadent pizza night once a month.
- Before getting married, I staunchly avoided bread (because I got the impression that "bread is bad" from health podcasts) but my wife has seriously good taste in bread. Now a few times a week I'll enjoy savory sandwiches; Eincorn and cheese or sourdough and peanut butter-like Tahini and honey.
- I drink moderately. 4-7 glasses of red wine a week, a beer or two a month, and sporadic shots of Bulgarian rakia (Balkan fire water) with my in-laws here.
- And I had a cookie yesterday (and I'm eyeing one as I write this very article!)
Yet, even during the COVID era, while I wasn't allowed to go to the gym, my wife and I gained no weight (unlike a lot of people, apparently). Here's us on vacation in the summer of 2021...
What we do right - what I think makes my ongoing dietary hedonism sustainable - is fasting. Breakfast is always bulletproof-style butter coffee and we do a 16-hour fast every day. Then once or twice a month I do a 24-hour fast, these have gotten easy to do for me, and I really savor breaking the fast! Fasting is free (in fact, it ends up saving a lot of money) and one of the best hacks for maintaining metabolic flexibility.
Red light therapy
![The FlexBeam [Biohacker Review]](/media/reviews/photos/thumbnail/1500x500s/da/3c/b5/flexbeam-7-1673340555.jpg)
For several years now, I've done 10-20 minutes of red light therapy almost every day. Photodynamic red light therapy has a (literally!) brilliant range of beneficial health effects; it normalizes mitochondrial metabolic function, it's a sleep hack inducing melatonin release, and a beauty hack (both topically and systemically).
My red lights were both under $600 which might seem a little spendy compared to health supplements, but the more you read up on the science of photobiomodulation, the more you'll see that it's a pretty fantastic value. Quality supplements are going to run you $40-$70 and they'll be gone in a month or two whereas red lights will empower your health in a number of dimensions for years!
I have two red lights that I use a little differently; the panel light I use on my back before bed and as a lamp in the evenings while the FlexBeam I use for targetted, topical therapy on my muscles after a workout...
Nootropics
Permit me another (not-so-humble) brag; in the past decade, I've been extraordinarily productive while living a wildly hectic life. I spent much of the decade living abroad as a digital nomad; which is - in a word - hectic.
- I rarely slept on the same bed for more than a few weeks; I was constantly moving to new AirBNBs (back when they were cheap), flatshares, hostels, and cheapo hotels.
- More than a few times, I took long bus rides to new countries or cities that I found inhospitable and then had to backtrack.
- I also wasn't in "monk mode" much as an entrepreneur; I would cram networking meetups, language learning lessons, daygame sessions, salsa classes, and late-night revelry at discos into my weeks.
- And during, much of that time reliably high-speed internet was NOT accessible in many of the places I found myself; I've spent more time than I care to admit searching in new-to-me cities for coworking space, cafes, restaurants, hotel lobbies, or libraries that had half-way decent wifi.
Yet I managed to write over 800 articles (many very thorough and well-researched), totaling over a million words. I produced hundreds of podcasts and videos (very few were low-effort). I built several pretty impressive websites along with consulting over a hundred clients. I got a lot done for a guy constantly distracted by a very unconventional lifestyle! And Nootropics are largely to thank for this. From Panamanian islands to Odesa, Nootropics were constantly in my medicine cabinet, backpack, luggage, and bloodstream.
I've now used over 200 Nootropics in the past decade - almost every one of those branded stack products along with a bunch of weird, fringe "smart drugs" - but there are three types that I turned to a lot more than others because they so reliably enhanced my brain power and focus...
The Racetams
The Adaptogens
And Nicotine
Final (not-so-humble) brag, most hard-charging entrepreneurs (many with lives less geographically hectic than my digital nomad existence) get badly burnt out eventually or go through a bout of depression, and then they need to go to therapy or meditate on a beach for six months to get back in the grindset groove. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED TO ME. That's not because I'm such a stoic, tough guy. I think that has a lot to do with the mental health-fortifying effects of Nootropics.
Mnemonic memory training
For a long time, I've been a memory training dilettante (maybe I'll take it seriously one day), and - marketing hype aside - it does help you to remember more of the things you need to. Every mind is a library, yet as the decades pass, more and more books tend to get lost.
As the toxicity of modernity intensifies memory loss affects younger and younger people. This is why I try to spend 5-10 minutes daily exercising my memory using the excellent SuperMemo app; it's a flashcard app with a clever algorithm that hacks the normal forgetting process. I have SuperMemo loaded up with hundreds of little things I would forget otherwise (foreign language vocabulary, phone numbers, birthdays, scientific findings from my Biohacking research, fun factoids I learned in books, along with quirky quotable phrases and passages - like Floreant Dendritae! “May Your Brain Cells Flourish!” in Latin).
Mnemonics really will enrich your mind and make you more creative, it's a topic worth reading a few books on, like...
Dual N-Back brain training
One thing I haven't been dilettantish (yes, that's a word) about is brain training with a Dual N-Back app. The main thing Dual N-Back does is exercise the working memory - the "RAM" of the conscious mind that solves problems and decides what to focus on. Brain training consistently makes me a more focused, disciplined, and dangerous dude.
I'll do it diligently every day for months on end, then I'll leave it alone for a while as I explore other (more fun) brain upgrade modalities. But then I'll always get back into it; every time I rediscover it, I notice some subtle way it makes me better. Most recently, I've noted that it brings more tranquility to my relationships as it makes me more emotionally resilient; I don't get stuck on a perceived slight and can focus on what I have to be grateful for from those in my life.
Weight lifting
Is something else I've been dilettantish about - I'll get a gym membership and get in several 90-minute workouts a week, then I'll take a few months off when life gets too full. And even inconsistent weight training has kept me lean, muscular enough to do everything I want, good-looking naked, and capable of opening a stubborn jar of pickles for my wife.
Being a supplement junkie, I take a few well-proven workout performance enhancers pre-workout - Creatine and HMB - that inspire me to push myself a little further there in the domain of body-length mirrors and metal.
Sun tanning
Tanning is endlessly debated, but that hasn't deterred me from shirt-lessly catching some rays whenever I could, sometimes even on Christmas day!
Catching some Vitamin D from the sun is a great reason to pick up (and string up) a hammock. During the warm months, I'll go for a 20-minute hang almost every day during midday, which normalizes my circadian rhythm and results in a nice tan. So far I haven't been pooped on by a pigeon (but I know that day is coming!) The only times I wear organic sunscreen is when spending hours at the beach on vacation.
Semen retention
For men, the preservation of sexual energy has an undeniable effect on health, longevity, vigor, and general happiness. Taoists measure life in breaths, heartbeats, and ejaculation and aim to reduce the frequency of these bodily functions with breathwork, meditation, and tantric techniques. Modern science has found that masturbation lowers a man's testosterone while sex with a real-life flesh-and-blood woman raises it. So as a single man, I would often go for 30, 60, or 90-day periods no fabbing - abstaining from porn or masturbation.
And when I got into a relationship, I would practice tantric techniques to avoid ejaculation or at least pleasure her enough (that she became my wife!) Now my wife gets 100% of my sexual energy and I enjoy la petite mort (French for "the small death") with her more often than the Taoists recommend...
Your age minus 7 divided by 4 is the minimum days to have between ejaculations
But I take Horny Goat Weed, have habituated a lot of other male vitality hacks and, hey you only once.
In addition to these nine things, I've been privileged to try a bunch of different anti-aging supplements, tools, and tech.
I'm sure these things have helped but the above-itemized hacks have been a regular part of my life for years (over a decade in the cases of a few) so I credit them for staying twenty-nine-ish!
And genetics are, of course, a factor. Several of my uncles on my mother's side aged very gracefully through middle age, and their father was still righteously banging my grandma at age 90 (or so I've been told. That's something to aspire to!)
Finally...
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