Bryan Johnson: The Five Science-Backed Habits For Longer Living

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  He fired 'Evening Bryan.'

  Bryan Johnson binge-ate for years to soothe a decade-long depression. He had failed a few hundred times at saying 'tomorrow I'll start.' Then he named the culprit: the version of himself who ran his mind from 5 to 10 p.m. — tired, fighting fires, looking for relief. He doesn't think Evening Bryan is a bad guy, just someone seeking relief from a burden, and he 'fired' him. Blueprint, his longevity protocol, is built on the premise that an algorithm can take better care of him than he can. It sets his bedtime and his food, and his mind can't add an impromptu brownie at lunch.

• 02

  Decide which version of you is in charge.

  Johnson treats himself as dozens of biochemically different people: Morning Bryan, After-Workout Bryan, Dad Bryan. Does 10 p.m. you, who sets the 6 a.m. alarm, have authority, or does 6 a.m. you, who wants the snooze button? Left alone, the present self always wins at the expense of the others. His sequence is: find a big motivating goal, separate out your selves and assign authority, then use tactics like pairing habits with cues. He now says he almost never behaves in ways he regrets.

• 03

  Make sleep your number one priority.

  His advice for anyone depressed starts with deep empathy — he says wanting to die can feel rational from the inside, and 'get over it' only isolates people. Then come baby steps. Sleep first, because good sleep raises energy, motivation and willpower. Then a daily walk, a few good foods and a few fewer bad ones, until the flywheel turns. At his brain-interface company Kernel, scans of his own brain showed less willpower after nights with less REM and deep sleep.

• 04

  He eats his last meal around 11 a.m. for one reason: sleep.

  He goes to bed at 9:30 on the dot and wakes without an alarm between 4:30 and 5:30. He logged eight months of perfect sleep on his wearable. With digestion finished by bedtime, his resting heart rate sits around 46 and he sleeps perfectly. Eating at 5 or 6 p.m. pushes it to about 56, cuts REM and deep sleep by roughly 50% and adds about 35 minutes awake. Bread, pasta, rice, flours, fried food and sugar also raise it. He gave up a daily three ounces of red wine because even a noon glass can show up in his sleep.

• 05

  Five 'power laws' get you a life expectancy of about 92.

  Don't smoke. Exercise six hours a week, mixing strength, flexibility and cardio. Eat a Blueprint-like or Mediterranean diet. Keep BMI between 18.5 and 22.5. Limit alcohol — he recalls the guideline as roughly one to three glasses of wine a week. He says sleep is emerging as a sixth power law as measurement improves. His team graded the health-span and lifespan literature by effect size; hot and cold exposure didn't make the cut for longevity.

• 06

  His biomarkers benchmark against 18-year-olds.

  He uses 18-year-olds because strength-to-weight ratio and VO2 max peak at that age. He reports cardiovascular capacity in the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds, bone mineral density in the top 0.2% of 30-year-olds, and a bench press in the top 10% of 18-year-olds. He trains about an hour every day with no rest days, using high-rep work rather than heavy weights. He says he got sick over a break for the first time in three years. The goal is to rejuvenate each of the body's 70-plus organs, measured by biological rather than chronological age.

• 07

  Money scrambles people's reality.

  He grew up poor. His mother sewed his clothes, and in third grade he worked the lunch tables to cover $25 a month of cafeteria money. He had no money until he sold Braintree at 34. He says nearly half of the people close to him since then have done something unambiguously bad to him, sometimes illegal. His advice for a sudden $500 million: change nothing for 6–12 months, expect everyone to want something (even bigger wedding gifts), and define what the money is for or 'money will run you.'

• 08

  'Don't die' as a philosophy for the AI era.

  Intelligence is improving faster than we can model, so he says the only thing he knows for sure is 'don't die.' That means don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't kill the planet, and align AI with the same goal. Aligning his 35 trillion cells is, to him, the same goal-alignment problem we face with superintelligence. It's the most-played game on Earth: we breathe every two seconds and look both ways before crossing the street.