A Boundless Approach to Aging

< Full Episode

Transcript: A Boundless Approach to Aging

Season 11, Episode 17  | September 23, 2025

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome back to another episode of Life Time Talks. I’m David Freeman.

And I’m Jamie Martin.

Today we’re going to be talking about a topic around taking a balanced approach to aging. So although aging is inevitable, many of the effects commonly associated with it, such as aches and pains, restricted movement, chronic disease, brain fog, weight gain, and low energy don’t need to be. What if our definition of aging had no limits? We’ll be exploring this question today, along with some strategies that could support us breaking free from the constraints in today’s conversation with — who we got, Jamie?

Yeah, we’re really excited. Today we have Ben Greenfield with us. Ben is a global leader in health, fitness, and human performance. He’s a New York Times best-selling author with his books including Boundless and Beyond Training, both being guide books for those looking to optimize their energy levels and achieve a life of boundless vitality. Ben’s work reaches millions of people through writing, podcasting, speaking, and coaching. He has a degree in sports science and certifications in personal training, strength, and conditioning, and sports nutrition. And over the past two decades, Ben has competed in 13 Ironman triathlons and worked with countless individuals, including executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes.

His approach to health and wellness is designed to empower people to live boundless lives, where energy is abundant, motivation is constant, and limits are non-existent. Ben, thanks so much for coming on Life Time Talks with us.

Hey, what’s up. Thanks for having me.

We are so excited to have you.

Hey, Ben, listen, let’s jump right into it. So the journey as it relates to the world of health, and you had this desire to want to understand how the human body and mind can operate without limits so boundless, if you will. So can you walk us through why limits are, or the being of boundless is something that you focus on?

Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of boundless is based around the concept of unlocking human potential that we should have at our beck and call, but that we walk around not being able to tap into or access. And I don’t think anybody would necessarily unless some, I don’t know, transhumanist who is convinced they’re going to be immortal. I don’t think anybody would say that we have no boundaries whatsoever. At the end of the day, yeah, when we’re 90, we’re going to have some sarcopenia and maybe some osteopenia, and our skin might not look as good as it did when we were 18.

And you might not be able to do an eight hour Ironman triathlon or run a 400 in the same amount of time. But the idea of merging healthspan and lifespan to be able to tap into way more than what we see around us, as far as what’s accepted as status quo, is something that I wake up in the morning super excited to tap into. I mean, this is what I’ve lived and breathed for over two decades now.

I started coaching tennis in my backyard when I was 14, running up and down the hills behind my house and figuring out what might be healthier to eat than macaroni and cheese. And the $0.29 hamburger, $0.39 Cheeseburger Day at McDonald’s, which is one of my favorites, I’ll admit, and eventually wound up in college studying physiology and anatomy and biomechanics. And that’s where I got my master’s degree.

And I’ve been immersed in competing and coaching. And now increasingly, the world of biohacking and anti-aging ever since then. And so I think it’s very interesting to look at, let’s say, a lot of these blue zones, where despite there being some controversy around birth records or incomplete data, we can pretty much say our living at least a little bit better combination of healthspan and lifespan in the average Westerner and see what they’re doing and what we can replicate, even in a modern, post-industrial, comfort-controlled environment where we might not wake up in the morning and have our job to be like, I don’t know, hiking dwarf goats up the side of a mountain to go gather some water or something like that. But yet, there’s a lot that we can do that we often don’t tap into when it comes to achieving what we’re potentially capable of.

Absolutely. Well, and you alluded to it already. I mean, aging. That is an area where many people think there are constraints. You start to hear people say, I’m too old for that, or I can’t do that anymore. And I mean, I think, but on this podcast and at Life Time in general, we’re just passionate about helping people no matter the age or state they are in their life to really have the best health span in their lifespan as you just talked about. You want to merge the two.

We want them to feel as capable and free as they can as they age. We want them to be able to do everything that we want to do. So why do you think people have this idea that the common negative effects associated with aging are destiny, so to speak?

I think there’s probably a few different reasons. One, we do live in an era where self-quantification, for better or worse, is at our fingertips. You can get blood testing that tells you that maybe you have rampant inflammation or thyroid dysregulation, let’s say. Or you could get some kind of a gut test that tells you that you have a dysbiosis or, I don’t know, some parasite or yeast or fungus or something. And I think probably at the top of the list, you get a DNA test that tells you that you have a high genetic risk for type II diabetes or colon cancer or some type of unfixable methylation issue or something.

And you can interpret that as a doomscroll. And some people do. They’re like, well, I was predestined to be obese. It runs in my family. My genetic results say this. My trainer told me I have a low metabolism. And so that data almost has the ability to slap you in the face and be a real downer. But if you look at genetics, for example, one part of genetics is the realm of epigenetics, how environmental factors, including the way that you live your life, the way that you eat, and the way that you move, affects whether or not these built in genetics are actually going to manifest.

So I talk and work with people on a daily basis who, for example, like me, high genetic risk for type II diabetes. I often wear a continuous glucose monitor. I track my blood glucose. I’m cognizant of the carbohydrates that I eat unless my sons take me out for gelato, which occasionally happens, and I have really good blood sugar regulation. If I get a lab test, my insulin looks good and my glucose looks good because I’m almost hyper aware of that and use that data about diabetes as empowerment.

And not to get too negative or scary here, but I have two cousins who have passed away of colon cancer, a grandfather who has passed away of colon cancer, a father who has passed away of colon cancer, and another cousin who doesn’t have his colon anymore because it had to get resected due to colon cancer. Well, I am very aware of everything from the amount of processed red meat and alcohol that I consume to getting a colonoscopy every few years as preventive screening, to paying attention to my gut health, to eating a very wide variety of polyphenols and flavanols and antioxidants from the plant kingdom as protective mechanisms all the way down to something I catch flack for on social media. I even do a coffee enema once a week to once a month.

Now there’s skepticism behind that. But I do these things because I look at my data. And I think, OK, I want to be empowered. I’m not going to use this as a doomscroll. And same thing when I go into the doctor for my favorite part of the year, that colonoscopy, I’m clean as a whistle. And I think a big part of that is the empowered lifestyle that I live based on what I’ve learned.

So I think that the other thing that plays into this is just the status quo. Especially in our Western lifestyle, we have a habit of taking older people out of a position of honor or authority or wisdom and instead passing them along into retirement and nursing homes or hospice care or roles in which it’s very easy to feel useless to society.

I mean, I personally really like the idea of looking around at people my age and saying whatever when I’m 60. No, I don’t want to be sitting in a rocking chair, reading a book, sitting in a nursing home, playing cribbage. I know I’m stereotyping here. I want to be out doing triathlons. I want to look at guys like Laird Hamilton and Don Wildman and Mark Sisson and all these mentors who I look up to who are out riding their fat bikes on the beach and surfing and playing pickleball and tennis and not just golfing but speed golfing.

And I think that we need to redefine what getting old means. And I have another friend, Derek Coburn, who just wrote a book called Let’s Retire Retirement. I don’t plan on retiring. I think a big part of what fuels an active lifestyle is waking up with purpose. And another example just to finish up is even if you look at post-menopausal women, there can be a higher risk of cancer and increased all cause risk of mortality after going through menopause. And an evolutionary biologist would tell you, well, that’s because nature has programmed into a woman the idea that once you’re no longer biologically useful and you can’t have kids, nature is just going to slowly take you out.

And yet, again, if you look at areas where there are a disproportionately high number of centenarians or people who live a long time, there’s a huge amount of super happy, vibrant older women because that role of let’s say, I realize this can be controversial. But speaking of this from an evolutionary biology standpoint, that role of propagating the species has been replaced with the role of the wise matriarch passing on wisdom to the village.

And so it’s this idea of, A, look at anything that someone has told you about your body that might make you think that you’re sick, and instead using that to empower yourself from a preventive standpoint, and, B, redefining what it means to be old and defying the status quo that surrounds us in terms of what aging actually means.

Yeah, I mean, Ben, what I’m hearing you say is you usually have heard the term as far as knowledge is power. And the reality is is the application of what we do with that knowledge is where it really becomes powerful is how I look at that and how we probably will bring that to light. So when you think of Life Time Talks, our pillars, we talk about movement. We talk about nutrition and supplementation, sleep, stress management, and a big part of what you just finished off with is mindset.

So with so much information out there, you can only imagine how people will struggle with what actually works and what doesn’t work. And you’ve tried a lot of these biohacking pieces of the movement with the health trends. So how does doing this reinforce these pillars of health that I just mentioned?
You mean how does the concept of biohacking reinforce those pillars?

Well, two parts, one, biohacking, one of them. But more importantly, as far as it’s so much information out there, how to help navigate through all that?

How do you cut through all the clutter and confusion, the latest science and the newest gadget and the newest supplement. And the latest, greatest workout standing on top of a stability ball, wearing blood flow restriction bands. Yeah, I get it.

Exactly.

I think that I really like to step back and look at things through a simplistic lens, even the advanced or scientific world of biohacking. A lot of what that world is doing is looking at nature and harnessing the wisdom of nature to make the body better in some way. And once you understand that, you can cut through a lot of the clutter and simply live. When it comes to living healthier, based on some simple principles, I’ll give you one example. If you look at popular health and fitness advice, or you read a diet or nutrition book, it’s pretty easy to wrap your head around the concept of moving your body and eating healthy. Trying to eat close to nature and not eat a bunch of Frankfurt’s.

I mean, that’s not rocket science for a lot of people. Moving and eating healthy. But I think what’s underemphasized, or at least not emphasized enough, is the idea is that we are electrical machines, our body is a giant battery. And there are books like Healing is Voltage by Jerry Tennant, or The Body Electric by Robert Becker that delve into the concept that each of our cells operate with a very precise electrochemical gradient across that cell. A little bit of a negative charge on the inside, a little bit of a positive charge on the outside, and you can engage in certain lifestyle practices that keep that battery charged and keep that battery from being drained.

So, for example, the planet Earth, every time lightning strikes the surface of our planet, or solar radiation bombards the surface of the planet, it collects negative ions. And when your skin touches the Earth, like being outside barefoot, walking on the beach, swimming in a natural body of water, especially a salty natural body of water like the ocean, which is why visiting the beach can be so healthy for you. Your body soaks up those ions and it’s almost like nature’s ibuprofen. These are natural anti-inflammatory, antioxidant electrical charges that your body can just soak up.

And so if you think about that, then a light bulb moment is, oh, I should go outside barefoot every now and again. I should go lay outside on my back in the backyard. I should consider whether or not I’ve spent the entire day because how you live your day is — how you live your year is how you live your life. Just walking around in big, built up rubber soled shoes all day, disconnected from the planet Earth, not outside. And if that’s the case, then you can start making a point to get in touch with the surface of the Earth. It’s even a practice called grounding for 20 to 60 minutes a day.

There’s an emerging number of companies now that will sell grounding shoes and earthing shoes that aren’t rubber, but that actually conduct electricity from the earth. And there are even mats now that you can bring into your home. If you can’t be outside a dirty, barefoot hippie all day, you can get grounding mats. I got one next to my desk here. I’ve got one in my office next door. I sleep on one underneath the top sheet of my bed that’s plugged into the grounding outlet of my home. So thinking about how you’re harnessing this giant earth that’s surrounding you to actually recharge your battery is one example.
Another example would be every time photons of light strike your skin, particularly full spectrum light, which you get from say, sunlight, those photons actually help to charge up your cells, specifically your mitochondria, to speed up the flow of electrons and produce more ATP. So in addition to the earth, you can also make sure that you’re getting adequate exposure to sunlight. And again, when we look at technologies now that are red light panels, red light beds, infrared saunas, ways of lighting your home, all this stuff that’s found in the field of what’s called photobiomodulation to actually charge the body using light.

And then a final example would be good clean, pure filtered water and minerals are how your body actually carries charges throughout it. So not being salt phobic but using really, really good sea salt and trace liquid minerals and electrolytes beyond just the isolated sodium chloride of table salt, which I don’t think is healthy, but staying open to the idea of using a lot of these different forms of minerals and electrolytes, along with good, clean, pure water and hydration to actually keep that charge going throughout the body. So that’s an example of how you charge the body. Connection to earth. Connection to light. And then good clean pure water and minerals.

And then the type of things that drain the battery. Well, I named a couple of them. Just never touching the planet, being inside all day. But we are also living in an electrical suit. A man-made electrical suit that our bodies haven’t really had a chance to evolve to deal with. Because this is all new, like in the past 100 years, just being surrounded by washers and dryers and refrigerators and microwaves and Wi-Fi routers and a freaking computer in our back pocket. So I’m just very cognizant during the day, and I encourage a lot of the people I work with to do this.

If you don’t need to have the electricity on or near you, you don’t have it on you or near you. My phone is plugged into this when I’m in my office during the day and it’s in airplane mode. This is just like a USB-C to Ethernet adapter. So I can have my phone hardwired and in airplane mode. I have my Wi-Fi router off most of the day and just plug things in via cables. And a lot of people who need to use Wi-Fi, I tell them, well, at least turn it off at night while you’re sleeping. And if you forget to do it, just plug your router into a digital wall timer that automatically turns off at 10:00 PM and automatically turns on at 6:00 AM.

I think the most important thing to do, though, and this is related to sleep, is just make sure your bedroom is a dark, cold, stress-free, work-free cave. So you don’t need a big screen TV and you don’t need your laptop, and you don’t need a bunch of electricity in your bedroom because that’s the one time of your life your body, your cells have a chance to recharge. Your battery has a chance to recharge from all the electricity you’ve been bombarded with throughout the entire day. So it’s not like you have to be a Luddite or go live with the Amish or move to a Himalayan mountaintop, but it’s just a matter of being cognizant of how you’re using technology.

It’s funny because I have clients sometimes who will send me a photo of a meal they’re eating or whatever, and you can see if they do a screenshot of something, let’s say, their Oura Ring data or whatever. You can see if the Wi-Fi is on their phone and I’ll reply back, busted. You don’t need that on. I can see you have a cell connection. So I tell people, even just have the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth disabled, but that’s an example of something that can drain the battery.

So coming full circle to reply to your question, the way I look at things is, yeah, we know to move well, we know to eat healthy, but I think it’s really helpful to think about the body as a battery and think about what things you’re doing to recharge the battery and how you’re living your life, or setting up your office or home or work environment in ways that could drain the battery, potentially.

And those are pretty, I mean, those are pretty straightforward things to do. And what I’m hearing from you is it doesn’t have to be difficult necessarily. Even the first examples, the grounding, the being out in nature, I mean, really those are things, ideally, we’ll be able to step outside. And just make some choices around how you choose to do that. But that’s so fun. It’s a fundamental thing that just noticing how you feel better when you do those things on a regular basis.

Oh, yeah, it feels amazing. I mean, are you kidding me? 2:00 PM after morning emails and phone calls and zooms like this or whatever to just go outside in the patio instead of sitting inside for lunch and to sit-in the sunshine and take off my shirt and eat a plate of salad and just soak up the earth. It’s incredible.
Yeah, it makes a huge difference. Well, we want to just dive into some of these things around longevity specifically because some of these things, whether it’s a health topic or some of these pillars that we’ve talked about, they really are essential when it comes to aging, and how do we have an impact on them. So we’re going to go back and forth, David, and I were going to throw a phrase or term or topic out to you and just have you talk a little bit about what are some of the top strategies people might want to consider or why around them so that they can age more boundlessly.

So we’re going to start. I want to actually just start with movement and exercise. Because as we’re talking to you, you’re moving. You’re on your moving treadmill. It looks like. I know so many people at our offices are now using those. Talk to us about — when we talked. We all know movement matters. Exercise matters. But talk to us a little bit when it comes to being boundless.

Yeah, yeah, this is horrible because I’m talking to people who are in the gym space. I used to own gyms. And I always feel guilty when I say this, but I try to live my life in such a way that going to the gym at the beginning or the end of the day is an option, not a necessity. So what I mean by that is any time I can be moving, taking — I tell my kids, I call them Pomodoro breaks, which isn’t my term, but the idea of taking a break for two minutes every 30 minutes or five minutes every 60 minutes to move the body is something that I’m doing throughout the day. Beyond just the walking treadmill.

Walking to the mailbox. Doing 10 push-ups. Bringing the mail back in the home. Setting up these little triggers throughout the day. After lunch, a hundred jumping jacks in the sunshine. The kettlebell that’s in the floor of my office when I walk in, picking it up and setting it down five times. The pull-up bar that’s out by the garage, every time I walk underneath it, five pull-ups. We have a pickleball court in the neighborhood. Now every time I walk off the pickleball court, there’s a bar over there, too. I do five pull-ups.

So by the end of the day, not an hour has gone by that I’m not figuring out, OK, am I hanging from something? Am I lifting something? Am I moving my body? Am I doing a little bit of calisthenic work? And once you view life through that lens, back to mindset, it helps you get past the defeatist mentality of, oh, man, I don’t have the 45 minutes available today that I need to go to the gym. Therefore, I’m just going to all or nothing today and just not do anything at all.

And I also travel to speak at conferences. Sometimes, as you guys probably know, there is a conference and you’re staying in the same hotel, but it’s busy all day. I will literally, three times during the day, go up to my room, do 50 burpees, get in a cold shower, stand under the cold water for two minutes, comb my hair, put my face lotion back on, get dressed, and go back downstairs. And so even if dinner arrives, I figure, you know what, I’ve got five minutes of cold therapy and almost 100 burpees today. It’s good. I’ve done something, but you just have to get — you have to develop the mentality that you don’t have to step inside a gym to move your body and to get fit.

And this is the thing, a lot of the gym goers or the health enthusiasts, they think movement, movement, movement, which we want to continue to champion. But another thing is work hard, recover harder. So let’s talk about recovery for the next pillar here.

Yeah, I think that recovery can be anything from like Jan — or what’s his name? Dan John, old school strength coach. He’s like lift heavy and then sit around and watch football and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And that certainly is one form of recovery. And I guess if you just a power lifter, maybe that’ll work.

Yeah.

But I’m all about active recovery. So active recovery basically means doing things that allow for increased blood flow, movements of metabolic waste product out of cells, and even ways that you could potentially improve mobility and decrease risk of injury even if you’re not hitting the gym, which is nice not only to enhance recovery, but also many people, probably many people are watching or listening to this. You’re wired to move and you get antsy if you don’t move. And if you miss a workout day like rest days are the worst day of the week for you because you feel guilty at the end of the day and you just want to move.
So I like to program in. Typically, for my older clients, we’ve got up to three recovery days for the people who are pushing 60 plus. Some of the younger people are at least one recovery day. I’m 43. I’m at a stage in my life where I’m at about two recovery days. So a recovery day would look like for the 45 minutes I’d normally be lifting weights. It is foam rolling, vibration balls, some of the Therabody or Hyperice tools, a nice podcast, and literally just giving my chance to self or myself a chance to be my own personal massage therapist. In the same way that I’d be going to work out, I consider it to just be a mobility workout, and I generally work in ample stretching throughout that as well.

Another example would be compression or inversion. And this would be on the daily. I will take a call or read a book or journal article wearing the compression boots, or I will wake up in the morning and hang from an inversion table or some of the gravity boots for just about three to four minutes, just to drain blood out of the body and invert and produce traction in some of the joints. One of my favorites is on my Sunday recovery day is using basically hot cold contrast to really help with blood flow. So a couple of my favorites are five minute hot tub, five minute cold pool back and forth for 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1. Usually with my sons or friends, we can have a nice chat while we’re sitting around.

Another favorite is infrared or dry sauna. 20 to 30 minutes stretching so that I’m getting the good mobility from the hot muscles, getting into the cold plunge. And then if I’ve got the time doing another round to allow for the back and forth blood flow. And then the last thing, even though we could talk for hours about recovery, I’m just giving some examples of how you can think about recovery being more than just sitting on the couch.

Another example would be how you’re eating, how you’re feeling your body. So for me, a big part of recovery comes down to bioavailable amino acids for muscle repair. So we’re talking about collagen supplementation, consuming digestive enzymes that contain something like a protease, as the name implies, something that’s able to break down proteins into amino acids when you have a meal that contains protein. And then the other piece would be a lot of these anti-inflammatories that can help with the joints or peptides that can help with the joints. I know peptides are another big complex field, but I’m a huge fan of turmeric or isolated turmeric saccharides, curcumin, or some form of bioavailable curcumin.
And then for peptides, there’s a couple, three really that I like for recovery. One called BPC-157, one called TB-500, and one called KPV. And these are a little bit more advanced, but they can rapidly assist with recovery or even repair of an injury. I suppose there’s one other thing I should bring up and that’s a newer device electrical muscle stimulation. Either full body or using on joints that need a little bit of extra help. Fantastic for blood flow. And that’s another tool in my toolbox.

And you guys, just to put this into context. Three days ago I could not walk and I was on crutches. You see me walking right now while I’m talking to you. I suffered a pretty significant ankle sprain, stepping backwards off of a vibration platform holding 260 pounds dumbbells. I didn’t see the kettlebell behind me and put my entire body weight. Plus those 260 pounders right on top of my foot, on top of the kettlebell handle and rolled the whole thing. And so all I do is during breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I’m running ice, e-stim. Then I follow that up with red light and heat. I’m doing peptides, I’m doing high dose turmeric, and I’m doing ankle rehab and mobility exercises.

I don’t know about you, but when I was in college they would have said rest, ice, compression, elevation. And that’s the old school way to approach things. I’m more about actively tackling something, especially an injury or full body recovery with as many modalities as possible, because I guarantee if I would have had that injury when I was 18, there’s no way I’d be walking on a treadmill talking to you. But I was able to be mobile and back to working out. And I got pickleball tonight. And that ankle injury was three days ago. So it just shows how powerful some of this stuff can be if you really can drag out all the stops to help your body repair and recover.

Right. Oh, it’s so interesting. I’m glad you’re up and moving and that you have — I mean, it’s so interesting just how many more things we know compared to 25 years ago. I mean, I’m similar in age to you and that’s played sports, you rolled your ankle, you took a break. So there’s just different things that so much has changed in the last 25 years.

Yeah.

OK, let’s dive in for a second. You already mentioned the importance of a dark bedroom. So I want to talk about sleep because we all know that sleep is the time of rest and repair. Why does that become more important with aging?

What’s called your sleep architecture. Your sleep cycles tend to diminish in quality as you age. You almost turn into — it’s funny because I used to laugh at old people when they tell me this, that they just wake up at night and walk around the house and check stuff out and look outside. You almost turn into a little bit of a sentinel when you age. Everything becomes important to check out at night, and you also wake up with racing thoughts and your body is less anabolic as you age. I mean, this is less of the case if you are the aging person I talked about earlier who’s like lifting weights and out surfing and riding your bike around town and doing all the things, but you still do a little bit less muscle growth.

You’ve got less hormones going around when you age. And so your body gets a little bit less quality sleep. I don’t really think that many of the sleep hygiene modalities I would heavily encourage for anybody of any age are any less important once you are an older person, whatever that means to you. So what does that mean? Basic sleep hygiene parameters. Light — presence of ample amounts of natural light in the morning, preferably from sunlight. But there are now light producing devices. I’ve got one on my desk that I can use to shock my body into, hey, it’s daytime, wake up, rather than keeping the curtains closed and things dark, et cetera, and you could also use this as a hack.

Let’s say I travel from the West Coast to the East Coast, and I wake up on the East Coast at 7:00 AM. It’s 4:00 AM for me back home, and I’m dead dog tired. One of the first things I’m going to do is blast myself with light from my phone, light from my computer, light from the sunshine, light from as many sources as possible to tell my body, hey, this is a new time zone. Get used to it. And then the opposite in the evening. Wearing things like blue light blocking glasses, keeping the lights more dim in your home, especially in your bedroom, activating night mode on the phone or having it set up to automatically activate, and paying a lot of attention to light exposure at night.

Temperature bedroom should be, like I mentioned earlier, a dark, cold cave, so 63 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit.

63 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. If you can’t do that, maybe investing in some kind of a mattress topper like an H sleep or a bed jet or a chilly pad that will keep the mattress cool for sleep. Avoiding a hard workout or a heavy, spicy meal three hours leading up to bedtime so your body is cool. And if your social life doesn’t allow you to do that, or your work life doesn’t allow you to do that, cold shower or lukewarm shower before bed to cool off the body. Even using about 5 grams of the supplement glycine is a way to naturally internally cool the bodies. That would be another example.

But thinking about cold — stress is another. Your brain should not associate the bedroom with work. So when I used to check in a hotel room, I’d flop my laptop on the bed, and lay there on my belly cranking out emails. I don’t do that anymore because I was training my brain to have the bed associated with a place where we work on emails. So now the laptop is away. It’s on a desk across the room. At home, there’s no business books by the bedside. There’s no work in bed. Sure, I might watch a funny YouTube video or read fiction or something, but you train the brain to associate the bed with rest.

And then finally sound. Especially for older people. Not just like sirens and slamming doors, but just the general low-level ambient sound of a room. Even the fan turning on can wake you up as you become a lighter and lighter sleeper as you age. So thinking about things like white noise generators, apps that will produce sound. You can still have your phone in airplane mode, of course. I do this, but I use an app called New calm and just pump out 10 hours of super relaxing sound. I don’t sleep 10 hours, but I to put it on for long enough to where it’s not going to turn off at 3:45 in the morning and wake me up. So sound is another big factor.

Then the last thing would be, of course, the supplement world is saturated when it comes to different adaptogenic herbs and all sorts of things that supposedly help you to sleep. I think the main — I would say the main two things to think about would be A, be careful with a lot of the things people are turning to get sleep. That’s not quality sleep. Diazepams, very powerful antihistamines, trazodone, hemp extract that contains a high amount of THC. Any of these will knock you out. But if you look at deep sleep, dreaming, memory formation, emotional processing, learning consolidation, none of that occurs during sleep on any of those compounds. So be careful with the stuff that’s a knockout blow to the head.

And then the other thing to consider is that you do naturally produce a little less melatonin as you age. And so melatonin can be a good thing, especially for an older person. I take melatonin when I travel across more than three time zones. So that’s not a nightly thing for me. I find it to be very helpful for realigning to a new time zone. I take a whole bunch the first couple of nights I’m there, and it’s almost like a sledgehammer to get you adapted to a new time zone.

But if you find yourself really struggling with sleep, your natural melatonin production might have decreased to the point where you need a little bit of extra help. You can get things like this tested. There’s a urine test called the Dutch test, and it’ll look at hormones and neurotransmitters. One of the things that test analyzes is melatonin. So you can see whether or not you’re a little deficient in melatonin if you wanted to check it out.

Hey, Ben, let’s hit on stress. I mean, this is a quote from you. Stress is only a problem when your body doesn’t have the capacity to handle it. So I know you touched a little bit about stress just now, but yeah, I mean that quote says a lot. But for our listeners, can you unpack that a little bit?

Yeah. So what I mean when I say your body doesn’t have the capacity to handle it is largely the amount of cellular resilience you have. Now granted mindset does play a role in this — the way that you perceive stress, the way that you look at a situation and ask yourself, A is this something I can control? And if so, what actions can I take to control it? Or B is this something I can’t control, but I can control my emotions, my mood, and my behavior. So I’m going to choose to be happy in this circumstance.

That type of mindset is certainly important for stress, but when it comes to stress in general, I look at things through two lenses — the cellular resilience piece. Training your body to be able to handle it, and then B the destressing component, which is a little bit related to sleep that we just talked about. If you can get a little bit more nitty gritty than that, which I will momentarily.

So the cellular resilience piece — I look at this through the lens of what’s called hormesis. The world of nature, the world of technology, the world of food presents us with all sorts of things that in large doses could kill us, but that in small doses induce cellular resilience. So, for example, xenohormesis, X-E-N-O-hormesis, is based around the idea that plants have toxins. They don’t have hooves or claws or teeth or nails or antlers.

So plants have evolved plant defense mechanisms that allow them to propagate and cause a mammal that eats them, to have some type of digestive distress that keeps that mammal from coming back and wiping out that plant species. Or that causes that mammal to not digest the plant well, and to poop out the seeds elsewhere so the plant can propagate.

So if you look at all these villains in the plant kingdom that people talk about — glutens and lectins and oxalates, the list goes on and on. It’s not a matter of avoiding those plant defense mechanisms. It’s a matter of consuming very small amounts of plants from a wide variety of sources, including herbs and spices, which we see many of the blue zones doing so that you are giving your body a chance to actually upregulate its own endogenous antioxidants.

I mean, the same antioxidants that you go out to whatever, Walgreens or CVS or Amazon to buy — your body can churn out things like, superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase as a defense mechanism against the diet that’s very diverse. A diet that’s very diverse also strengthens your gut bacteria, and builds them up to be able to strengthen your immune system and your resilience to stress.
This is why unless someone has a full-blown autoimmune condition or severe gut condition, I’m not a huge fan of a heavily restricted, myopic diet like full-blown carnivore or even paleo in some circumstances. Or a low plant keto diet because you’re missing out on a lot of the elements of the plant kingdom that can induce cellular resilience. I would even place alcohol into this category.

If you look at a lot of the data on alcohol, drinking small doses of alcohol on a regular basis without drinking too much and without getting drunk or imbibing, can be better for you from an antioxidant and cellular resilience standpoint than not drinking any alcohol at all. So even alcohol falls into this hormetic category. So what this means is that for body stress, eating a very diverse diet — looking at the Mediterranean style diet of many of these blue zones, even that little glass of organic wine at the end of the day, these type of things can be very good for causing your body to bounce back stronger.
Other examples of resilience-inducing activities would be the sauna, the cold plunge, exercising, sunshine, being in social scenarios where you have to adapt to a wide number of personalities. It’s basically doing anything you can do to be mildly uncomfortable on a regular basis. So that’s one component of stress management.

The other component would be being able to destress. We live in an era now where we can borrow a lot from the field of biohacking when it comes to destressing. So for example, you can use sound — certain sounds and audios like binaural beats to shift yourself into a more relaxed state. You can use light — certain flashing of light, different than red light therapy, but actual devices that use LED lights to shift your body into a relaxed state. And you can use haptic sensations like vibrations to also move the body into relaxation.

So a few examples of that would be there’s a chair. It’s called a shift wave. You sit in it. You put on headphones and a sleep mask. You choose a session ranging from 2 up to 60 minutes and it vibrates your entire body. You have a fingertip heart rate sensor that monitors your heart rate variability and your heart rate. And it will adapt to how stressed you are and vibrate your body accordingly. It’s incredible. It just shifts you into this deep state of relaxation.

Another example would be a lamp called the Rock Siva, or a wearable set of glasses called the Neuro Visors. Both of these also pair to sound and play these flashing lights. You have your eyes closed. You can see the lights. It’s the closest thing you’d get to LSD or mushrooms without actually taking drugs. But the idea is it’s downregulating the default mode network in the same way that psychedelics or entheogens might, but without a lot of the biochemical blowback of whatever, taking psilocybin during your lunch break.

And what it does is it shifts the body into this super relaxed state where you just forget all your worries, and you go into almost this trance like hypnosis. That would be another example. And then finally, and I wear one of these when I’m asleep. There are vibrating devices or mild sound-producing devices. One’s called the Apollo. Another is called the wave watch, W-A-V-E. And these produce barely audible or barely feelable vibration and sound sensations.

And you could set them for sleep, for relaxation, for wakefulness. And it’s just this mild sensation, an almost sub perceptual that shifts your body into this relaxed state. So those would be the biggies. I mean, looking back at everything I’ve just said, I would I’d be remiss not to mention breathwork. I feel like a lot of people talk about it. So you guys have probably talked about it as well, but I would also rank breathwork as a really great stress management tool.

Well, as you were just saying that with the vibration thing, I think you can also combine breathwork with vibration. There’s a lot of — in the yogic practice of even just owning. I remember it’s something that’s at your fingertips all the time. You might feel a little strange doing it, but it’s actually really powerful to have that vibration.

One of my favorite breathwork apps called Othership, like mothership, but without the M. And it’s like a DJ for breathwork. It’s incredible. But Shiftwave partnered with Othership. So you can actually on your Shiftwave chair, choose an Othership session, and it will bring you through the whole breathwork routine while vibrating your entire body. And it’s one of the coolest sessions ever. So yeah. I love, as you can hear, to use technology and a lot of these cool new toys we get from the biohacking world to relax way more deeply than I’d be able to just sitting outside on the grass doing breathwork. Nothing against the natural method.

But I think technology is a pretty cool way now to reduce stress. Yeah. How do we use what’s at our fingertips to help us in our daily lives? The last one that I think we want to dive into today, just for the sake of time, I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about the importance of social connections because you just said you have to be willing to get uncomfortable. But what role do you think — I mean, we know there’s an epidemic of loneliness happening a lot of especially, when people get older, they maybe don’t have as many connections as they used to have. Talk a little bit about that piece of it.

And Ben, before you answer it, I liked using your quotes because I think it can paint the full picture to our listeners. You said community and love are the ultimate fuel for a long and joyful life.

Yeah.

So I wanted to see that up.

I mean, it’s true. Even the US Sergeant General in 2023, Vivek Murthy, he cited data that shows that loneliness or the perception of loneliness, and I’ll explain what that is, as dangerous as smoking like 15 cigarettes a day as far as the impact. Now, that makes sense if you look at it, again, from an evolutionary ancestral standpoint, because human beings used to coexist in tribes, and that was necessary for survival.

So if you were banished from the tribe, or you were ostracized, or say from you were from a religious standpoint, excommunicated from a church, this was a very disturbing and distressing position to be in. And the body goes into freakout mode. The heart rate goes up, the blood pressure goes up, heart rate variability decreases, breath weight increases, your body begins to downregulate the immune system, so you’re more susceptible to viruses, while upregulating that whole sentinel system of looking for danger in everything, including any email or your newspaper you’re reading, or whatever.

And so your body has not become disentangled from any of those ancestral mechanisms. Yeah. You aren’t going to die if you don’t have as many Facebook friends as, whatever, your good friend does, but your body still perceives that to be a very uncomfortable scenario. And so this is probably why, if you look again, not to kick this horse to death. Pun not intended in this case. But if you look at a lot of the blue zones, you see community togetherness, gathering around meals, dining together, honoring people who are older and putting them in positions of honor.

You see all these tribal, community, village-like aspects built and baked into daily life that no doubt play a role in longevity. I mean, Harvard’s longest study on longevity. It was like 80-plus years long. They started with male college students and followed them through life, isolating for all confounding variables. How much you exercise, and how many kettlebell swings and burpees, and how much time in the sunshine, and how much you do or don’t smoke.

Nothing beat the amount of quality relationships in your life. The amount of love basically, that you had in your life. To go back to that quote that you were talking about, David. So I mean, the evidence does not lie that — I mean, it’s important, so important that in fact, I’m convinced that one of the reasons that you see the 105-year-old gin-chugging, cigarette-smoking great grandma in Sardinia, Italy, who doesn’t do any of the biohacks and never stepped into a gym in your life. I think a big part of that is based on the amount of family and togetherness and relationships that are emphasized in that context.

So the trick is, or not the trick — but the problem is like I mentioned. There are — it’s two different types of loneliness. There’s objective loneliness. Actually being alone, and there’s subjective loneliness. Looking at how many friends and followers and fans and likes and subscribers that somebody has, comparing your own number to that number, and feeling as though you’ve fallen short and you’re somehow not keeping up socially. That’s just as dangerous an aspect of loneliness as truly being alone and not really having any friends is this subjective, comparison-based loneliness.

Now, you pair that with where that loneliness comes from. Well, usually it is from a digital scenario. Digital relationships cannot simulate what flesh and blood relationships simulate. And I’m not just saying that. I mean, you look at Pacinian corpuscles on the surface of your skin that respond to human touch. Those cause a release of the feel-good hormones, oxytocin and serotonin. That means it’s far different to see a hand wave on Zoom or a fist bump on Facebook than it is to actually give somebody a hug, or shake their hand in terms of the way that your hormones process that.

Pheromones — the way that we interact with the opposite sex. You can’t smell someone on Tinder, or a dating app, or a social media app. Pheromones are signaling molecules that allow human beings and mammals in general, to detect the immune-based histocompatibility to the person that we’re interested in getting with. And it’s critical to the propagation of a robust immune system and a healthy species, but it’s also something you completely miss out on in a digital scenario.

I know it’s gross to think about smelling other people, but it’s true. That is part of our relationship mechanisms. And then if you look at research from the HeartMath Institute, we produce electromagnetic signals that are picked up anywhere from three to 15 feet outside of us by other human beings. We can sense emotions, feelings, the presence of other human beings. Some people refer to this as the sixth sense.

We miss out on all of that — oxytocin serotonin, hormones, pheromones, heart signals, brain electromagnetic signals, all of that when we’re interacting in digital scenarios. So I think the trick here is to figure out ways to weave real analog flesh and blood meet ups into your life. And I’m not opposed to using a digital tool to do that. A tool like Meetups, or Mosey, or Facebook to find the local pickleball or foraging meetup, or work out of the gym, or whatever. But use the digital tools as a bridge to real analog interaction.

And then knowledge is power. Just understand some of the things that I’ve just said. It’s not the same for you to be alone with a whole bunch of friends on your phone or your computer. It’s far different than actually being out there, being brave, being dangerous, going to a restaurant, going to a bar, going to a meet up, going to a club, going to a gym, actually getting with people.

Back to the hormesis concept. I understand, especially in people who have grown up with devices, it is uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable being around the mess of other people, and working up the nerve to go talk to a boy or girl you haven’t met before, hanging out with people who may not feel or talk or believe the same way you do. But this is part of human life. It’s also part of battling loneliness.

And the amount of literature that exists that helps you do that, because I’m a big reader, I mean, it’s vast — How to Win Friends and Influence People, Never Eat Alone, Sahil Bloom’s new book, the section on relationship wealth and his book, The Five Types of Wealth. I mean, there’s so much out there — like The Art of Charm, these charm video websites. You can learn. You can train yourself how to talk with people and be comfortable around people. It’s just as important as going to the gym.

You have covered a ton. I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Did we miss any big buckets of things that you wanted to make sure to address when it comes to aging and longevity?
Oh, I mean, I’m sure there’s tons that we missed. But I mean, I guess to put the cherry on top of to whole relationships and loneliness piece is you also see, often, entangled with the relationships piece and with the community living piece, some type of a sense or feeling that we are not just bodies with souls. It’s more like we’re souls with bodies. So this idea of understanding that our spirit needs fitness just as much as our body and brain need fitness.

So I’m also, and you see this in a lot of happy older individuals, a huge fan of engaging in the spiritual work. That can be gratitude journaling. It can be prayer, it can be reading, spiritual or religious texts or devotionals. It can be attending a church. It can be singing. It can be silence, solitude, meditation. Some of these things pair with the breathwork. Or there’s no reason you can’t do, prayer and gratitude journaling inside a hyperbaric chamber. I mean, you can stack a lot of this stuff but caring for your spirit is so important.

And if you think about it, coming full circle to where we started, the idea here is not to live forever. We are all at some point, some sooner, some later than others, going to be wrinkled and going to lose our muscles and not have our pretty face anymore and not be able to walk as quickly. And getting out of bed will be a real chore and eventually we’ll just all be laid out and have passed away and given our final breath.

But I really firmly believe the one single part of us that can go on to be around for eternity, the single spark inside of us, our soul, is something that is eternal and is immortal. And we can care for that and keep that in our mind as we go about our day to day activities. So you will find me first thing beginning of the day. I’m praying. I’m meditating. I’m reading my Bible. End of the day. Last thing before my wife and I — our heads hit the pillow. We pray together. And so in the Greenfield house, our spirits are so important. And we care for those just like we care for our bodies and brains.

I got something for you, Big Ben. We got a mic-drop moment if you’re ready for it.

Oh.

Yeah. Here we go. All right. If everything — and I feel like I already know what this answer is going to be. But if everything you rely on to optimize your life, the tech, the tools, the supplements, all of that. If it was stripped away, what would be the one thing you would hold on to?

The only thing in my entire life, and it is hard because it’s like, I can say my kids, my wife, my yard, the ducks and the geese out there right now. I think there’s only one thing in my life that when I pick it up, I just feel like magic powers going through my body, which doesn’t sound very scientific, but it’s the one thing that I live and die by. And that is my handbook for life. And that’s my Bible.

Yeah. Well, Ben, we so appreciate you coming on, and taking the time to chat with us today and go through — I mean, I feel like we got left. We have so many tidbits that are going to be useful for our listeners and our viewers. So if people want to follow you, they can find you at bengreenfieldlife.com and at bengreenfieldfiness on Instagram. Anywhere else you want us to point them to make sure they can connect with you?

I’m not hard to find. I think that’s pretty good.

Yeah, they got it. Well, Ben, thank you so much. We appreciate you. Cool. Thank you so much, guys.

That was awesome. It was a joy talking to you.

Blessing thank you.

All right. Thanks, guys.

[MUSIC PLAYING]