A biohacker who is spending $2 million (£1.6 million) a year to try and turn the clock on his biological age has shared the one thing everyone can do to improve their health without splashing out loads of cash.
Bryan Johnson, 47, from Utah, US, is a venture capitalist who refers to himself as ‘the world’s most measured human’.
In 2013, he sold his payment gateway company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for a whopping $800 million (£642 million).
But after becoming a very rich man, Johnson said his health took a dip in 2020.
Ultimately that was the start of Project Blueprint, his personal journey to measure all 70 organs of his body to ‘maximally reverse’ his quantified biological age.
It’s a rigorous daily routine which consists of dozens of pills and a strict diet of the same daily foods, with a team of doctors monitoring his progress.
Having shared his progress on social media, Netflix has recently made a documentary about him called Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.
“It began when I was 21 years old. I was a missionary, and I lived among extreme poverty in Ecuador,” he told People.
“I felt really compelled to want to do something that would improve the world. I didn’t know what.
“So the goal became make a whole bunch of money by age 30, and then with that money, find something interesting to do.”
Once he sold Braintree, it ‘coincided with having to rebuild myself from a decade of depression, leave my religion [Mormonism], having divorce, like just try to rebuild myself from scratch — and then this bigger question, what do I do?’
Johnson then put $100 million (£81 million) in ‘synthetic biology, genomics, nanotech’ and built a brain interface, which he calls ‘the world’s best way to easily and robustly measure the brain … and then I started Blueprint to measure myself. And it all kind of came together into this one simple thesis, which is, don’t die.’
But since not everyone can spend millions a year on their health, the businessman has provided a cost-free way normal people can improve their chances of living for longer.
“Sleep is a professional activity,” he said. “Take sleep as seriously as you do your job.
“You show up on time, you respect it, you’re very rigorous about it, you’re disciplined, you take pride in it.”
He added: “If I eat late or too much food, [it] will decimate my sleep.”
The health-enthusiast recommends to try out a ‘wind-down routine’ which is a ’30 to 60-minute window to wind down from work, not be on your screen, not doing work, to reconcile what you’re happy about, what you’re sad about, what you’re anxious about. You need some kind of calming mechanism’.
“Sleep is the most powerful drug in existence for anybody,” he insisted.
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever is available to watch on Netflix now.
