If you want anything you buy for your health to actually work, you have to build a health foundation first. That is the whole argument, and two stories this month made it from opposite directions. One was a sleep device. The other was a $101 million prize.
Here is the pattern I watch play out constantly. Somebody spends real money on a treatment, a device, a protocol. It works for a while. Then it fades. And the conclusion they draw is that the thing did not work.
Usually the thing worked fine. It landed in a body that could not do anything with it.
This is not a small distinction. It is the difference between a person who gets six weeks out of an intervention and a person who is still holding the gains two years later. Same product. Same protocol. Completely different outcome.
The variable is almost never the tool. It is the body the tool arrives in.
I have been in sourcing and biologics for a long time, and what I have observed is that people want the answer to be a product. A product is a decision you make once. You buy it, and you are done. The alternative requires deciding over and over for years, and that is harder. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
When I say build a health foundation, I mean three things working at once. Sleep. Movement. And the inner life, whatever that looks like for you.
Most people treat those as separate projects with separate scorecards. They are not separate. They feed the same system.
Sleep is when repair happens. That is when growth hormone pulses, when the brain clears waste, when the rebuilding work gets done. Movement is what tells the body it is still needed. Muscle is not decoration, it is an endocrine organ sending signals to your metabolism, your immune system, and your brain all day long. And the inner life is what pulls your nervous system out of a defensive posture.
That third one is the one people skip, and it is the one I would argue matters most.
Your body runs in two modes and it can only hold one at a time. Defending, or building. If you are running a low grade stress response every day, and most people are, your biology has already made a decision about priorities. Survival wins. Repair waits.
A team at UT Austin published work in Nature Communications on a soft wearable patch that uses gentle ultrasound to reach deep brain regions while reading brain activity in real time. In twenty eight people, it cut the time to reach REM sleep by about forty three minutes and held them in REM roughly sixteen minutes longer. You can read the coverage of the study here.
The number that got my attention was not the sleep number. It was heart rate variability, which improved in the healthy participants. That tells me the device was not just moving people through sleep stages on a chart. It shifted the whole autonomic state.
Now the honest limit, because I am not in the business of overselling. Twenty eight people is a small study. Results that look strong at that size often shrink at three hundred. It is a research prototype. Nobody can buy it and nobody will be buying it next year.
But the direction is right. For a long time sleep was treated as the gap between the parts of your life that count. What work like this says is that sleep has measurable architecture, and that architecture can be influenced. That is serious medicine.
The second story is XPRIZE Healthspan, which just narrowed six hundred teams from fifty eight countries down to ten finalists. The competition launched in 2023, runs $101 million, and the finalist teams now run clinical trials through 2029 with a grand prize decided in 2030.
Look at what the rules require. Restore muscle function, cognitive function, and immune function, by at least ten years, in adults aged fifty to eighty, in one year or less.
Three systems. One clock.
That requirement quietly rules out the single mechanism answer. Nothing moves all three of those in twelve months on its own. Biology does not work that way. So the moment you write that rule, you have forced every serious team into combination.
The biggest prize in longevity just publicly agreed that no single input gets you there.
The teams advancing look exactly like that. Something biological, plus something behavioral, plus something measured. The University of Utah is serving as the data coordinating center, which means one place is standardizing the evidence across every team instead of ten groups grading their own homework. In a field with this much noise, that matters more than the prize money.
Here is the question I would put to anyone reading this. Are you building something, or are you renting it?
Renting looks like this. You pay for the treatment and keep the exact schedule that made you need the treatment. You buy the device and never change the hour you go to bed. You stack five interventions on a body nobody ever told the emergency was over.
Owning looks different. The people I have watched hold their gains changed the week, not just the protocol.
This applies directly to what I do for a living. What biologics do is signaling. We are introducing communication that aging cells cannot produce at the same quality anymore. But a signal is only worth what the receiver can do with it. I have watched two people get the same treatment from the same batch, and one is a different human being in six weeks while the other shrugs.
The difference is what was already running underneath.
Chapter Twelve of my book Beyond Repair opens with my friend Dr. Mike. We were riding bikes in Santa Monica, passed the workout area at Venice Beach, and he got off his bike, walked to the climbing rope, and went straight up it. He made it look easy. Most high schoolers cannot do that.
He is sixty six. Not a professional athlete. He is a physician who has been deliberate about the same small choices for decades, with regenerative medicine layered in along the way.
Layered in. Not instead of.
That chapter is about the gap between lifespan and healthspan. Lifespan is the clock. Healthspan is how much of that clock you actually spend at full capacity. You can reach eighty barely moving, in pain, cognitively dimmed, and on a dozen medications. Or you can reach ninety the way Dr. Mike is tracking. I write about the full version of this in the weekly Base Lift newsletter.
None of this requires waiting for a device that does not exist yet, or for a competition that finishes in 2030. Here is where to actually begin.
People are usually surprised when I put this in a health article. I would argue it belongs here more than half the supplement advice on the internet.
About eighteen years ago I had a chance to own a piece of a cigarette manufacturing operation in southern China. It was a good business. The numbers worked. I would have made real money. I could not do it, and nobody was watching. It was me and a spreadsheet.
What I took from that is that you have to decide who you are going to be before you are presented with the choice. In the moment, every rationalization is already sitting there sounding reasonable.
Here is the biological piece. Somebody who spends twenty years saying things they do not believe is running a low grade stress response every day of that life. That is not a figure of speech. It is a physiological state, and the body keeps a record of it.
I notice it in myself. The weeks I say the hard thing, I sleep better. That is not a study. It is just true, and I do not think I am unusual.
The tools are getting genuinely good. I have built a company around that belief and I am not walking it back. Regenerative medicine is going to keep improving, the devices are going to keep improving, and the work coming out of that healthspan competition is the most serious thing happening in longevity right now.
But every one of those tools amplifies. None of them create.
So the most powerful lever in your entire health turns out to be the one nobody can sell you and nobody can take away. It is free. You can start tonight.
Build something worth amplifying. Then go get the tool.
________________________________________ EF-AQs htmlIt means getting sleep, movement, and your inner life working together before you add anything on top. These three are not separate projects, they feed the same system, and the state they are in decides how much any treatment or device can give you. Read more →
Usually the treatment worked and the environment did not change. If you return to the same sleep, food, and stress that created the problem, you are renting the result rather than owning it. The people who hold their gains changed the week, not just the protocol. Read more →
Lifespan is the clock. Healthspan is how much of that clock you actually spend at full capacity. You can reach eighty in chronic pain and cognitively dimmed, or reach ninety still doing things most people half your age gave up on. Read more →
Biologics work through signaling, which means a signal is only worth what the receiver can do with it. What I have observed is the same batch producing dramatically different outcomes in two people, and the difference is almost never the product. Read more →
________________________________________You do not need a million dollar program to start working with your biology today. Here is how:
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