Humans have always wanted to live forever, and the search for eternal health and vitality is often more cautionary tale than instructive guidebook. See: The first Emperor of China, who famously took a mercury-laced “elixir of immortality” that almost certainly shortened his life, rather than extend it.
Now, the barrage of “eat this ONE THING and you’ll live to 100” posts on social media can seem like a digital version of such snake oil cures for mortality.
A 30-second scroll can offer up 30 different opinions on how to extend your lifespan: Eat two dates a day to ward off colorectal cancer; balance on one leg to ward off hip fractures. It’s mostly benign, sometimes helpful advice on its own. (We’re not touching the seed oil / Ivermectin / sunscreen is poison brigade here.) But en masse, the stress of trying to sort through all these tips might just outweigh the good those blueberries, omega fatty acids and weighted vests are doing.
For women, there’s an added layer of complication: We are not the focus of the longevity lifehack movement. That would be men, like Bryan “Wants To Live Forever” Johnson, centimillionaire tech entrepreneur and the subject of a recent Netflix documentary. His goal is to “not die,” which involves 54 pills a day and experimental treatments like gene therapy.
As with almost every other aspect of women’s health, our longevity and aging processes are understudied. “When I first started in the biohacking world it was — and primarily still is — protocols by men for men. A lot of that is because a lot of the research is done on men,” said Kayla Barnes-Lentz, an L.A.-based biohacking expert who owns a longevity medicine clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. “It’s 2025 and we still don’t know why ovaries age at double the speed of every other organ. This is wild to me.”
She points out that while women live an average of four to six years longer than men, we have far more chronic diseases. “Eighty per cent of autoimmune conditions are in women,” she said.
It’s why Barnes-Lentz, 34, has offered up her own body as a longevity guinea pig. She experiments with methods ranging from sleeping in a Faraday Cage to block out potential electromagnetic radiation to keeping a hyperbaric chamber in her home to reduce inflammation and lengthen telomeres, and shares her findings with her nearly 400K Instagram followers. “I’m not willing to wait for the data to catch up. Women are not small men. We need our own protocols.”
To that end, we asked Barnes-Lentz and two other experts how women can live longer, healthier lives.
1. Sleep like your life depends on it
Our experts were unanimous on this one: Quality sleep and longevity are inextricably linked. “Far and above anything else, we have to put sleep at the forefront of health, and especially for women,” said Barnes-Lentz. “We know that one night of poor sleep can reduce our natural killer cells [white blood cells that can destroy diseased cells, like cancer cells], decrease our immune system, and increase the hunger hormone ghrelin and our blood pressure.”
Barnes-Lentz finds she needs an extra hour of sleep than her husband. “There are a few hypotheses about why this happens, but part of it is our hormonal fluctuations,” she said. “For me, in the late luteal into the early follicular phase of my cycle, I need even more than that, maybe an extra hour and 20 minutes.”
She builds her entire daily schedule around optimal sleep. First thing in the morning, she jump starts her circadian rhythm by getting 10 to 15 minutes of sun exposure in her eyes. (If you wake up before the sun, she recommends a “10000 lux lamp,” aka a SAD light therapy device.) She stops eating three hours before bed, because food signals our body to stop producing melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep.
It’s also one reason why she doesn’t drink alcohol. “We know it’s a neurotoxin, and it can disrupt our sleep,” says Barnes-Lentz. (The U.S. Surgeon General recently called for cancer warnings on bottles of booze.)
After sunset, she eliminates all blue light, only using red light sources. (Search “red light phone trick.”) She’s in bed by 8:30 every night, cautioning against the “second wind,” aka a cortisol spike, that can happen around 10 p.m. And she keeps her bedroom at 18C, and makes it as dark as possible.
2. Move your body
This is not breaking news, but exercise is supremely beneficial to helping women live longer, healthier lives.
“If there’s one practice that is longevity in a pill, it’s exercise,” said Barnes-Lentz. Women specifically benefit from improving bone density with compound lifts; exercises that use more than one muscle group at a time. “We know that our bones, especially as we hit menopause, really start to decrease in strength. That can lead to osteoporosis, which is really problematic.” (See: The oft-quoted stat that as many as 1 in 3 adults die within 12 months of a hip fracture.)
Barnes-Lentz’s exercise regimen also includes twice weekly VO2 max training, a measure of intense physical effort that’s linked to lower cardiovascular risk and longevity. For women, she recommends a four-minute high-endurance run, followed by six minutes of recovery (as opposed to four minutes for men), repeated four times. “I’ve seen my cardiovascular age go from negative nine years [i.e. nine years younger than her actual age] to negative 11.5 in just the past month and a half of training at VO2 max.”
She also does two days of upper body strength training and two days of lower body strength training, with mobility exercises in the mix. “I’m thinking about, how can I be steady and stable, and not break a hip?” And she tries to get about 300 minutes a week of “low level movement,” mostly walking outside.
That’s a practice that Dr. Paula Rochon, founder of Women’s Age Lab at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital, endorses. “Walking is a great way to improve your overall health,” she said, adding that women are less likely to be physically active than men. “People talk about how you have to hit 10,000 steps a day, but there’s actually been really interesting talk about how 4,000 or 2,500 steps is pretty good.”
3. Cultivate connection
Because women live longer on average, and tend to marry men who are older than them, there’s an increased chance that they’ll find themselves living alone as they age.
“We know that 40 per cent of people who live alone tend to be lonely,” said Rochon, who points out that many families are scattered these days. “Loneliness is not good for your health.” Loneliness has been linked to a 29 per cent higher risk of heart disease and a 32 per cent higher risk of stroke, and a 26 per cent higher risk of dying.
Rochon said women often joke about living out their old age with their female friends in a coven-meets-commune. “It’s sort of in jest, but it’s not. Because having those social connections is really important, and it’s something that can be a real challenge. It’s also about rekindling friendships that we’ve let drop, and regaining some of those social connections.”
4. Try to remove stress
Another tip that all our experts agreed on: Reduce your stress to live a longer life. (Easier said than done, cried all the women doing the emotional and physical labour of three men.)
“We know that women perceive stress at much higher levels than men,” said Barnes-Lentz, whose own stress-reduction-regimen includes “prayer and gratitude in the morning, along with meditation.” She uses tools such as the Moonbird, a hand-held device that expands and contracts to help with deep breathing.
“Eighty per cent of doctor’s visits are related to stress,” she added. “Remove as many unnecessary stressors as possible.”
5. Look into NAD+ and SOD
The supplement NAD+ is having a moment. Beloved by celebrities such as Hailey Bieber, it’s believed to replenish a coenzyme associated with DNA repair that decreases in our body as we age. (Particularly in the skin.)
“It is the antioxidant. It’s produced by every cell in your body. If you didn’t have it, you would be damaged and die very quickly. It’s the principal way we manage oxidative stress,” says plastic surgeon and longevity expert Dr. Cory Goldberg, comparing it to someone mopping up the industrial waste created in a factory.
He partakes himself and pairs it with a Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) supplement. Whereas the antioxidants in a blueberry can destroy one free radical, SOD is enzymatic, meaning it can be used over and over. “One molecule of this SOD is about a million times more effective,” he said. “Oxidative stress is one of the most fundamental root causes of aging, because it actually causes harm to your DNA, and ultimately is a key driver of cancer.”
“The natural way to increase your SOD is through exercise,” he added, recommending 20 minutes a day of cardiovascular workout.
6. If you’re in perimenopause, consider hormone therapy
“Up until recently, estrogen was a dirty word. All people could think about was the breast cancer risk and that has been deeply debunked,” said Goldberg, referring to HRT. “At this point, I would say estrogen is actually being considered as a longevity tool.”
He says that physician-monitored hormone therapy is a “key element” for women who want to live a long, healthy life. “Whether it’s mood or the comfort of the skin or avoiding sexual dysfunction, those things make a person feel happy and fulfilled. It’s not just about living longer.”
7. Eat more mushrooms
Goldberg is a big fan of mushrooms in a whole food and plant-based diet geared toward longevity. His favourites are Lion’s Mane and Oyster mushrooms.
“Those two have really high concentrations of some important micronutrients,” he said. “One of them is ergothioneine, a remarkably important molecule in our chemistry that we can’t produce and we have to consume.” This natural antioxidant shows promise in preventing everything from cataracts to wrinkles to Parkinson’s.
Oyster mushrooms also have a mechanism to break down microplastics, meaning they have little to no microplastics in them, added Goldberg.
8. Sweat it out
Barnes-Lentz points to research that shows a link between sauna use and a reduced risk of all-cause mortality, including cardiovascular disease.
She does a sauna session every night, one or two hours before bed. “This is especially great for women, because we’re exposed to significantly higher levels of toxic exposures in the form of personal care products, fragrances, cleaning products,” she says. “For me, reducing toxic burden is a huge thing for longevity for women.”
For the same reason, she gets blood work done four times a year to test her levels of environmental toxins like parabens, PFAS, endocrine disrupters, mould, and heavy metals, exposure to the latter of which has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases.
“It also helps to really give you a great night sleep,” she added.
