Note: This guest post about habits that accelerate aging is written by Denisa Lepadatu, of the LongX Foundation (full bio at the end of the post). She and I are running a longevity retreat this August in Colorado that you should definitely come to! More details at the retreat website: https://mtnlongevity.com/.
I didn’t think I had any habits that accelerate aging. In fact, I used to think I had my basic longevity playbook more or less figured out: sleeping 8 hours, exercising consistently, eating nutritious food – the lifestyle basics.
And, to be fair, those things matter enormously.
But the deeper I got into research, the more obvious it became that biology – and aging, as a consequence – is far messier and more interconnected than my checklist made it seem. If there were a complete longevity playbook, it would read more like a personalized textbook. Maybe that is partly what we see unfold through longevity influencer Bryan Johnson’s million-dollar experiments on himself.
At the molecular level, the complexity of (aging) biology makes sense. The body is not a machine with isolated parts but trillions of cells, constantly and simultaneously sensing signals, responding to stress, allocating resources, and making tradeoffs. Aging emerges as dysregulation in that network. Every input the body receives, chemical, mechanical, psychological, social, feeds into it in some way.
Intellectually, I understood this already.
Practically, I had not fully appreciated how many seemingly unrelated parts of my life might feed into why we age. Stranger variables than sleep or exercise, which I never would have looked at as “longevity habits.” Things like how I breathe at night and whether I feel lonely.
So I asked a different question: what do I repeatedly do that I haven’t considered that might age me faster?
Below are five answers I found.
Disclaimer: none of this is medical advice, and most of the evidence is preliminary, observational, or relies on proxies like DNA methylation clocks, which are powerful tools but still imperfect measures of biological age. Remember, correlation is not causation. But these patterns are intellectually intriguing, plausible, and worth sitting with for a moment.
1. Does mouth breathing age you?
Breathing is automatic, how wrong could it possibly go? Quite wrong, it turns out.
Since I was a kid, I woke up almost every morning with a dry mouth, feeling somewhat unrested, often struggling to breathe through my nose properly. It was uncomfortable but I didn’t give it much attention.
Then I started reading about sleep-disordered breathing.
Note, the relevant research here is not about mouth breathing alone, but sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) specifically: repeated partial airway obstruction, fragmented breathing, and oxygen drops during sleep. SDB is a spectrum that ranges from heavy snoring all the way to obstructive sleep apnea.
Simply put, when airflow repeatedly drops during sleep, oxygen delivery to cells falls as well. Cells interpret this as stress. Then oxygen returns, reactive oxygen species spike, inflammatory pathways activate, and the cycle repeats again.
One major pathway involved is NF-κB, a master regulator of inflammation. Under chronic intermittent hypoxia, the body repeatedly shifts resources toward short-term survival rather than long-term repair.
Now imagine this happening not once, but potentially hundreds of times per night, for years. That is called chronic intermittent hypoxia, and it is a very different biological issue than simply sleeping less.
A 2019 study using participants from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) measured biological age using DNA methylation clocks (currently among the strongest biomarkers of biological aging – they track chemical modifications to DNA that accumulate with cellular stress and predict disease risk and mortality independently of calendar age). More severe sleep-disordered breathing predicted greater epigenetic age acceleration. One standard deviation increase in breathing disruption corresponded to roughly 7-10 months of accelerated biological aging, depending on which clock was used.
These findings were replicated in the Framingham Heart Study cohort. More recent Mendelian randomization work has begun exploring whether sleep characteristics may causally influence epigenetic aging pathways, though this literature is still emerging.
What to do. If you:
- wake up exhausted despite enough sleep,
- snore regularly,
- wake with dry mouth,
- experience morning headaches,
- or struggle to breathe comfortably through your nose,
It may be worth discussing a sleep study with a physician, sleep specialist, or ENT. Sleep-disordered breathing remains significantly underdiagnosed and is often treatable.
The diagnostic ladder is simpler than most people think.
Start with the STOP-BANG questionnaire: 8 yes/no questions (snoring, tiredness, observed apneas, high blood pressure, BMI, age, neck size, sex) freely available online, which carries 91% sensitivity for obstructive sleep apnea.
On the wearable side, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 and Apple Watch Series 10 are currently the only consumer devices with FDA authorization to screen for sleep apnea, by flagging patterns.
You can ask your primary care doctor for a home sleep apnea test (HSAT): a device (e.g., mailed to you), worn one night, and covered by most US insurers when ordered with documented clinical suspicion. Alternatively, you can ask for an in-lab polysomnography to check both sleep architecture and breathing events.
2. Oral health and longevity: tooth loss, dentures, and neglected oral function
As a child, I definitely did not think brushing my teeth was a longevity intervention. Honestly, I barely thought about oral health for longevity at all.
Psychologically, it may have something to do with the fact that the healthcare system separates dentistry from medicine (e.g., when training professionals), as if teeth exist independently from the rest of the body. (Fun fact: this separation is a remnant of treating surgery and dentistry as manual labor rather than intellectual work in medieval Europe.)
But there is a famous line in medicine: “the mouth is part of the body.”
But there is a famous line in medicine: “the mouth is part of the body.”
Indeed, the mouth is a living ecosystem directly connected to your bloodstream, immune system, digestive system, and even your brain’s vasculature. And when it becomes a source of chronic low-grade infection or inflammation through gum disease, tooth loss, painful chewing, or poorly fitting dentures, the rest of the body responds to that.
One bacterium in particular appears repeatedly in this research: Porphyromonas gingivalis, a major pathogen involved in periodontal disease.
Researchers have found evidence of P. gingivalis and its toxins not only in diseased gums but also in atherosclerotic plaques, colorectal tumors, and even brain tissue from patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The proposed mechanism centers around chronic immune activation: elevated inflammatory cytokines like IL-6, TNF-α, and C-reactive protein.
This does not prove oral bacteria cause these diseases directly but suggests the mouth participates in systemic inflammatory processes.
There was another unexpected angle in this literature that fascinated me even more: chewing itself.
Humans evolved eating foods that required significant mechanical effort, but we now largely do not. Mastication stimulates specific nerve pathways, increases cerebral blood flow, activates the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, and modulates hippocampal function.
Animal models consistently show that reduced mastication accelerates cognitive decline and hippocampal neuron loss. The signal appears to run both ways: reduced chewing reduces stimulation; reduced stimulation accelerates certain aspects of aging.
A 2024 Mendelian randomization study examined dental traits against four independent epigenetic aging clocks. Traits including denture wearing, painful gums, loose teeth, and reduced tooth number showed evidence of a causal relationship with biological age acceleration. The strongest signals appeared in clocks tied to disease risk and mortality.
What to do. The basics surely help: brush, floss, and see a dentist. If you have chronic gum inflammation or significant tooth loss, discuss it with your doctor in the context of systemic inflammation if possible.
3. Loneliness and aging: isolation makes you older
I travel constantly. I move countries more than most people. From the outside, life looks socially rich: new people everywhere! But there is a difference between interaction and belonging: I lack a stable social anchor in most of these places. Turns out, my body ages differently due to this detail of my life, too.
Humans are social animals. For most of evolutionary history, being alone meant almost certain death, due to predators and fewer shared resources. The human immune system seems to have evolved to interpret social disconnection as a threat signal, activating the Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity (CTRA): a gene expression pattern characterized by upregulated inflammatory genes and downregulated antiviral and antibody genes.
In ancestral environments, this made sense: isolation meant predation risk, so mount inflammation for wound repair. Now, this happens to me every time I travel and spend time in isolation for too long, as well.
Loneliness has been associated with elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep architecture, inflammatory cytokines, impaired immune regulation, and higher mortality risk.
A 2021 meta-analysis found loneliness associated with a 26% increased risk of premature mortality. More recent work has linked both loneliness and social isolation to accelerated epigenetic aging measured through DNA methylation, independent of other health behaviors. In contrast, social engagement downregulates the HPA axis, stabilizes glucocorticoid signaling, and reduces inflammatory tone.
Longevity is usually discussed through supplements, protocols, biomarkers, and routines. But some of the strongest longevity signals remain deeply human: learning together, spending time in conversation, building relationships, even if just for a few days.
If this topic resonates with you, join us August 6-9 in the mountains! https://mtnlongevity.com
What to do. Audit the quality, not just the quantity, of your social life.
4. Chronic impulsivity and self-control age you faster
The same pattern that makes me eat three pieces of chocolate when I intended one also makes me skip the doctor’s appointment I scheduled, skip the workout I planned, and stay up too late. (Sometimes, all on the same day.)
If no one behavior alone accelerates my aging, the impulsivity underneath them all surely does.
Self-control, formally defined as the ability to regulate immediate impulses in favor of longer-term goals, is a psychological construct with a biological basis. Low trait self-control is associated with higher allostatic load (the cumulative wear on the body from chronic stress), lower consistency in health behaviors, higher rates of chronic disease, and… faster biological aging.
A 2023 preprint study found that higher self-control, in contrast, was associated with slower biological aging across multiple DNA methylation clocks, independently of socioeconomic status, education, and major health conditions.
The proposed pathways are multiple and mutually reinforcing: people with stronger self-regulation maintain more stable routines (sleep, eating, exercise), experience less chronic stress from impulsive decision-making cycles, have stronger social relationships, and are more likely to engage with medical care before problems become serious.
There is also a bidirectional component. Self-control depends heavily on prefrontal cortex function, which depends on metabolic and vascular health, the very systems that chronic impulsivity tends to degrade.
What to do. Consider your habit patterns. Tools that reduce friction around good defaults, like meal prepping and scheduled workouts, matter. If impulsivity feels clinically significant, discuss ADHD evaluation with your doctor. There are evidence-based interventions.
5. What you believe about aging
I am in my 20s – too young to think seriously about aging, you may think. And yet I realized I carry assumptions about what aging feels like and how it affects me.
I am particularly culturally conditioned as a woman to think aging is not desirable, but rather something to hide – and I think about it every other day. Researchers call this area “self-perceptions of aging”.
Yale psychologist Becca Levy has spent decades studying self-perceptions of aging (SPA), how individuals subjectively experience and anticipate their own aging. Her landmark 2002 study, following participants from the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement over 23 years, found that people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative perceptions.
That is impressive: a larger effect than not smoking or exercising regularly at that stage of life!
How? Negative beliefs about aging tend to reduce engagement, effort, and challenge-seeking. They predict less exercise, less cognitive engagement, less social connection, and more passive responses to health symptoms. All of these behaviors directly regulate your body – through inflammatory tone, cellular repair, and epigenetic maintenance.
More recent work has linked positive aging self-perceptions to lower inflammatory biomarkers, better hippocampal volume preservation, and slower epigenetic aging, too.
So, the story you tell yourself about aging may have measurable biological consequences.
What to do. Notice where your assumptions about aging are defeatist versus evidence-based. There are good reasons to think biological aging is plastic, variable, and strongly influenced by behavior well into old age.
Learn more here: https://mtnlongevity.com
TL;DR: Do you have hidden habits that accelerate aging?
Ask yourself: what is my body receiving as input, chronically, that I haven’t examined?
Personally, I answered:
- Sleep-disordered breathing
- Periodontal inflammation
- Social isolation
- Chronic impulsivity
- Negative aging beliefs
I struggle with all, and no one added them to a longevity playbook I read, so I missed the signs thousands of times before. Yours might be different, but they are worth asking about and getting them checked out.
I work in longevity biotech, focused on understanding and delaying biological aging from first principles. My path into the field began in high school through transhumanist literature and led me to study cell biology and biochemistry in Germany, alongside aging research internships in Switzerland. I co-founded LongX, a global initiative lowering barriers to entry into longevity, and later worked across venture capital and science communication in the field. More recently, I’ve explored new coordination models for longevity research through alternative science institutions, funding experiments, and programs hosted in pop-up cities worldwide. LinkedIn.