Why aging happens and how to slow it down

Aging affects everyone. You get older, you lose mobility, you’re able to do less, you start to forget things… and that is considered normal. But not everyone ages at the same rate. What causes aging and how do you decrease how quickly it happens to you?

Fundamentally, aging is caused by a loss of information. Our cells need information that tells them what type of cells they should be, how they should act, and how they should adjust to fit their environment. When this information is recorded inaccurately, isn’t communicated, or is compromised in any way, cells lose their ability to function properly.

Organisms evolved a mechanism for surviving under stressful conditions that is the precursor to how we age.

In a normal situation, an organism’s main focus is to reproduce: all of their energy goes into growing, finding mates, and creating offspring. When an organism is faced with environmental pressure, such as lack of food, extreme weather conditions, or a disease, this sole focus on reproduction becomes a disadvantage. If a parent has damaged genetic information, they will pass it on to their offspring, so a higher percentage of each new generation is born with defects, decreasing the overall population survival rate.

However, some bacteria developed an ability to shift their focus from reproduction to endurance. When faced with challenging scenarios, bacteria stopped actively reproducing and instead re-allocated their energy to hunker down and weather the storm. So, depending on what information cells were receiving, they changed their function. This created a higher chance of survival and lower chance of passing down genetic defects, resulting in healthier offspring. Such a circuit is counterintuitive, because reproducing less becomes better for the species.

The key insight for how this relates to aging is that if resources (food, water, etc) are scarce, your body uses what it has stored for energy. This includes cells that are malfunctioning: you break them down and repurpose them to sustain yourself, effectively getting rid of machinery that would get in the way or cause more problems, or taking out the trash. In this way, you switch out reproduction for repair, preventing the accumulation of damaged cells. The more damaged cells there are, the more information loss occurs, so our survival circuit is making sure that operations are able to function properly and keep everything in check, slowing down aging.

The way we live our lives now decreases our exposure to stressful conditions. There is an overabundance of food, we can adjust temperatures to fit our preferences, we’re never on the run from predators… and while this makes our lives easier in the moment, if there is no stress, our survival circuit won’t kick in and we won’t get those “cleaning house” benefits. This process of adapting to stressors without damaging the cell is called hormesis.

That said, it is important to find healthy levels of hormesis without going too far. An example of how this mechanism works at a larger scale when at the extreme is if a woman is underweight or a high intensity athlete, her menstruation cycles become irregular or stops occurring. The information her cells are receiving is that of constant stress, and therefore her body is so focused on repair that it has no leftover energy for reproduction.

Healthy stressors that activate our survival mechanism include cold and heat therapy, intermittent fasting and exercise. All put our body into survival mode and allow us to eliminate the unnecessary information, increasing our longevity.

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