The board
5 levels, 1 map
3 progressive levels, the Bridge of Prevention running across all of them, and a final move. It is the same shape as the map in the book. Open any level to see what is inside it.
Build the base the rest of the map stands on
Every player starts here, and this is the level nobody gets to skip. How you eat, how you move, how you sleep, what you tell yourself and how much joy you let in — these do most of the work, they cost almost nothing, and they are open to anybody, anywhere. Genes turn out to be a far smaller part of the story than most people expect; the rest is what you do with your days. Get this level running and everything higher on the map works better.
Open any part of this level to see what is in it.
01Mindset & heartset
9 things
The master switch. Decide that a longer, better life is actually available to you, and every other habit on this level gets easier to keep.
- Fall in love with yourself
- Mindfulness
- Meditation
- Breathwork
- Personal growth
- Retreats
- Gratefulness
- Follow your purpose
- A longevity mindset — reprogram yourself for it
Stress, cortisol and the alarm that never switches off
An alarm built to ring for a minute, ringing all night. The sound is not the problem. Not being able to switch it off is.
If your blood is not singing at the thought of being who you are and doing what you do, then your life is wasted.
I met Srikumar years before the quest, and one sentence of his changed how I look at everything. This is why mindset sits underneath the map rather than beside it: if you are not glad to be alive, no supplement and no scan is going to fix that. Extra years are only worth having if you want them.
Show another quote — Ketut Arsana
That is how you make your life balance in the world. That is why you will be a good player in the world.
Ketut said this to me in Bali long before I had thought of calling any of this a game — and there it was, a player. A healer in Ubud and a scientist at Harvard were describing the same thing in different words. That was the moment I stopped treating the basics as the boring part.
02Nutrition
11 things
The raw material your body rebuilds itself from. Less sugar, less processing, more plants — and enough hours between meals for the body to get its own housekeeping done.
- No sugar
- Quality unprocessed food
- Low carb
- Stop at eighty per cent full
- Vegetables
- Olive oil
- Nuts
- Berries
- Care for your microbiome — variety is the whole trick
- Intermittent fasting — a 12-hour gap
- Fasting-mimicking
Autophagy
Your body’s clean-up crew. It takes old, broken cell parts, breaks them down, and uses the pieces to build new ones. When it slows, the debris accumulates, and that accumulation is a big part of what ageing looks like from the inside.
Also one of the 12 hallmarks of ageing — 05 · Disabled macroautophagyCaloric restriction and fasting
Eating less, but not eating badly. The body shifts from processing a constant surplus to maintaining itself.
The gut microbiome
A garden you did not plant and cannot see, which feeds you back. While it is varied it looks after the wall between your gut and your blood. When it thins, that wall leaks a little, and the immune system spends its life mildly annoyed.
Also one of the 12 hallmarks of ageing — 12 · Dysbiosis03Movement
9 things
Not an extra: maintenance. Strength, stamina and flexibility every week, some of it outdoors — and recovery counted as part of the training rather than as time off.
- Move in nature, thirty minutes a day
- Strength, every week
- Endurance, every week
- Flexibility, every week
- Recovery — it counts as training
- Yoga
- Pilates
- HIIT
- Freediving for VO2 max — with a trained buddy, never alone
Sarcopenia
Muscle quietly leaving. It starts in your thirties, and almost nobody notices until it costs them something — a fall, a stair, an independence.
Mitochondria
Your power plants. More of them, working better, is most of what people mean when they say they feel energetic. It is one of the most trainable things about you.
Also one of the 12 hallmarks of ageing — 07 · Mitochondrial dysfunctionHormesis
Give the body a small challenge and it over-repairs. That is why training, heat, cold and fasting all work by the same logic — you are not avoiding stress, you are choosing the right size of it.
So really, the trick for me is treating muscle as an organ. Finding out what my functional weight is, carrying a bit more muscle than the average person — and that becomes a place where you store sugar, so obviously your insulin sensitivity goes up.
Gary changed how I think about training. Muscle is not a look and it is not vanity — it is a working organ, the largest place your body has to put sugar, and the thing that decides whether you are still carrying your own shopping at ninety. Nobody had ever put it to me that way, and I have trained differently since.
04Sleep
11 things
The night shift, when the repair actually happens. 7 to 9 hours, dark, cool and quiet — protected as carefully as anything you do in daylight, because without it the rest starts to unravel.
- 7 to 9 hours
- A dark room
- A cool room
- A quiet room
- Legs elevated
- No overhead light
- No alcohol 3 hours before
- No THC 3 hours before
- No exercise 3 hours before
- Fewer screens in the evening
- Yoga Nidra helps
DNA repair
A maintenance crew working constantly on damage you never notice. Ageing is partly the crew getting slower than the damage.
Also one of the 12 hallmarks of ageing — 01 · Genomic instabilityChronic inflammation
A fire that never quite goes out. You do not feel it day to day, which is exactly why it does so much damage over decades.
Also one of the 12 hallmarks of ageing — 11 · Chronic inflammation05Flow, nature & joy
8 things
The part of the map most often read as decoration. It is the reason to want the extra years in the first place — and flow is a state you can learn to reach, not a mood that happens to visit.
- Live in flow
- Live in awe
- More nature
- Less noise
- Boost your social relationships
- Live a life you enjoy
- Live a life that matters to you
- Stay curious. Live Beyond!
The one word we refuse to use loosely
Flow is the state where performing at your best and feeling your best turn out to be the same state. Not a mood, and not a reward for the work — the condition in which the work goes best.
It is not one activity. It is music, making, writing, cooking; a long conversation that runs away with you; and sport — most of all the kind where you are surprised every second and have no choice but to let the subconscious take over. That is why the chapter is called Flow, nature & joy: nature and play are the cheapest ways in, and joy is what it leaves behind.
It belongs in Level 01 because it costs nothing, it is open to anybody, and because a life with more of it in it is a life somebody actually wants to keep living — which is the whole point of adding years to it.
- The self goes quietYou stop monitoring yourself.
- Time distortsAn hour goes in 10 minutes — or 10 minutes stretch.
- The effort drops awayThe doing gets easier, not harder.
- It feels richerMore information, more meaning, more of everything.
The clearest modern account of it is Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal of the Flow Genome Project, whose programme Marek trained on. The 4 marks above are theirs.
I encourage people to misbehave, to go out, to stay out late, to party, to have fun, to indulge, to enjoy.
A longevity doctor telling people to misbehave is the most honest thing on this level. A life you have to endure is not a life anybody protects for fifty years. Joy is not the prize at the end of the map — it is one of the reasons the rest of it works.
06The don’ts
5 things
The cheapest moves on the whole map, because they cost nothing to make. What you leave out counts for as much as anything you add.
- No alcohol
- No cigarettes
- No harmful drugs
- No overdoing things — not even the good ones
- Basic hygiene is a must
Oxidative stress
Rust, on the inside. Every cell burns fuel with oxygen, and that burning throws off unstable molecules called free radicals, which steal electrons from whatever is nearest — your DNA, the fat your cell membranes are made of, and the mitochondria that make your energy. Your body has its own clean-up crew for them and normally keeps up. Oxidative stress is the state where it cannot keep up: more damage arriving every day than gets repaired. Over years that is a large part of what ageing looks like from the inside — stiffer arteries, tireder cells, more mistakes in the code.
It sits in The don’ts because everything in this group makes more of it. Alcohol, cigarettes and harmful drugs all flood the body with free radicals faster than the clean-up crew can work, and so does overdoing anything — even the good things. That is the mechanism these 5 lines share, and the reason they are on the map together rather than being 5 separate scoldings. Leaving them out is the cheapest move on the whole map, because it costs nothing to make.
07Modern medical care
5 things
Use the medicine that already exists — body, mind, gut, teeth — and ask more of it than a visit once something already hurts.
- Look after your physical health
- Look after your mental health
- Look after your microbiome
- Look after your teeth
- Challenge your doctors to get an upgrade