3 Behaviours Split Those Who Live Long From Those Who Don’t

GP Dr Dominic Greyer previously shared that strength training, good sleep, reducing inflammation, maintaining your “metabolic flexibility,” and enjoying life (in moderation) separates those who age well from those who don’t.

And a new paper, which focused on the short-lived African turqioise killifish, aimed to work out how different behaviours appeared to affect their ageing trajectories.

The fish, which were partly chosen because they shared “key biological features with longer-lived species like humans, including a complex brain”, shared the same genes and were raised in similar environments.

Researchers found that by midlife (for the fish, 70-100 days), fish that lived longer were already behaving differently from those that died sooner.

Study leader Claire Bedbrook said, “Behavioural changes pretty early on in life are telling us about future health and future lifespan”.

In this study, one of the biggest factors was sleep. Fish that had longer lives mostly slept at night, while those with shorter lifespans slept both at night and during the day.

Incidentally, longer naps, more disorganised nap times, and a higher percentage of naps taken at noon and in the early afternoon have been linked to increased mortality risk among humans.

But activity mattered too.

Fish who swam harder and faster were likelier to live longer, “a measure of spontaneous movement that has been linked to longevity in other species as well”.

And fish that lived longer were more active in the daylight as well. A separate human study found that those who did the majority of their physical activity between 11am and 5pm, or mixed throughout the day, had a lower cardiovascular and all-cause mortality risk than those who moved mostly in the early morning or at night.

The researchers noticed that ageing seemed to occur in two to six stages rather than gradually.

“We expected ageing to be a slow, gradual process,” Bedbrook said.

“Instead, animals stay stable for long periods and then transition very quickly into a new stage. Seeing this staged architecture appear from continuous behaviour alone was one of the most exciting discoveries.”

Similar patterns have recently been noted in humans.

In an editor’s summary, senior editor at the journal Science, Mattia Maroso, said: “These results might lead to better understanding of the ageing process in other vertebrates, including humans”.

And speaking to Stanford Reports, study leader Ravi Nath said, “Behaviour turns out to be an incredibly sensitive readout of ageing… You can look at two animals of the same chronological age and see from their behaviour alone that they’re ageing very differently”.

The other study leader, Claire Bedbrook, shared, “We now have the tools to map ageing continuously in a vertebrate… With the rise of wearables and long-term tracking in humans, I’m excited to see whether the same principles – early predictors, staged ageing, divergent trajectories – hold true in people”.