Increasing your longevity: the Psychotip® programme

1. Before you start

You have already read a hundred articles on the subject. One tells you to fast, another to eat every three hours; one praises red wine, another forbids it; a third sells you a powder at three hundred euros a month.

The result is a fog, and fog produces inaction.

This text does the opposite. It ranks the levers by return, it gives the orders of magnitude in years gained, and it says what is useless. You will see that the list of things that genuinely count is short, boring and long known — which is excellent news, because it means it is doable.

One idea to keep if you read nothing else

The gains are not in refinement. They are in the move from zero to something: from smoker to non-smoker, from sedentary to slightly active, from isolated to connected, from six hours of sleep to seven. Looking for the optimal protocol before making that move is adjusting the sound system in an empty hall.

2. What you can genuinely gain

Let us start with the figures, because they are larger than most people imagine.

The cohorts that measured it

Two large American cohorts followed more than one hundred and twenty thousand people over several decades, regularly recording five simple behaviours: not smoking, having a body weight in the normal range, doing at least thirty minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity a day, drinking little or no alcohol, and eating a good-quality diet.

At age fifty, people with all five had a life expectancy about fourteen years longer for women and twelve years longer for men than those with none.

Fourteen years. Not fourteen months.

That figure has to be read correctly: it is a comparison between two extremes, in a population of health professionals, and these are observed associations, not a trial in which people were assigned by drawing lots to adopt these habits or not (section 5 comes back to this). The real effects of an individual change are probably smaller. But the order of magnitude — a decade — is found across many independent studies, and it is robust.

What diet alone can deliver

A modelling study published in 2022 estimated the life-expectancy gain associated with moving from a typical Western diet to an optimised one — more legumes, whole grains and nuts, less red and processed meat.

For a twenty-year-old, the modelled gain is around ten to thirteen years. For a sixty-year-old, it is still around eight years. For an eighty-year-old, it remains over three years.

Note especially the last two figures: it is never too late, and the return remains considerable at an advanced age. That is one of the most encouraging findings in this whole text.

Tobacco, in one sentence

A regular smoker loses on average about ten years of life expectancy. Quitting wins back a large part of them, and the earlier you quit, the more you recover.

No other behaviour has a comparable return. That is why it is lever number one in section 7.

What these figures do not say

They do not say what will happen to you. Part of longevity comes down to luck — an accident, a cancer with no known risk factor, a genetic susceptibility. You can do everything right and die early; you can do everything wrong and live long.

What these figures do say is that you strongly shift the probabilities. That is all an individual can do, and it is a great deal.

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