How an Obsession With Longevity Impacts Today’s Wellness Enthusiasts

Dr. Jordan Shlain has seen them all.

There’s the spreadsheet patient, who arrives at appointments with neatly organized data tracking everything from heart-rate variability to sleep stages to glucose levels. There’s the protocol refugee, taking 14 supplements, two experimental injectables, and a roster of peptides discovered on Reddit. And then there’s the social-withdrawal case, so committed to a cold-plunge-and-sauna schedule, fasting window, and nine p.m. blackout that family dinners and kids’ weekend games have fallen by the wayside.

To an outsider, and in isolation, some of these habits may not seem so extreme—Reddit peptides excepted. Health is wealth, right? But in the pursuit of longevity, some people are taking things so far that they may be counteracting the benefits of all those spreadsheets, supplements, and schedules. “You can optimize the life out of your life, and that’s the thing to beware of,” says Shlain, founder of Private Medical, a concierge-medicine practice with locations on both coasts of the United States, from New York to San Francisco.

This emerging understanding of over-indexing on longevity has a name: longevity-fixation syndrome. It’s not an official diagnosis, but the term is most often attributed to Jan Gerber, founder of Paracelsus Recovery, a mental-health and addiction-recovery clinic in Zurich. Since 2011, Paracelsus has treated clients for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, drug addiction, and a host of other conditions. But only in the past two or three years, Gerber tells Robb Report, have people begun presenting with what he describes as a kind of addiction to longevity.

Outside of one case he can recall, people aren’t coming to Paracelsus directly for longevity fixation. More often, it comes up during the diagnostic process. Someone might be experiencing sleep problems and depression, “and then when we start all our diagnostics, it turns out that they’re spending 18 hours a day obsessing over living longer, in an extreme case,” Gerber says. Or Paracelsus will recommend a full epigenetic panel and other tests, only to learn that the client has already done them all, takes a long list of supplements, and receives two IVs a week during the workday. “From our professional point of view, it seemed it did more harm than good,” Gerber says. 

While the term itself may be new, longevity-fixation syndrome feels all too familiar to Jason Wood. The 40-year-old director of community engagement at ANAD, the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, Wood went through a period about six years ago when a focus on longevity and disease prevention completely overtook his life. A disordered relationship with food, which Wood had struggled with for many years, morphed into glucose monitoring, blood testing, and IV injections. When he ate out at restaurants, if he couldn’t make a substitution to a dish, he would agonize over whether the meal might eventually contribute to illness. “I was spending lots of money, and I was spending lots of time focused on all of these other activities that I thought [were] going to promise me longevity,” Wood tells Robb Report. “It was just a wide range of very unhealthy obsessions that I became fixated on over time as a source of control.”

For many people, control is exactly what longevity appears to offer: a sense of agency over their health, their bodies, and the future. Wood’s parents both died of cancer when he was young—his father when Wood was 11, and his mother when he was 19. Their deaths, he says, “really made me hyperaware of our own mortality. I was really fearful of that same thing happening to me.” On a much larger scale, the pandemic instilled a similar worry in people around the world. Improving one’s health and wellness seemed like a tangible response to the Covid crisis, especially for those with the time and resources to devote to extending their lifespan.

You can optimize the life out of your life, and that’s the thing to beware of.

According to the market-research firm Data Bridge, the longevity- and wellness-biotech industry was valued at almost $5 billion in 2024. By 2032, that number is expected to more than triple, to $15.6 billion. And while people across the socioeconomic spectrum can invest in their health in countless ways, those in the upper echelons are particularly well positioned to shell out for the clinics, diagnostics, supplements, and treatments that promise to make their lives better—and longer. “For this demographic, health span’s a luxury good,” Shlain explains. “A second home is a flex; a bespoke suit is a flex. But staying sharp at 85 and being able to climb the stairs at 90 and recognize your grandchildren at 95—that’s the real flex. So ultimately, everyone with means figures out that their most valuable asset is their biology.”

Bryan Johnson, the tech bro at the head of the “Don’t Die” movement and one of the most well-known—and controversial—figures in the longevity scene, reportedly spends some $2 million a year on longevity. While that’s on the extremely high end of the spectrum, a 2024 Forbes survey found that people would be willing to spend an average of $5,285 for every additional healthy year added to their lives. Those willing to shell out the most were Gen Zers ($7,856), followed by Gen Xers ($6,347). The desire for a longer, fitter life cuts across age, gender, and race. Everyone wants to live well, for as long as possible.

In and of itself, that’s not a problem. “For some people, at first glance, if you have 18 hours in the day, if you have a trust fund or whatever… you might as well spend those 18 hours on longevity,” says Gerber, of Paracelsus. The issue arises when that focus—that fixation—starts to interfere with the rest of your life. This is what medical professionals are beginning to see in their clients, and what Wood experienced when he reached his breaking point over dinner with his husband in the summer of 2020. “When I hit rock bottom during that meal,” Wood recalls, “he was like, ‘Something’s been going on. I’ve seen your personality starting to change…. You’re just fixated, and you’re focused on health and wellness. I miss the Jason that you were.’ ”

Up until that point, many of the people in Wood’s life didn’t recognize his behavior as a problem—not even his doctors. He was working mainly with his primary-care physician, who applauded his discipline and dedication to a healthy lifestyle. The same was true of his friends, family, and coworkers. “As soon as we see people who are so dedicated to longevity or health and wellness and diet and exercise,” Wood says, “we build them up, we lift them up, and we use it a source of shame for other people who maybe aren’t at that same level.”

Gerber sees the same dynamic. Longevity can appear not only legitimate but admirable from the outside, especially compared with some of the disorders he treats at Paracelsus. “Nobody will call you out on taking supplements and having a workout routine, but they will call you out if you drink too much,” he says. That makes it more difficult for physicians, friends, and family to recognize when health-conscious behavior has crossed into something harmful. But some medical professionals are increasingly willing to tell patients when their pursuit of health and wellness has gone too far.

The No.1 thing that you can do to hack your longevity is hang out with friends without your screens.

At Private Medical, Shlain once saw a patient who wanted to try a peptide injection after it had become popular at his gym. Before agreeing, Shlain sent the peptide to a lab that tests drug purity, to make sure it was legitimate. The results were so alarming that the lab’s C.E.O. called him directly. While the first ingredient was indeed what the peptide purported to be, the second was an MDMA analog. “So, it had a little ecstasy in it,” Shlain explains. The third was an herbicide. Another eight ingredients were contaminants in high doses.

Dr. Sabine Donnai, a physician and the founder of Viavi, a London-based practice focused on longevity medicine, has seen similar cases. In one recent example, a client returned from the U.S. with 87 different supplements. At Viavi, Donnai’s goal is to get clients to an average biological age 15 years younger than their chronological age, which usually takes about three years. But for those taking excessive supplements, stressing over what else they should add, and worrying that they might miss out on something that could help them live longer, their biomarkers are actually getting worse.

“The problem is that [fixation] causes an abnormal amount of stress,” Donnai says. “Stress steals energy like nothing else because stress is about survival now. Stress is the opposite of longevity…. So [it’s] the opposite, almost, than what they’re trying to achieve.”

That’s the rub: The more obsessively someone pursues health and wellness, the more they may cancel out the benefits of the habits they are trying so hard to perfect. And if every waking moment is spent wondering whether you are doing enough—or whether you are doing the absolute best possible thing at that exact moment—is that really a life you want to live forever?

This is what everyone I interviewed for this story wanted to make clear, whether they had dealt with longevity fixation firsthand or work in the medical community focused on the field: The stress and sacrifice are not worth it if you are not also enjoying the life you are trying to extend. “If you’re lonely, if you’re sad, if you’re stressed,” Gerber says, “you don’t want to live to 100.” 

In that sense, the antidote to longevity fixation may be the same as for many other disorders: prioritizing mental health and relationships. “The only point in living longer is if it can be healthy and worthwhile,” Donnai says. “And worthwhile is as much the physical health, emotional health, and mental health. And that is the bit that I find in the longevity world gets forgotten.” She recommends an 80:20 approach to longevity. In her experience, clients who follow that split seem happier and more fulfilled than those thinking about longevity 100 percent of the time. They are, she says, “not forgetting to live, to enjoy life.”

Right now, much of the longevity industry prioritizes diet, exercise, vitamins, supplements, and diagnostics. It elevates physical health, performance, and disease prevention, often to the detriment of social ties and mental health. But those two things may be even stronger indicators of lifespan. Gerber points to healthy relationships as one of the best predictors of living longer as people age. The key to a long, happy life is not simply genetic markers, cholesterol levels, or how much time you spend in the sauna, asleep, or working out at the gym—even if those things matter, too. It’s whether you have strong relationships to sustain you as you move through that life, with all of its good and bad.

“Social connections [are] one of the strongest independent predictors of health span we have,” Shlain explains. “The No. 1 thing that you can do to hack your longevity is hang out with friends without your screens.” And just as the quality of your food may improve your health, the quality of your friends is just as important. “Get rid of bad friends, overprocessed friends,” he adds. “Stick with the protein and fiber friends.”

Those relationships are what help you live in the present moment, rather than fixating on the years you may or may not have ahead. In the end, that realization helped Wood break his harmful cycle. “It was one of those things where I had to realize to really prioritize the time I do have,” he says, “and to remember that it’s about the quality of my life and not the quantity of my life.”