1The Time Bombs of AgingNothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. —Marie Curie
“Get used to it. You are just getting old.”
“Well, that’s just part of aging.”
I hear from people every day that this is the way their doctors—and friends and acquaintances too!—react when they talk about the changes they are experiencing as they get older. It’s as if everyone is throwing up their hands and taking a copout attitude about what it means to age. This is exactly the same sentiment I heard from Eva when we began working together. “Well, I guess I’m just getting old,” she’d said. A learned resignation from her previously vibrant life. Somewhere she had internalized the narrative that normal aging means suffering.
Maybe you have too. If I asked you what it means to age and what aging feels like to you, your response may depend on how old you are right now and how you see aging depicted around you. I remember in my early college years I was in such a rush to be an established adult I would repeatedly tell my roommates to “just grow up!” And now, ironically, I wonder what the hurry was about anyway. How we feel about the passage of time is also determined by what we have seen in our own families or the messages we receive from the media. Your outlook will be very different if you see your elders living vibrant lives decades past retirement, traveling the world and taking time to enjoy the fruits of their labor, or if you see your grandmother or aunts become frail and hunched over or fall and break their hip, resulting in not only tremendous personal stress but changes in family dynamics and tough family decisions.
Gender matters too. If you watch the media or marketing portrayals of how to live longer, you’ll see a gap. For men, more time is often portrayed as longevity, new adventures, and a dignified passing into graying temples and confidence that may be undergirded by Viagra (or the twenty-nine other choices that exist for male vitality). For women, more time in life is at worst portrayed as invisibility and frailty and at best by the message of the need for anti-aging cosmetic procedures to return to the appearance of youthful times.
So, we all have these concepts of aging from our lived experiences and the cultural waters we swim in. But what is aging anyway, and why do we age at seemingly different speeds? From a biological standpoint, what is this lifelong process of aging, and what accelerates it or slows it down?
The Hallmarks of AgingThe very systems and processes that keep us alive—metabolism, immune system, and cellular repair mechanisms—are designed to protect and sustain us. They are pillars of health, working tirelessly to balance energy, repair damage, and fend off disease. But as time passes, these systems can become overburdened or less efficient, turning from protective forces into what I consider molecular time bombs that threaten to break us down.
There are several reasons for this breakdown. Over decades our bodies face relentless wear and tear. Our cells divide, our once healthy metabolic pathways produce damaging proteins, and waste accumulates in our cells. Young bodies can handle and repair this damage easily, but over time, damage accumulates faster than it can be repaired. And our metabolism shifts. While metabolism powers every function in the body, the by-products of energy production—such as oxidative stress and inflammation—can start to cause harm. Initially, these processes are balanced, but as the inflammatory by-products build up, they begin to disrupt healthy function. Cells have a limited number of divisions before they undergo programmed cell death or enter a state of senescence, when they no longer divide and instead secrete harmful inflammatory signals. In short, they become exhausted, so this once useful process of cellular aging results in chronic inflammation and tissue damage. Systems designed to keep us safe, like the immune system, can become overactive or dysregulated, leading to chronic diseases like autoimmune disorders or metabolic syndrome. In other words, our once adaptive homeostasis becomes maladaptive. Or, more simply: The very systems that once shielded us now become time bombs to our health.
While we can’t stop the passage of time, we are not victims of aging. The true power lies in recognizing these time bombs early and taking proactive steps to neutralize them. By shielding ourselves, we can maintain control and build a future of sustained health and resilience.
That’s right, while some scientists believe aging is a disease that needs to be cured, others, like me, believe aging is a superpower. It allows us to grow through our experiences into the richness of life and to live in all the richness we are capable of. The issue is not our aging but our health as we age. We must take action to build an Unbreakable life, in which our healthspan equals our lifespan.
To dive deeper into creating shields for health and longevity, we must first more fully understand the time bombs of aging. How we age can be changed by our lifestyles, and it’s frankly a crime how little we’re taught about the biology of healthy aging. It’s far easier to internalize healthy aging habits and behaviors (like the ones you’ll find in this book) when you know exactly how they change your biology.
I’ve taken the time, therefore, to detail the most important ones here. We have some clear indications of the biological processes that damage our cells and ultimately pave the way for chronic disorders and disease. We also have clear indications about what can help protect us and keep us Unbreakable over time.
For the sake of clarity, I’m going to distill the twelve (and growing) known hallmarks of aging into what I consider the six main molecular time bombs and then explain the key ways you can shield yourself against them so you can not only extend your lifespan but also make your healthspan last as long as you do.
Time Bomb 1: DNA Changes and DamageOur DNA is not our destiny, and we can stop blaming our parents for our health. Every time I say that in public, I know my mother smiles. Although we inherit our genetic code, or DNA, from our parents, it does not predetermine our full health and lifespan. Only 30 percent of health and aging is the result of genetics. The other 70 percent is caused by our lifestyle choices, which directly influence how our DNA is expressed.
If and how our genetic code is read to dictate the function of our cells, tissues, and bodies as a whole depends on multiple factors. This doesn’t mean our DNA itself changes, but the way our bodies “read” it does, thanks to something called epigenetic change. Our lifestyle choices—how much we exercise and what type of activity we do, what we eat, how we sleep, and other habits and behaviors—can alter the way our genes behave without rewriting our actual DNA code.
This understanding can give us real hope for the future, because it shows that our genetic expression is largely in our own hands. In fact, consider that a single session of aerobic exercise alters more than 9,800 molecules, including proteins, lipids, genes, and immune markers that influence health, and you get just a glimpse of how powerful the right exercise program can be. The promise and curse of epigenetics is that our lifestyle choices can indeed shield our health, but they can also damage healthy gene expression and lead to increased cellular damage, more rapid aging, cancer, and shortened healthspan and lifespan.
I see the profound influence of life choices on health and longevity in my own family. My father’s parents, Oren and Velma Wright, were farmers in Kansas. They survived by working hard and eating the fried, high-fat midwestern diet of the time. Smoking was the norm. The result? Their healthspan was diminished. By their early sixties they had developed cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions, and both died of stroke and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease before their early seventies. My father, Gene, on the other hand, has been an endurance runner my whole life, and although he grew up on the fried fatty foods his parents served, his commitment to self-health shielded him, and at eighty-five he continues to live a vibrant life, daring us all to keep up with him. Though he inherited his parents’ genes, his life choices altered their epigenetic expression and added fifteen years (and counting) to his lifespan.
Included in the category of DNA damage is something called telomere shortening. Telomeres are protective caps that wrap around our chromosomes, which are long strands of DNA that carry genetic information. You can think of them as being like the plastic caps on your shoelaces that prevent them from fraying or, in the case of your chromosomes, from degrading or fusing with one another, which can cause disease. Telomeres will shorten over time, and as they do, cells lose their ability to divide and function properly.
This telomere exhaustion contributes to the aging process and is associated with the development of age-related diseases and accelerated aging. When telomeres become critically short or dysfunctional, they can trigger cellular senescence or apoptosis (programmed cell death), further contributing to aging and age-related pathologies. In fact, older people with shorter telomeres have three times more risk of death from heart disease and eight times increased risk of death from infectious diseases.
Copyright © 2025 by Vonda Wright, MD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.