Ever wonder what you’d do if you were an eccentric millionaire with nothing but time and resources? Would you buy a private island, fly to space, or maybe pursue the dream of eternal youth?

Bryan Johnson—a tech millionaire who sold his company to PayPal for $800 million in 2013—not only chose the latter but is also documenting his quest through his latest venture, Project Blueprint: an ever-evolving health and wellness protocol aimed at reversing his body’s biological clock.

While you might not be able to mirror Project Blueprint exactly (unless you also have nothing but time and resources), you might consider picking up a few tech tools that you can use to join the anti-aging revolution.

Tech Tips for Your Anti-Aging Routine

Project Blueprint is powered by measurement, and there are several types of gadgets you can use to get real-time updates on what’s happening inside your body—useful information like heart rate, stress levels, and even brainwaves.

If you want to follow in Bryan Johnson’s footsteps, you’ll need to consider adding a biofeedback device and a sleep tracker to your wellness repertoire.

Biofeedback Devices for Anti-Aging

Biofeedback devices come in various shapes and sizes, each employing a unique and innovative approach. For example, the HeartMath Inner Balance device pairs with an app available for both Android and iPhone, using both visual and audio cues to guide you toward a state of relaxation and reduced stress.

The device includes a sensor that clips onto your earlobe. This sensor communicates with the app on your smartphone via Bluetooth. Its primary focus is measuring your heart rate variability (HRV), which refers to the variation in time intervals between your heartbeats.

Another popular biofeedback device is the Muse Headband, which provides real-time feedback on your mental state using electroencephalogram (EEG) technology. The headband’s EEG sensors track activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain associated with cognitive functions such as attention, focus, and relaxation.

In a recent walk-through of his home, Johnson showed off various laser machines, ultrasound systems, electromagnetic stimulation machines, and red-light therapy devices, to name a few.

While we can’t all have the kinds of devices that transform a multimillion-dollar home in California into a biotech lab like Johnson, some surprisingly affordable and practical biofeedback devices can help you gain insights into your body.

Anti-Aging Sleep Technology

Johnson’s blacked-out bedroom never sees the light of day. It’s kitted out with two air purifiers (just one of several types of gadgets that can combat air pollution), copper-infused pillows, and something interesting on his nightstand: Pulsetto.

This neuromodulation device stimulates the vagus nerve, helping combat stress and anxiety, and helps Johnson get back to sleep if he wakes in the middle of the night.

There are of course other devices that you should consider if you want to monitor and improve your sleep. According to the Quantified Scientist on YouTube, the Apple Watch is the most accurate sleep-tracking wearable on the market.

The Balance Between Technology and Natural Health Practices

Image Credit: Bryan Johnson

Technological innovations are terrific at offering insights, metrics, and even gamifying fitness routines (who doesn’t love a good challenge?). Yet, it’s necessary to marry these tech solutions with natural health practices, such as eating a balanced diet and focusing on mindfulness.

Even Andrew Huberman’s productivity routine includes exposure to sunlight, reading books, and the ubiquitous advice of reducing screen time before bed to improve productivity.

In particular, mindfulness—whether developed through meditation, yoga, or simply taking a moment to breathe and connect with your surroundings—is an integral facet of a holistic wellness approach.

Technology can guide you, (for example, apps on your Apple Watch can provide mindfulness exercises), but it’s ultimately up to you to find your inner calm. In tandem, tech and non-tech solutions may be able to help slow down the clock, enhancing not only the length of your life but also its quality.

Bringing All the Anti-Aging Technology Together

So how do you incorporate the many potential age-defying gadgets into your daily routine? Consider a basic tech-inspired anti-aging routine.

Morning Wellness Routine

1. Start your day by reviewing your sleep data. Did you get some solid Zzzs or do you need to adjust your wind-down routine? Also, by understanding how to use your fitness tracker’s body battery metric, you’ll know if it’s a good day to hit the gym or take a rest day.
2. Enjoy a mindful breakfast. Use a nutrition tracking app like MacroFactor to ensure you’re getting the fuel you need.
3. Engage in a mindfulness practice, guided by a meditation app if you prefer. Or use a biofeedback device like the Inner Balance to develop greater coherence—a measure of synchronization between your heart, breath, and mind. Both of these options would be a great way to set a calm and focused tone for your day.

Afternoon Wellness Routine

1. In the afternoon, it’s time for some physical activity. Virtual coaching and AI are changing the way people exercise, so consider one of these platforms to keep track of your performance and help you push your limits in a healthy way.
2. Stay hydrated and nourished. Download one of the many apps to remind you to drink water.
3. Take another moment for a short mindfulness exercise, helping to reset your focus and keep stress at bay.

Evening Wellness Routine

1. Wind down with a light yoga or stretching session. There are pros and cons to online and in-person yoga classes, so it’s up to you to determine which is better for your lifestyle.
2. Program your smart thermostat to cool your room and prepare for bed by reading an old-school, paper-scented book.
3. Let your device of choice track your sleep and start the routine again tomorrow. If wearables aren’t your thing, Amazon Halo Rise is a contactless sleep tracker and might be right for you.

Creating Your Own Health and Wellness Protocol

Bryan Johnson might have limitless resources for his quest for youth, but don’t be discouraged. With some innovative gadgets coupled with traditional wellness practices, well-being is yours to be had.

The path to health and wellness is more of a marathon than a sprint, and each step—each night of tracked sleep, each mindful meal—is progress. Over time, your commitment could make you the newest contender in the Rejuvenation Olympics (yes that’s now a thing!).

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Mayor Brandon Johnson’s inauguration pledge to reopen Chicago’s city-run mental health clinics puts him on the clock to deliver a win for advocates who have been waging that fight for more than a decade.

It also sets him up to make good on a longtime goal of one of his strong union supporters, by creating jobs at the clinics for members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Whether he follows through could be one of the most important Rorschach tests on how Johnson’s first term gets viewed.

To appreciate the existential parameters of this fight, head back to 2012. That’s when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel shuttered six of the 12 city-run clinics.

Almost from the moment Emanuel announced his intention to close the centers, patients and their supporters commenced a series of protests that drew attention to what they said was the mayor’s disregard for their well-being.

Twenty-three people were arrested after barricading themselves inside a Woodlawn clinic in 2012, and protesters turned up at Emanuel’s public events around that time to heckle him over the decision.

AFSCME lost dozens of positions for its members when the clinics closed, and the union joined in the push to reverse the decision. It’s a fight that’s never ended.

[ Brandon Johnson sworn in as Chicago mayor: ‘Our best and brighter days are ahead of us’ ]

Toussaint Losier was a volunteer with the Mental Health Movement, which worked with patients to spearhead protests against the closures. Now a professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Losier said he’s struck by how the fight to reopen the clinics has remained potent for over a decade.

Helen Morley, who said she uses the Beverly Morgan Park Mental Health Clinic, and other protesters disrupt a program celebrating Chicago’s 175th birthday at an event at the Chicago History Museum in March 2012. A half-dozen protesters disrupted the event that then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel was attending. (José M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)

“What’s really amazed me has been the degree to which the question of the closure of the clinics and the struggle around trying to prevent that has remained fixed in people’s political imagination in the 10 years since,” he said.

It remains to be seen whether Johnson will follow through on his campaign promise to reopen the clinics and his inauguration applause line about finding a bunch of ways to make sure Chicagoans get the mental health care they need, “including reopening our mental health care centers across the city of Chicago.”

A Johnson spokesman declined to comment on the administration’s plans for the mental health clinics.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot likewise campaigned in 2019 to reopen the city-run facilities, only to back away from the pledge when she won, saying it made more sense to boost funding to a broad array of mental health nonprofits. She increased mental health spending to $89 million as part of her 2023 city budget.

But Johnson faces a much different political base than Lightfoot did, with progressive grassroots organizers and union activists who expect him to deliver on their priorities, noted Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a co-founder of Southside Together Organizing for Power, a group that played an important role in fighting the clinic closures.

“What I’m excited about with this political moment — don’t get me wrong, I love Brandon, Mayor Johnson, I think he’s a great guy — but what gets me excited is not him and his personality as much as the structural pressures upon him,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle said. “The same things, to be frank, that are causing such alarm among those who like to, who are generally in Naperville and like to throw bombs at city politics, are the same things that have me excited.”

AFSCME has been a strong Johnson supporter.

The AFSCME International Union PAC contributed $100,000 to his mayoral campaign this year ahead of the April runoff election, according to state campaign finance records. And AFSCME Illinois Council 31′s PAC contributed $56,750 to Johnson in 2018 during his successful run for Cook County commissioner.

AFSCME Council 31 spokesman Anders Lindall said the union doesn’t back candidates because they expect a quid pro quo. “We support candidates who have the right position on our issues, not the other way around,” he said.

“And the other thing is, Mayor Lightfoot campaigned on (reopening the clinics) four years ago, and we did not endorse Lori Lightfoot,” Lindall continued. “That wasn’t a political consideration. And Brandon Johnson campaigned on it this time around and we remained neutral in the (mayoral) primary. So this is really about the policy for us.”

[ Rahm Emanuel closed half of Chicago’s mental health clinics. What was the impact — and will Lightfoot reopen them? ]

The need to reopen the clinics has become more commonly accepted over the past decade, Lindall said, making it easier for Johnson to do so.

“This is not happening overnight, and I certainly think the new mayor alone is not out on an island,” Lindall said. “But there has been a growing consensus to the point that I think it’s probably difficult to find a lot of people today that would not say that the 2012 closures were a mistake.”

A sign hangs in the window of a storefront at 4313 S. Ashland Ave., the former site of the Greater Lawn Mental Health Center, on May 29, 2019. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)

Lindall argued the clinics provide much more consistent care in part because they can, in most cases, pay better salaries and offer better benefits than private providers that experience a lot of staff turnover.

And he said there’s better transparency when the city is running the facilities, allowing the public to see what kind of care patients are receiving and how funds are being spent.

“When the city is providing the services, we know who is being served, when, how and by whom,” Lindall said. “And the accountability is direct. CDPH (Chicago Department of Public Health) has a management structure, the agency head reports to the mayor and the City Council has the legislative oversight of all of that.”

Lindall said nonprofits have a role to play too.

“It’s definitely not an ‘either-or’ situation,” he said. “The level of unmet need in our city is such that it’s ‘both-and.’”

There are “around 70″ AFSCME-represented mental health worker positions currently on the city payroll, including 62 employees working at the remaining five city-run clinics who also conduct mental health outreach in Chicago libraries. Five other city workers represented by AFSCME serve as mental health co-responders with police.

That’s down from 92 positions when 12 clinics were operating, Lindall said. The Cook County Health Department took over the sixth remaining city clinic, in Roseland, beginning in 2017. That one is now run by a private company, with the county putting in $800,000 annually, according to a county health department spokeswoman.

Christopher Colon of Chicago, and Angie Pray of Portland, Oregon, go door to door on May 19, 2012, asking Rahm Emanuel’s neighbors where they can find mental health care since the mayor closed some of the clinics. (Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune)

The city clinics see just a small fraction of the number of people in Chicago who receive mental health services.

According to the Chicago Department of Public Health, city clinics served 1,782 patients in 2022 while there were 73,899 patients served citywide at city clinics and the various nonprofit agencies and other mental health programs in the city that receive public funding.

Federal COVID-19 relief grants are drying up, however, and mental health needs are soaring citywide since the start of the pandemic.

Alexa James, chief executive officer of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Chicago and a member of the Johnson postelection transition team’s Health & Human Services Subcommittee, said the city needs to be nimble to deal with the crisis.

“If you look nationally at city health departments, they have learned that being their own provider is complicated, because they haven’t found that they have the flexibility to innovate, and that just being a clinic-based care center, we’ve all learned through a lot of work, that integrated health systems, meeting people where they are … is really the way to create more trust in the mental health system,” said James, whose nonprofit receives city funding to help pay for a mental health helpline.

Reopening the city-run clinics would buck that trend, she said.

“City health departments nationally have really stopped becoming providers,” James said. “They’re really gap-fillers, they’re funders, they’re conveners. What I’m understanding from this administration is they may want to change that agenda, they may want to get back into the provider business … There’s definitely strong opinions on either side, but what we believe is that sharing costs with the state, the county and the city is going to give us more bang for our buck.”

jebyrne@chicagotribune.com

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