Dr. Rhonda Patrick: There are a couple of personal questions that I'm going to ask you at the very end that I know people are also very interested in. One is your ideal diet and exercise routine, and other factors that you're using for longevity, whether for the day or for the week, whichever way you bunch them. What's ideal for you to improve your longevity? I know that's a very general way—

Dr. Peter Attia: With respect to nutrition and exercise?

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Nutrition, exercise, and anything else, like sleep. What's your ideal program?

Dr. Peter Attia: Sweet. Yeah. Well, I will say this: I'm sure that everything I'm about to say is going to make me sound really rigid, and people are going to be like, “That guy's a psycho.” So I'm always a little hesitant when talking about what I do.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Well, people want to know what you do.

Dr. Peter Attia: Okay. So, look, compared with most people, I am probably considered quite regimented. I'm way less regimented than I used to be. But nevertheless, here's how I think about things. Let's start with sleep. I really take my sleep seriously, and I'm someone who functions best with a consistent bedtime and wake-up time. So I am in bed usually for eight hours a night, typically 10 to 6, and that usually results in probably seven and a half hours of sleep. I'm going to just rattle off the names of things I use because I don't have any affiliation. I use Eight Sleep as my mattress cover.

Dr. Peter Attia: I love what these guys have done. It's a fantastic cooling product, and it has made an enormous difference for me. I've been using it for the last three years. Most of our patients are using it. There are other products out there, and I've tried them, and they're good. This one I just happen to fancy the most.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: Agreed.

Dr. Peter Attia: I'm also very particular about what I'm doing before bed and what I'm not doing before bed. I'm not perfect with this. I'm not perfect with any of these things, Rhonda. But I really go out of my way not to look at anything that's going to activate me. So I try not to look at email for a couple of hours before bed. In fact, I have two separate phones. I have my regular phone that has email, social media, and junk on it. Then I have what I call my Batphone that literally has nothing. It has the remote to the TV, a phone, and text, but only two people know the number: my wife and my daughter. It also has the camera, so it's basically an excuse to have a camera and a phone if I'm going someplace and don't want my regular phone with me.

Dr. Peter Attia: That's the phone that's with me if I'm watching TV downstairs or something like that. I can't even be tempted to look at social media or email. It's all in the spirit of turning the system down before bed. Even little things, like I'll brush and floss my teeth before I go in the sauna, because I sauna before bed as well. Once I'm done with that sauna and shower, I'm going straight into bed. For me, that's also a very productive sleep trick. There are certain supplements that I use to sleep as well. I'm a fan of glycine, ashwagandha, magnesium L-threonate, and straight magnesium oxide. I don't use melatonin or phosphatidylserine unless I'm jet-lagged. If I'm time-zone hopping, I'll use those as well.

Dr. Peter Attia: On the nutrition side, I don't follow any particular diet. I guess you could say I eat what would be called a balanced diet. I'm an omnivore who will probably always struggle with food in the sense that, if left to my own devices, I would eat everything and too much of it. So I do need to be mindful about what I eat. What do I pay attention to? I generally pay attention to not eating junk. That's the most important credo of my diet. I say this as someone who's done everything. I've been vegan. I've been keto. I've done hardcore fasting, intermittent fasting, and time-restricted eating. I don't think there's a diet I haven't done for long periods of time.

Dr. Peter Attia: I have found benefit in one form or another from various aspects of these things. But right now I'm mostly optimized around energy balance and protein intake. Most of my conscious effort around my diet goes into making sure I'm getting 40 to 50 grams of protein four times a day. A lot of times, at least two of those are meals that are just venison or eggs, where it's just a protein and there's not a lot of other stuff in it. I do make sure I stop eating at least three hours before bed. It really makes a difference, going back to sleep, that I go to bed a little hungry. If I ever go to bed with my belly too full, it feels nice, but I don't sleep as well. So I try to err on the side of going to bed a little hungry. We're really lucky because we have young kids, so we eat early. We're eating at six, so I'm going to bed typically with four hours between when I last ate and when I go to sleep.

Dr. Peter Attia: We can talk about alcohol. I'm in the camp that believes there is absolutely no benefit to alcohol at any dose from a purely biochemical standpoint. However, I acknowledge that there are probably some prosocial benefits to it, and I happen to really like alcohol. I probably have, depending on the week, anywhere from zero to seven or eight drinks. I don't think there's a time that I can recall in the last five or six years when I've had more than two drinks in a day. I also try to do my drinking early. By that, I don't mean two in the afternoon, but with dinner, so that, functionally, the alcohol doesn't factor into my sleep. I know this because I track all these things. I know exactly how alcohol negatively affects my sleep, and I know that as long as I have that drinking done by six or seven, it doesn't show up on any metric that I'm tracking with respect to sleep.

Dr. Peter Attia: Exercise is the most important thing from a physiological standpoint for me. I exercise every day, and much of what I do revolves around it. Even here in San Diego this week, I have a membership at a great gym every time I'm here. I know that I'm going to get up first thing in the morning and go do my workouts. They're not going to be the exact same workouts I'd be doing at home, but I'm still generally doing four hours of Zone 2 a week, with one higher-intensity workout geared toward VO2 max, and then four strength-training sessions a week. That's the foundational pillar of everything I do. There are other things layered on top of that, like rucking and recreational activities that are also physical.

Dr. Peter Attia: The last thing I would say, which we didn't talk about but is an equally important part of this, is mental health. Everything that we've talked about—the right sleep, nutrition, and exercise—factors into creating what I describe as a wider buffer zone around distress tolerance. Then therapy, which I do at least one session a week and sometimes two, plus journaling and dialectical behavior therapy, have been enormously important in increasing the quality of my life in the past five years.