IT SEEMED LIKE it was going to be a perfect summer day. Jason Wood, an office manager at a tech company in Boulder, Colorado, was on a much-needed vacation in Wyoming with his husband, Matt, who worked for an architecture firm. First stop had been Fort Collins, to hike around the Horsetooth Reservoir, with its crystal blue water reflecting the sky. Next they drove to Cheyenne, where the plan was to catch the Independence Day fireworks at the local rodeo that evening. They went to dinner at a classic American restaurant in downtown Cheyenne. Matt ordered a shrimp pasta dish. Wood ordered the hummus platter, but he wanted to make a substitution. He asked the waiter if he could please have fresh vegetables—carrots, cucumber, celery sticks—instead of pita bread. The waiter told him they didn’t have any fresh veggies, so he wouldn’t be able to substitute.
“Just that one thing, that was enough,” says Wood, a slim man of 40 years, with close-cropped hair and a light goatee. “I looked at Matt and was like, ‘I’m done with this trip. I hate it here.’ ”
Before they’d left home, Wood had extensively researched restaurants with options that fit his food rules. Nothing that would contaminate his body and shorten his life. No meat. Organic foods only: chickpeas, low-fat yogurt, and Malk, the only almond milk Wood touched. Absolutely no bread. But all the places he’d researched were closed for the Fourth. He spent an hour in the hotel looking for another restaurant he thought would fulfill his requirements. And then, boom: no fresh vegetables.
What he was doing seemed like a good thing, especially since he’d been heavy as a kid. In 2018, after dropping from 265 pounds to below 200, he was empowered to do more. In addition to following strict food rules, he hit his apartment gym twice a day for 60-minute sessions: cardio in the a.m., weight training at night. Then came the weekly intravenous drips, plus D vitamins, B vitamins, various nutrients, whatever he thought would improve his overall health. He’d lose his temper if he couldn’t train at a specific time or eat the way he wanted. Any hobbies that kept him from working out fell away. He visited his doctor every few months to order another round of blood work. He lived in constant fear of breaking his routines, so he stopped hanging out with friends.
As Wood went into panic mode over dinner, Matt delivered a verbal body check: You’re obsessed with food and diet and wellness. All you ever talk about is supplements or how often you’re going to work out. It’s not fun to be around you.
Wood, through his tears, picked up the pita and ate a few bites. But he knew, sitting there at that restaurant in Cheyenne, that he was sick—and had been for a long time.
TODAY THERE’S A new term to describe the way Wood altered his life in the name of extreme health: longevity fixation syndrome. Doctors and therapists are now exploring ways to help people with the condition—and bracing for an onslaught—as more and more behaviors and products are marketed as longevity hacks. David Popiel, MD, a primary care physician who works for Private Medical, a concierge health care clinic network, tells me that over the past decade, he’s seen more people admitting they have an unhealthy obsession with their own longevity.
For Wood, the control he was trying to exert on his physiology had become toxic. Everything—friends, vacations, his spouse—was a roadblock. At restaurants, he couldn’t follow his food rules. On vacations, he couldn’t get to the gym. “Up until that point, there was never an inkling of doubt that what I was doing was the wrong thing or the unhealthy thing,” he says. “And then that day [in Cheyenne] hit, and I realized that this was no way to live.” But Wood would have to find his own path out, balancing his quest for a long life with doing what was best for his health—and not knowing, for years, that there was a difference between the two.
LONGEVITY FIXATION SYNDROME is like other compulsions: It overtakes your thoughts and behaviors until it exacts a negative toll on every aspect of your life. It’s not unlike orthosomnia, the detrimental obsession with achieving perfect sleep metrics, or orthorexia, a pathological interest in healthy eating habits. But with longevity fixation syndrome, the target of the obsession is what gets sold to men at the gym, at the grocery store, on every bro podcast, and by every looksmaxxing influencer right now. If you miss a gym session or have to stay up late or can’t get fresh veggies instead of pita bread, it’s not only your health taking a hit—your lifespan is in trouble.
Unlike anorexia nervosa or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), however, longevity fixation syndrome isn’t listed in the DSM-5 or ICD-11. (Orthosomnia and orthorexia aren’t, either.) Dirk Stemper, MD, a psychotherapist in private practice in Germany, describes longevity fixation as a unique preoccupation. “Mostly it’s a phenomenal element on the surface with an underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he says. But because it lacks a formal designation, doctors tend not to recognize it as a problem. Guys themselves pass it off as “just being healthy.” That leads to years of being miserable or making others miserable and not finding treatment—and not getting it covered by insurance even if you do.
Jan Gerber, a serial founder with a PhD in business and the CEO of Paracelsus Recovery, a boutique mental health clinic in Zurich, coined the term “longevity fixation syndrome” in early 2026. About 5 to 10 times every month, Paracelsus fields calls from people claiming they are longevity-obsessed. “We’ve been noticing this for at least a couple of years,” says Gerber. “It’s not just with our patient group, but also with the referrals and inquiries we get.”
At the height of Wood’s issue, he was spending about $750 EVERY MONTH on his longevity program.
Although the term might be novel—foreign, even, to some longevity specialists—the degree to which it’s a perceptible problem is not. “One patient described it to me as like a drip of a sink you’re hearing in the middle of the night that you cannot stop,” says Roberto Olivardia, PhD. A leading clinical psychologist who focuses on eating disorders and body image issues in boys and men at his practice in Lexington, Massachusetts, he explains that he’s seen this phenomenon for years.
Olivardia and Dr. Popiel don’t seem surprised that more patients they speak with these days are fixated on longevity. In a life filled with uncertainty, taking care of our health is one thing a person can control—to the point of compulsion. “I was losing who I was as a person because everything was defined by this health and wellness regimen that I put into place,” Wood says. “I didn’t really know who I was anymore.” At the height of Wood’s issue, he was spending about $750 every month on his longevity program. Olivardia mentioned a story about an ordinary guy who spent so much on staying healthy that he couldn’t keep up with his mortgage.
There aren’t any hard criteria that indicate when discipline around longevity is turning into compulsion. But according to Olivardia, there are clues. For instance, spending hours a day reading about longevity, or feeling so much anxiety during meals out with friends that you’d rather avoid seeing your buddies. Another telltale sign is feeling anxious or stressed if you can’t get to the doctor or check your vitals. You find yourself giving up everything for the sake of trying to live longer.
The $250 billion global longevity industry itself deserves part of the blame. Its products are amplified by podcasters like Gary Brecka, Dave Asprey, and Mark Hyman, MD, and wellness brands like Hims, Lifeforce, and Viome that advertise on social media. “Convince a healthy person that aging is a disease, and every birthday turns into a symptom. Then sell him the panel, the peptide, the patch, the protocol,” says Jordan Shlain, MD, founder and chairman of Private Medical. “By the time these folks reach us, they’re already exhausted from babysitting 40 biomarkers and a supplement shelf that rivals a pharmacy.”
GERBER DESCRIBES THE people who call his clinic as mostly men in their 40s, many of whom fit the profile of the Silicon Valley founder: very driven, very competitive, and very knowledgeable about the latest health trends. Paracelsus can’t see all of them. It’s a residential treatment center with an in-house maximum capacity of three patients at any one time, although the clinic does outpatient aftercare as well. The fee is more than $100,000 a week. Other guys get help for a lot less, using whatever health insurance resources they have to find an affordable therapist.
There is, however, a factor that Gerber has seen consistently among the longevity-obsessed, regardless of how fat their wallets are. “Some kind of trauma is the one common denominator,” Gerber says, before rattling off a short list of what he means: emotional neglect; someone close to a person, like a friend or a parent, dying; a personality disorder. Traumatic experiences aren’t the only driver, but people who have experienced trauma previously are at higher risk of developing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and, yes, a preoccupation with longevity.
“Trauma just creates a lot of unpredictability, feelings of helplessness, uncertainty, and loss of safety,” says Jason Nagata, MD, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and an expert in eating disorders in boys and men. “As a coping mechanism, they want to try to maximize things that are in their control, like food, or exercise, or biohacking.”
That tracked for Wood. He was 11 when his father died of colorectal cancer; when he turned 19, his mother died of metastatic brain cancer, after having already survived three bouts of lung cancer. Wood became an orphan before he was legally allowed to drink—although that didn’t stop him. (He’s sober now.) He drifted in and out of homelessness, at one point living at a Red Roof Inn for weeks on end. He was supposed to inherit the family paving business at age 25, but with his parents dead, his older siblings sold it off. Wood says all of this to me in a cool, calm manner—the complete opposite of how he was that night in Cheyenne. There’s no warbling tone, no trace in his voice of any of the pain he felt as a younger man. No tears. But he looks away for a moment, then back at me, and leans in before describing how he experienced his day-to-day moments. “Life felt like it was spiraling out of control,” he says.
Then, when he turned 29, he found blood in his stool and had his own colorectal scare. A colonoscopy revealed three polyps close to turning cancerous. “It really made me feel like my body was out to get me, and I wanted to take complete control of the situation and try to fight back,” Wood says. “Seeing both my parents die young, I was already very aware that we have an expiration date, and I wanted to make sure I pushed mine out as far as I possibly could. I thought that if I slip up even once, I’m going to die at a young age, too.”
AFTER HIS HUMMUS reckoning in Wyoming, Wood approached his primary care physician, who diagnosed him with OCD, anxiety, and an unspecified eating disorder, tacking on post-traumatic stress disorder, too, because of his experiences with the deaths of his parents. In other words, he told Wood that his fixation was a form of obsession, and that he might be so focused on longevity because of past trauma. But then all he did was tell Wood to go home and Google some therapists. “I couldn’t believe that,” he tells me, an incredulous tone rising in his voice. “If I had a heart problem, you’d send me to a cardiologist.”
The impulse was right even if the delivery was off. After researching about 25 different therapists, Wood connected with Sean Stevens, a licensed professional counselor based just outside Denver who seemed to understand what Wood was going through. Currently, the best treatment for longevity fixation looks a lot like how doctors might treat patients with orthorexia, orthosomnia, or other compulsive conditions. In his sessions with Wood, Stevens employed cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of talk therapy that focuses on helping a person challenge negative thoughts and engage in practical activities. Wood appreciated that Stevens talked to him about his fear of death and his fear of losing control over his health. Then it became about taking active steps to curb that fear. Wood would venture out with friends for pizza. Stevens would ask him: “Did your health suffer in a meaningful way just because you had an evening out?” After several months, the treatment strategies started becoming habits.
“Seeing both my parents die young, I was already very aware that WE HAVE AN EXPIRATION DATE, and I wanted to make sure I pushed mine out AS FAR AS I POSSIBLY COULD. I thought that if I slip up even once, I’M GOING TO DIE AT A YOUNG AGE, TOO.”
Yet not everyone agrees on what, exactly, is being treated when it comes to longevity fixation syndrome. Since the line between disorder and discipline is hard to draw, some in the longevity industrial complex question whether this is really pathology. Biohacker and influencer Bryan Johnson cheekily panned the entire idea of longevity fixation syndrome in comments on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. (“I’ve been sober from dying for five years now,” he wrote. “I’m trapped in a prison of health. Please help.”)
He argues that a fixation on health isn’t necessarily damaging. “Other fixations are more serious,” he says. When it comes to an obsession with money, for instance, “do we think it causes people anxiety? Do we think it causes them to neglect their health, their family, their own mental well-being?” Underpinning Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement is the idea that nothing is more important than the act of living. But Wood started to question whether the extreme rules he was living under were really a way to live life at all.
WOOD AND STEVENS met twice a week for six months initially. Stevens was compassionate and patient but also pushed Wood outside his comfort zone, which for years had been bordered by the rigidity of his longevity regimen.
But Wood struggled to shed his obsession. “I had to separate myself from all of those things that used to define me. For a long time, it was kind of like figuring out who I am again and how I fit into this world,” says Wood. He would sneak off to the pharmacy to check his blood pressure. Even though Wood now had to monitor his glucose levels to manage his diabetes, he would do it far more than he needed to every day, and then claim that his doctor was the one who wanted him to check his levels that frequently. Wood would even try to fool Matt into thinking that he was eating foods that he never would have touched at the height of his longevity fixation.
Pancakes, especially, caused Wood “a great deal of anxiety,” he says. After all: They’re made of “forbidden” flour. But they were one of Matt’s favorite foods, and so, early on in his recovery process, Wood made an effort—in appearance, at least. Whenever pancakes hit his plate, he would cover his mouth with a napkin while chewing, spit out the contents, and then hide the napkin in his lap until he could dispose of it. “I would throw it in the garbage and try to make it look like I ate it,” he says. “And there were a couple times I got caught and called out on that.”
Wood started to question whether the EXTREME RULES he was living under were really a WAY TO LIVE LIFE AT ALL.
Through his counseling sessions, Wood began to think a little differently about how he had been controlling his health. Stevens asked him to experiment with trying different behaviors to test whether Wood’s health beliefs were really accurate. For instance, if he tried taking a rest day after an intense gym session, he was encouraged to ask himself: Are you any less healthy? And if you think the answer is yes, what’s your proof? “A lot of therapy is helping people figure out what their own recipe is as opposed to having this rigid way of thinking,” Stevens says.
Eventually Stevens gave Wood an assignment: Write about himself, walking through every event in his life that brought him to the brink that day in Cheyenne. About a year into his recovery, Wood started a blog and began sharing his experiences on social media. He sat down one day to write a post, but when he looked up, he had written 50,000 words, a memoir he self-published in 2022 called Starving for Survival.
“I was able to realize that I was worth so much more than just what my diet plan was or my exercise plan was,” he tells me. That allowed him to disconnect his health routine from the idea that it was the one thing keeping him from meeting the same fate as his parents. “It was really scary at first, but every day that I do it, I feel like I gain a little bit more trust in myself and in my body,” he says.
OVER TIME, HE threw away the pulse oximeter. He threw away the scale in the house. Now, the only tracking device he has is a continuous glucose monitor for his diabetes. He gets his blood work done once a year and says he looks at the results only if the doctor points something out. The IV drips are gone. He still goes to the gym, but that’s to keep up his tennis game and to keep his muscles in good working order for when he goes rock climbing. He’s vegetarian for ethical reasons now, but eating doesn’t send him into a tailspin. His new habits, he says, “are total freedom, because now I don’t have to obsess about all this stuff. I’m not constantly thinking about it.”
Wood and his husband now live near Grand Rapids, Michigan. They made the move in 2023, a few months after Wood became the director of community engagement at the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders in Chicago. He started a men’s support group for guys struggling with the same stuff he did: worries about dying early and disordered relationships with food and their bodies. Wood is there to share his own story, reframe the questions, and remind these men that longevity is good, as long as it doesn’t consume you.
“TO ME, HEALTH has been redefined,” says Wood. “For so long, health was focused on food and fitness and body. And now I’ve realized that my social health, my mental health, my spiritual health—all of those different things are part of my overall well-being.”
This July, he and Matt took a trip to Washington, D.C., in advance of the city’s semiquincentennial celebrations. For dinner, they went to a Mediterranean restaurant. Hummus was on the menu. This time, Wood didn’t make any substitutions and ordered the pita bread. He didn’t feel guilty. He didn’t worry about it. He ate it all.
Marty Munson, currently the health director of Men's Health, has been a health editor at properties including Marie Claire, Prevention, Shape and RealAge. She's also certified as a swim and triathlon coach.