Longevity advice has become increasingly complicated.
There are supplements to take, training protocols to follow, foods to avoid and new research appearing almost every week. The volume of information can make living well for longer feel like something that needs to be carefully engineered.
| Who is Dr. Niko Mihic?
Dr. Niko Mihic is Chief Medical Officer at Axo Longevity and has worked in elite sports medicine, including as medical supervisor at Real Madrid. His work brings together preventive health, performance and long-term wellbeing, with a focus on using health data alongside everyday lifestyle habits to help people understand how their health is changing over time.
When he speaks to patients about longevity, he comes back to nine principles. They cover the obvious foundations such as sleep and exercise, but they also make room for relationships, learning, stress and the way you experience everyday life.
That wider view matters because health does not develop in isolation. The way you sleep affects how you recover. The way you move influences how well you maintain physical capacity with age. Your relationships and daily environment can shape how engaged, supported and resilient you feel.
Here are Dr. Niko Mihic’s nine principles of longevity and what each one can look like in practice.
Dr. Niko starts with the most straightforward principle: do not smoke.
There is a reason it comes first. Smoking affects almost every major organ in the body and remains one of the biggest avoidable risks to long-term health.
It increases the risk of:
It can also affect circulation and the body’s ability to recover.
For someone thinking about longevity, this matters because the biggest gains do not always come from adding something new. Sometimes they come from removing a behaviour that is consistently working against your health.
That is why Dr. Niko puts smoking ahead of supplements, optimisation strategies or more advanced interventions. If smoking is part of your routine, addressing it can have a much greater impact than trying to compensate for it elsewhere.
For people who already smoke, quitting can be difficult and often takes more than willpower alone. Support can include:
These can make the process more manageable and improve the chances of stopping successfully.
What to take from this: if you smoke, make quitting one of your highest health priorities. If you do not, keeping it that way remains one of the simplest things you can do for your long-term health.
This principle goes beyond food. It is about paying attention to everything the body has to process regularly, including:
What matters most is the pattern that builds over time. One meal will not define your health, and one night out will not decide your future, but repeated habits can influence:
Calorie intake is part of that picture too.
Your energy needs change with age, activity level and body composition, so consistently eating far more or less than your body needs can have consequences over time.
Medication also deserves context. Prescribed treatment can be essential, but it still helps to understand:
The same applies to supplements, especially when several are taken together.
The useful question is what has become routine. Once you understand what you are consistently putting into your body, it becomes easier to see where a change may be worthwhile.
What to take from this: look at your usual week rather than one “good” or “bad” day. The habits you repeat most often are the ones most likely to shape your health over time.
Sleep is one of the easiest parts of health to let slide when life gets busy.
Work runs late, screens stay close, and the mind can remain switched on long after the day is supposed to be over.
That matters because sleep affects far more than how tired you feel the next morning. It plays a role in:
A few short nights may leave you feeling flat. When poor sleep becomes your normal routine, the effects can start to show up elsewhere:
Improving sleep often starts with the basics:
What to take from this: do not judge your sleep only by how many hours you spend in bed. Pay attention to whether you are waking up feeling restored and whether your current routine gives your body enough time to recover properly.
Exercise is one of the strongest foundations of long-term health, and maintaining muscle becomes increasingly important with age.
Muscle supports:
But it also plays a major role in metabolism. Skeletal muscle helps the body use glucose, respond to insulin and cope with the physical demands of everyday life.
That becomes more important over time. Simple things such as:
all depend partly on the strength and physical capacity you have maintained.
This is where resistance training becomes especially valuable. It helps preserve muscle and strength, while aerobic exercise supports cardiovascular fitness and endurance.
The exact routine can vary, but both forms of movement have a place in a longevity-focused approach.
The goal is to keep giving your body a reason to adapt as you get older.
What to take from this: build a routine you can sustain and make strength a regular part of it. The muscle you maintain now helps support how capable you remain later.
Social relationships are part of the health picture too.
The people around you can influence:
Strong relationships can provide a sense of belonging and give you people to lean on when life becomes more difficult.
They also affect everyday behaviour in more subtle ways. The people you spend time with can shape how active you are, how often you leave the house, how regularly you eat with others and whether you have routines that keep you engaged.
Over time, friendships can drift and social contact can become less frequent without you really noticing. Work gets busier, routines become more fixed, and seeing people starts to require more effort.
That is why it is worth paying attention to the relationships that leave you feeling better after spending time together.
You can ask yourself:
What to take from this: social connection deserves the same kind of attention as other parts of your health. Make time for the people who help you feel connected, supported and engaged with life.
Keeping the brain engaged is part of the picture as well.
A new project gives you something unfamiliar to work through, which can mean learning new information, solving different problems and using skills that do not usually come up in your everyday routine.
That could be:
The exact activity matters less than the fact that it asks something new of you.
As routines become more settled, it is easy for large parts of life to become repetitive. Work follows the same patterns, weekends become familiar and even hobbies can start to feel automatic.
Choosing something you are not already good at changes that.
It gives you a reason to concentrate, make mistakes, improve and stay curious.
What to take from this: keep giving yourself something new to learn. A project outside your normal routine can help keep life mentally engaging and give your attention somewhere fresh to go.
Thinking about the future is unavoidable when you are thinking about longevity.
You make choices now because you care about how you will feel later. You exercise to protect your health, plan ahead financially and try to reduce risks before they become bigger problems.
The difficulty comes when thinking ahead turns into constantly living in anticipation of what might happen next.
That can look like:
Bringing your attention back to the present can make things feel more manageable because it gives you something concrete to act on.
That might mean:
You can still plan for the future without spending all of your mental energy there.
What to take from this: focus on what you can influence today. Small actions in the present often do more for your long-term health than repeatedly worrying about what may happen later.
Art may be one of the more unexpected principles on the list, but it speaks to something that often gets left out of conversations about health.
Your environment affects how you feel. Music, visual art, nature, architecture and creative work can all give your attention somewhere different to go and create moments that feel genuinely enjoyable.
That could mean:
There is value in having parts of your life that do not need to improve a metric or produce an outcome.
A lot of health advice focuses on what you should control or reduce. Making space for art adds something different: experiences that keep life interesting, emotionally engaging and worth paying attention to.
What to take from this: make room for things you find beautiful or meaningful. They may seem separate from health, but they still shape the quality of the life you are trying to extend.
The final principle brings the focus back to your health data and the value of regular medical care.
Some changes in the body develop quietly. You may feel completely well while blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar or other health measures begin to shift in the background.
That is where regular check-ups and appropriate testing can help.
They can give you a clearer view of:
It also helps to understand your own results rather than treating every appointment as a separate event.
Knowing your health history gives you more context. A single result can be useful, but trends often tell you more about whether something is improving, staying stable or gradually moving in the wrong direction.
That is why keeping track of your results and asking questions when something changes can make medical conversations more useful.
What to take from this: stay engaged with your health, keep up with appropriate check-ups and know what your results are showing over time.
The value of these principles is in how practical they are.
You can look at them against your own routine and quickly see where things may have slipped. Maybe sleep is the weak point. Maybe exercise has become inconsistent. Maybe you are doing well physically but have not made enough space for relationships, curiosity or recovery.
The next step is to connect those everyday habits with what is happening inside your body.
At Axo Longevity, we measure 100+ lab tests across 36+ areas of health to give you a clearer view of how your body is performing over time.
Your results are brought together in one place, with:
The aim is to make longevity more actionable, so you can see where to focus and make decisions based on your own health data.
