12 Age-Reversing Habits: How I Made My Brain 10 Years Younger

Ever since I was a child, I was consumed by anxiety and tormented by my mind. As I got older, my anxiety got worse, and so did my urge to escape it.
I began using drugs when I was 14 years old, and by the time I was 20, I was a heroin addict. I spent the next 15 years destroying my body and mind. But I was lucky. Pummelled into submission by the most painful night of my life, I was forced to look at the world from a completely new perspective.
Life gave me a second chance, and I devoured every second of it. Some might say that I switched addictions. But I like to call it intense curiosity, as I was bitten by the bug of life.
That was in October 2013, and since then, I’ve become a PhD student, an author, a life change strategist, and a lecturer at the top two universities in Ireland, all in the area of the neuroscience.
My newfound curiosity also introduced me to the world of personal growth, where I designed a programme to help me to navigate my new life. The habits from this programme have not only helped me to achieve outward success; they’ve changed my physical, emotional, and mental health too.
As luck had it, I was part of a brain imaging study while I was in detox. Using scans from my addicted brain, we compared them to scans of my brain 5 years later and the differences were incredible.
With new innovative measurement tools, I’ve also been able to explore the predictive age of my brain. Astonishingly, not only did I reverse the age of my brain, it is now nearly 10 years younger than that of a normal man my age.
Below I describe how our brains can change, and then I discuss the 12 age-reversing habits that made mine 10 years younger.
How Our Brains Can Change
The Plastic Brain
Our brains are malleable, like playdough, and our experiences determine their shape. This process is best compared to physical exercise. For example, thirty reps lifting weights won’t make your muscles bigger, but thirty reps every day for a year will. The same is true for your brain, and over time, its shape will change.
I was a compulsive worrier before I found recovery. I always felt tense, uneasy, and anxious. If my mind wasn’t scanning the world for potential threats, it was looking for ways to relieve my unrelenting anxiety. Over time, I literally transformed my brain into a finely tuned anxiety machine.
It’s the same for any negative feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Whatever you rest your mind upon, be it anger, self-doubt, or fear, your brain will eventually take that shape.
Thankfully, you can shape your brain in a much more positive direction. For example, by harnessing the power of neuroplasticity via regular mindfulness practice, you can become more resilient, develop sharper focus, and manage your emotions more effectively.
The brain images below are scans of my own brain. The one on the left was conducted as part of a study in 2013 — when I was only two days clean after 15 years of addiction. The one on the right was taken in May 2018, as part of a TV documentary about stress.
As an external comparison, the picture middle-right shows me deep in addiction in 2011, and the picture far right was taken in February 2020, nearly 10 years later.
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Source: Unprocessed scans of my brain taken in 2013 and 2018. These scans contain the slice showing the anterior commissure, the standard anatomical structure used to compare brain scans. It was difficult to make exact slice comparisons as the images were scanned on different MRI machines using a different resolution.
Brain-age
Our lab at Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience has worked on a way to predict brain age. We calculate brain-predicted age (brainPAD scores) by analysing the grey matter density of the brain. This is associated with increased mortality risk, cognitive decline, increased risk of dementia, and poorer physical function.
In 2013, my predicted brain-age was 2.84 years ‘younger’ than my chronological age. This was surprising after 15 years of drug addiction. In 2018, however, my brain was just under 10 years ‘younger’ than my chronological age.
In the 5 years between scans, this means I reduced the age of my brain by more than 6 years. It’s difficult to visually identify differences in grey-matter density, but if you look closely, you can see specific differences in the purple circles below. The scans on the right also look brighter all round.
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Source: Grey matter scans of my brain taken in 2013 and 2018. Although subtle, there is greater grey matter density in the scan from 2018. Unlike the comparison scans above, these scans have been processed using a normalization technique which is required for the analysis.
12 Age-Reversing Habits That Changed My Brain
Many of the habits below are scientifically associated with changes in the brain. These include meditation, reduced stress, sleep, and nutrition.
Many others cannot be directly related to brain changes, but as neuroplasticity demonstrates, all types of learning results in changes in the brain.
1. Observe Without Engaging
‘Self’ means your self-concept, your story — who you think you are. If you are suffering in some way, like I was with anxiety, disconnecting from ‘self’ will give you the freedom to experience a greater sense of well-being.
Self-observation, which is a form of meditation, helps you to do just that. It involves mindfully observing your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.
For example, if I asked you to observe how tense your body feels, you might take a step back and focus on a specific area, such as a lump in your throat or a tight chest. If I asked you about your anxious thoughts and feelings, you could observe this too. You might be worrying about money, why your chest feels so tight, or why everyone except you seems to be able to cope.
The point is, you can take an observer’s perspective of anxious thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. When you implement this practice, however, you must do so without engaging.
The clouds metaphor explains this best. Imagine your thoughts, feelings, or bodily sensations as clouds floating through the sky. Sometimes they’re dark and angry. Sometimes they’re light and calm. But ‘you’ are not the clouds. You are the blue sky who observes the clouds, without engaging. You simply observe them until they pass.
Self-observation not only improves self-awareness — it provides you with a sense of detachment in challenging situations. Instead of being controlled by your thoughts and feelings, an ability to observe them will arise instead.
Although brain research in this area is only just emerging, some promising studies have targeted an area known as the default mode network (DMN), also known as the ‘wandering mind.’
The DMN is active when our minds are directionless, aimlessly drifting from thought to thought. This has been linked to rumination and overthinking, which can have a detrimental impact on our personal well-being.
Mindful self-observation has been found to decrease activation of the DMN, which in effect, quietens our busy minds. In one study, regions of the DMN showed reduced activation in meditators compared to non-meditators, which has been interpreted as a diminished reference to self.
I have a wonderful relationship with anxiety today. I still get anxious in challenging situations — it’s natural after all — but with the help of self-observation, I watch it pass by, without engaging.
2. Seek Questions, Not Answers
We all feel stuck from time to time. But instead of looking for answers, I’ve found that questions are better for unraveling the complexities of life.
Here are 7 questions that I ask myself regularly:
What Part of This Situation is Under My Control? This is a powerful question because very little is under our control. Many people see this as a problem, but if you focus on what you can control, you’ll realise that this is not a weakness — it’s a strength.
What Are You Constantly Avoiding? It’s easier to put these things on the long finger, but they always come back to bite you in the ass. More times than not, you know what to do, but you constantly avoid it, despite the evidence.
What Would My Mentors Think About This? This question allows you to take the perspective of others. And better still, the perspective of someone you greatly admire. Sidenote: You don’t have to personally know your mentor. Many of mine are dead hundreds of years, and most of them come from books.
What Would Tomorrow-Me Think? Everything happens in a context, and our decisions are often reflected by that context. That’s why this question is so valuable. Just like taking the perspective of a mentor, you can take the perspective of your future self, or your former self, whatever serves you best.
If I Am Saying Yes to This, What Am I Saying No To? Steve Jobs once said that it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on what’s important in life. I love this line because it helped me to realise the potency of this question. Be it our relationships our career, or our health, we need to reflect on what we hold most dear. Then, when we say yes to one thing, we know we’re not saying no to something that’s more important.
Does This Align With My Values? People often make decisions that do not align with their values. There are many reasons for this, but most often it’s because they don’t ask themselves this simple question. Next time you’re doing something and it doesn’t feel quite right, ask yourself how it’s serving what you value most in life.
What’s the Worst That’ll Happen if I Attempt This? Sometimes the worst thing that can happen isn’t as bad as you think. And if it is that bad, you can put contingencies in place by reflecting on this question.
These questions probably didn’t change my brain, but any time I feel stuck, they help me to sort out my life.
3. Eliminate (Or Reduce) Emotional Hi-jackings
Have you ever felt completely shaken and overcome by fear? I have. I was easily overwhelmed before and during my addiction — it was my default. Daniel Goleman calls this an emotional hijacking, where your amygdala — the fear centre of your brain — screams like a siren.
In today’s world, more often than not, the stress response, or the fight and flight response, is not activated by the external environment — it is activated by our own minds.
This comes in two flavours: ruminating about a past you cannot change, and worrying about an imaginary future. These internal stressors are the worst kind of triggers. External stressors come and go, but fighting with your own mind is constant.
What’s interesting about these internal stressors is that they don’t exist — not in reality anyway. They are projections of our minds, and some of them are entirely irrational.
My own anxiety, which resulted from childhood trauma, centred on bodily sensations. Ever since I can remember, I was terrified of my heartbeat, breath, and pulse. If someone asked me to feel my own heartbeat, or if I even talked about it, my amygdala lit up like a Christmas tree.
This emotional hi-jacking would then activate my hypothalamus — the relay station of the brain — which then sent a signal to my pituitary glands. These, in turn, sent a message to my adrenal glands, releasing cortisol throughout my bloodstream.
Cortisol is the primary stress hormone, which prepares your body for fight or flight. But you can’t run away from or fight your mind. So wha