‘Longevity fixation syndrome’: the allure of eternal youth

The quest for immortality may seem the preserve of Greek myth or science fiction – or even the fantasies of the Silicon Valley super-rich – but it is actually taking over the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.

Longevity Fixation Syndrome has been identified by health professionals as a new mental-health disorder, driven by an obsession with extending your biological clock and staving off not only the signs of age, but even death itself.

‘Obsessive self-surveillance’

Someone with LFS may “obsessively monitor their body, stick to unattainable routines, and engage in behaviours fuelled by fear”, said The Mirror. These “extreme” practices may include constant monitoring of sleep patterns, bowel movements and blood-sugar levels, embracing “controversial therapies”, and following intense exercise routines, strict diets and “supplement protocols”.

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One of the most popular anti-ageing therapies is plasma exchange, a process that involves being hooked up to a machine which removes your blood, separates out and removes the plasma and then replaces it with donor plasma. This is a “well-established treatment for certain blood disorders, autoimmune diseases and neurological conditions”, but its anti-ageing benefits have never been proven in large clinical trials, said The New York Times.

“What starts as self‑care becomes obsessive self‑surveillance,” Jan Gerber, CEO of Zurich-based mental-health clinic Paracelsus Recovery, told The Mirror. We’re starting to see “a growing number” of very stressed and anxious people “whose lives are dominated by the fear of ageing and decline”.

While LFS has yet to appear in official diagnostic manuals, Gerber compares it to orthorexia, an eating disorder characterised by an obsession with healthy food. And, like many other addictions, it can affect your career and personal relationships, and lead to loneliness and isolation. Ironically, “the stress generated by this mindset can be so intense that it actively shortens lifespan, rather than extending it”.

Struggle to ‘accept mortality’

Anxiety about longevity does have some basis in fact: the past century’s steady increase in life expectancy is slowing, according to a mortality forecasting study published in PNAS last year. The average person is living longer than they were many decades ago, thanks mainly to huge improvements in child health but, for the moment at least, we seem not to be able to push longevity much further: it would be “optimistic” to expect 15% of women and 5% of men in most countries to live beyond 100 this century, according to a 2024 study published in Nature Aging.

Global Google searches for “longevity” tripled over the course of 2025, and entrepreneurs have been quick to spot the potential new market. At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, longevity tech was “the hype vertical du jour”, said the Financial Times. Standout items included a $899 (£660) “longevity mirror” that tells how well you are ageing, and a $600 (£440) “longevity station” that measures your body composition and assesses your health across more than 60 biomarkers.

The most public face of the new crusade against ageing is Bryan Johnson, a 48-year-old American venture capitalist who has claimed he will “achieve immortality” within the next 15 years. Johnson has said he wants his “Don’t Die” movement to be “the most influential ideology in the world by 2027”.

This obsession with longevity “reveals a self-centred society” in which people struggle to “accept mortality”, said the FT. It also, “let’s face it”, a new “buzzword” for shifting products. We’d probably do well to face the fact “that when we die is not something we can control”, and “realise that life is too important to waste it trying to live forever”.