Performance Longevity

I’ve been taking Benadryl every night for ~3 years now. It’s the only thing that knocks me out. Is it bad?”

This question appeared in my inbox recently, and variations of it come up often. The person mentioned some lingering grogginess in the morning, but otherwise assumed everything was fine.

If some version of that lives in your head, you are not the only one.

Millions of adults use over-the-counter antihistamines as a nightly sleep aid.

The reasoning makes sense: it’s available without a prescription, it’s affordable, and it does produce sleepiness.

On the surface, it looks like a small trade: a familiar allergy ingredient, a predictable sedative effect, and side effects that look like “a little groggy” or “weird dreams.”

This article is about what sits underneath that trade:

The underappreciated risks that go beyond next-day drowsiness.

Why long-term use matters for brain health and dementia risk.

How these drugs disrupt your sleep architecture—even when they help you stay asleep

How to think about your next step in a way that matches the complexity of your midlife physiology, instead of just asking, “What else can I take?”

Let’s get started.

Restful Sleep and Biological Aging: Why It Matters “The first question I ask every client about their sleep isn’t ‘How many hours?’—it’s whether they wake up feeling restored.” The most under-emphasized sleep metric isn’t a sleep score, REM %, or hours in deep sleep. It’s this: restful sleep. Because many of the most meaningful downstream

What are telomeres, and how are they associated with aging and disease? Telomeres are protective DNA “caps” at the ends of your chromosomes. Their job is to help preserve the integrity of genetic material during cell division, when DNA has to be copied again and again. With each replication cycle, telomeres shorten a little. When

Do 3am wakeups age you? Low-quality sleep = “older than expected” DNA methylation ages in midlife and beyond. Most conversations about sleep and aging focus on how we feel. Epigenetic clocks measure something different: how fast our cells are aging. The data from these clocks now reframe sleep from a quality-of-life issue to a longevity

Melatonin not working for your sleep? Learn how timing, dose, meals, meds, and age interact—and apply 5 safe adjustments to support deeper, steadier rest. How to Personalize Your Melatonin Approach The same 9 p.m. melatonin dose might align with one person’s biological night while falling outside the optimal biological window for another. Both constraints are

Does deep sleep clear Alzheimer’s proteins or does quality matter more than minutes? Each night, a remarkable waste clearance process takes place within the brain. This is the glymphatic system, a recently discovered network that uses cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to flush out neurotoxic proteins—specifically amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau, the hallmark proteins linked to Alzheimer’s and

Recently, a CEO client said: “I’ve optimized everything—nutrition, training, biomarkers. But every night I wake up to pee and can’t get back to sleep. I’ve tried everything. This one thing I can’t solve is driving me crazy.” Melatonin, valerian, prescription aids, zero liquids after 7. Nothing worked. Here’s what I told him: It’s not just

Does Short Sleep Impair Blood Sugar Control (Even with a Healthy Diet?) We’ve all felt it — the day after a short or restless sleep when sugary treats feel more tempting and energy dips too soon. That response isn’t just from fatigue. Instead, it reflects changes in blood sugar regulation. According to the Heart Disease