What Does Longevity Mean to Me?

When people hear the word longevity, they often think about living longer. I understand why. A lot of the conversation tends to focus on life expectancy, supplements, exercise, and all the things we should be doing to add more years to our lives.

But when I think about longevity, I find myself thinking about something much simpler: sustainability.

I think about having the energy and capacity to do the things that matter most to me, such as caring for my patients, spending time with the people I love, and contributing in ways that feel meaningful. Without spending years pushing through at the expense of my own wellbeing.

It wasn’t always how I thought about it.

The Culture I Was Trained In

Like many doctors, I trained in an environment where functioning at a high level was expected. When I was in the NHS, you had your roster and that was it. No negotiation, no flexibility, no real conversation about balance. You worked the hours you were given because that was what everyone else was doing.

Everybody was tired and working at a hundred miles an hour. And when you are surrounded by people operating at that pace, it becomes very easy to mistake endurance for wellbeing. For a while, I genuinely thought that was what being well looked like.

About four years ago, I started challenging that assumption. I was a partner in a clinic and we were coming out of lockdown; by then, the goalposts seemed to be changing constantly and many of us were carrying concerns about our own health and family overseas. At the same time, I was still working, exercising and doing my training sessions. But underneath that, I could feel the strain. I was functioning, but I wasn’t always well.

That was when I started asking myself: is this sustainable? Not for the next month, but for the next twenty years of my career?

The answer came quickly. No.

From that point, I became much less interested in how people can keep pushing, and much more interested in how we protect the foundations that allow us to stay well over time.

The Foundations I Keep Coming Back To

Sleep is one of them. I am not a perfect sleeper and I don’t pretend to be. My family lives overseas, so sometimes I am on the phone with them late at night just to match their timezone. But I now recognise sleep as something worth protecting, because I know how much it affects everything else.

Movement is another. I am lucky enough to have a home gym, because I know that if I had to drive somewhere, there would be weeks when life simply got in the way. Some weeks I am properly training with YouTube in the background: a podcast, a makeup video, something completely unrelated to medicine. Other weeks I am walking into work through East Melbourne, listening to Trevor Noah, laughing to myself as I head down the street. I am sure I look slightly ridiculous, but I find that laughter is truly one of the best medicines.

Then there is stress recovery. I used to finish a conference and be back at work the next day. These days, when everyone else rushes to the airport, I stay the extra night. I give myself time to let things settle. When I skip that, I really do feel it. Recovery is no longer something that happens after the important work is done. For me, it is part of the important work.

What Life Has Taught Me

Some of the most important things I have learned about wellbeing have not come from medicine. They have come from life.

I moved from Nigeria to the UK as a teenager, and then from the UK to Australia as an adult. Both moves were exciting, but also demanding in ways that were not always obvious: building community from scratch, learning unfamiliar systems, finding your footing. During that time, my husband and I kept asking ourselves: what do we need to keep ourselves going in an unfamiliar place?

What those years taught me is that wellbeing is not just about prioritising yourself. Life can be genuinely demanding. The question is whether you have built enough support around yourself to navigate those periods when they arrive.

One lesson that has taken me the longest to learn is stopping long enough to ask some honest questions when things start feeling heavier than they should. I even interview myself sometimes: what is going on here? Am I carrying too much?

Marketing is a good example. I tried doing it myself for a few months before accepting I could not do everything well alone. Finding people to help was not a failure. It is also something I bring into every consultation, because one of the questions I ask women regularly is: who is helping you? People are far more willing to help than we imagine, if we are willing to ask. We are built for community, and a life that can withstand pressure is almost always one that includes support.

What I See Every Day

Many of the women who come to see me are highly capable. They are leading teams, running businesses, raising children, supporting everyone around them, often while navigating significant health challenges of their own. From the outside, they appear to be coping extraordinarily well.

And then they sit down in my consultation room, and what often appears is a picture of someone who has been running on empty for much longer than they realised. I see it in women with ADHD, in women living with PMDD, in women navigating perimenopause and menopause. Women who are incredibly resilient, but who have become so accustomed to pushing through that they no longer recognise how depleted they have become.

What they need is rarely another impossible standard to chase. When someone tells me their friends and family do all these things and they feel like they should too, I do not add to that pressure. I just ask: what can you do? We start there, and we build from that.

A More Sustainable Approach to Longevity

Nowadays, when I think about longevity, I think less about how many years we live and more about how we live those years. Whether we feel connected, supported, energised and well enough to participate fully in our own lives rather than simply getting through them.

I think about sleep, movement, nourishment, recovery, relationships, nervous system steadiness. And I think about coming back to those things again and again, whenever life pulls me away from them.

Most of all, I think about helping women live well over time.

Not perfectly. Just well.

Because wellbeing is not built through extraordinary efforts. It is built through the things we return to again and again. And in my experience, those foundations are what make longevity possible.