Aging doesn’t feel linear for most of us—and the biology may back that up. In this episode, Rachael revisits the “aging bursts” research (multi-omics signals that shift noticeably around the mid-40s and early-60s) and explains the useful takeaway: not “two magic ages,” but real transition zones where one system becomes the bottleneck and you suddenly feel older—sleep changes, recovery slows, stress tolerance drops, joints start “talking,” metabolism gets less forgiving.
Aging doesn’t feel linear for most of us—and the biology may back that up. In this episode, Rachael revisits the “aging bursts” research (multi-omics signals that shift noticeably around the mid-40s and early-60s) and explains the useful takeaway: not “two magic ages,” but real transition zones where one system becomes the bottleneck and you suddenly feel older—sleep changes, recovery slows, stress tolerance drops, joints start “talking,” metabolism gets less forgiving.
You’ll also hear an important update for women: when researchers align women by menopause timing (not just chronological age), menopause may explain many of the step-changes people interpret as “accelerated aging.” The practical play is simple: build reserve (strength, sleep, stress resilience) and rightsize your environment so daily life supports your Go-Strong years—before a setback forces crisis-mode decisions.
👉 Grab the free 3-minute Scorecard at www.rightsizeretirement.com to spot where your life is quietly taxing your energy, movement, and peace.
Chapters
00:00 Aging Isn’t Linear: What “Aging Bursts” Really Mean (and What They Don’t)
02:29 Why the “Aged Overnight” Feeling Happens: Step-Changes, Not a Smooth Slope
04:51 The Big Update: Chronological Age vs Midlife Systems Shifts
06:19 Aging as Bottlenecks: When One System Quietly Becomes Your Limiting Factor
08:55 Protect Your Floor in the Go-Strong Years: Build Reserve in Strength, Sleep, and Stress Capacity
09:49 Rightsize Before Crisis: How Your Home Environment Can Shrink—or Expand—Your Next Act
Hey, hey, welcome back to Next Act Ninjas, the go-to podcast for mastering your health and wealth longevity. I'm your host, Rachael Van Pelt. And today we're going to revisit and update a topic that stirred up a lot of curiosity when I first covered it 18 months ago. And it's this idea that aging isn't a smooth, gradual slope, but rather shows up as abrupt step-changes, almost like bursts of accelerated aging.
But before we go any further, I want to be really clear about what I mean by that. Because I think that the internet loves to turn a little bit of nuance in scientific data into panic. I'm not saying that there's this specific birthday where you wake up and suddenly become old. I'm not saying that your body is on some cruel schedule where the universe flips a switch and speeds things up. That makes for catchy headlines, but it is not how biology works, and it's not how real life works. What I am saying is that many people experience aging less like a slow-fade and more like a series of thresholds. You feel relatively steady for a while and then something shifts. Recovery changes, sleep changes, your tolerance for stress changes, your metabolism gets less forgiving, your joints start talking back. And it can feel sudden, even if the groundwork has been laid quietly for years.
That lived experience is what made the "aging bursts" research feel so validating to many of us. That study that initially brought this to light, what it did is it looked at a broad set of biological signals over time using what we call multiomics. And that just means that they took a snapshot of what's happening across many different layers of biology and they looked for patterns. What they found in those patterns, suggested that there are two age windows where a lot of biological signals seem to shift noticeably. One shift was around our mid-40s, another our early-60s. The shifts that happened in the mid-40s were related to things like lipid processing and pathways connected to cardiovascular disease risk how our body handles alcohol and caffeine. The shifts that occurred in the early 60s lean more towards immune function, kidney-related pathways, and glucose regulation.
But here's the update I want you to take with you today. The most useful version of this story is not that there are two magic ages where you suddenly age faster. The most useful version is that midlife and early adulthood are common transition zones where multiple systems can reorganize. And that reorganization feels abrupt. Importantly, if you're not protecting your floor and building reserve ahead of time. Those transitions can launch you out of your Go-Strong years and into the Go-Slower years much faster than you ever expected.
This is incredibly important in the context of rightsizing retirement because most retirement planning assumes life is linear, doesn't it? Most people plan the next few years of life as if their energy, mobility, resilience is just going to fade slowly and predictably. They imagine that they're going to notice the decline early and adjust calmly and gradually. But what actually happens in the real world is a big step-change that could be the result of any number of things. Maybe it's an injury that never fully resolved. A season of insomnia that erodes your energy. A lab result that triggers a whirlwind of procedures. Or an illness that takes much longer to recover from than expected. Could even be a season of caregiving that pushes your nervous system past its capacity. The truth is people rarely lose their Go-Strong years in one big dramatic moment. They lose them in one, small, sneaky setback at a time.
And this is where I want to remind you to take advantage of your Go-Strong years. Don't take them for granted. They are the last years where your body is still responding quickly to things like exercise training, where you can still build muscle and aerobic capacity efficiently. They're the years you can still create a physiologic reserve, one that's going to serve you as a buffer when life gets unpredictable. If you treat your Go-Strong years like an endless runway, you are more likely going to delay doing any of the hard work. But if you treat them like an asset that's going to expire, you're going to get more serious, aren't you? Boosting the basics like strength and sleep and stress regulation. And of course, creating an environment that's going to support rather than drain you.
But let's talk about a major update to the story that I think matters a lot, especially to women. The timing of "age bursts" originally seemed odd because they occurred right before and right after women go through menopause, which prompted some scientists to look at the data differently. They aligned women not by chronological age, but by when they went through menopause. And that new analysis revealed that menopause was the physiologic step-change that was affecting a variety of things like sleep and shifts in body composition, changes in lipid profile, changes in glucose regulation, and changes in stress, just to name a few. In other words, for women, the "bursts" may be less about turning a certain chronological age and more about moving through a specific biological transition that affects multiple systems all at once.
Now for men, there's not a clear hormonal transition like there is for women, but the principle still holds. Midlife is simply when the bill comes due. If you've been putting your body through decades of stress, inconsistent sleep, too much sitting, not enough exercise, poor nutrition, eventually things like blood pressure become a problem. Metabolic flexibility is gone. Recovery from anything just takes longer. The experience isn't linear or gradual. You just hit a threshold and suddenly feel older. You start thinking things like, "I used to bounce back fast, but now I don't. Why is that?"
As a result of these analyses, scientists have started to shift how they think about age "bursts". Instead of thinking about aging as just this one uniform global process, they're now thinking about it as an uneven process, something that happens across multiple systems. We now think of organs and systems as having their own biological age, which means your brain may not be aging at the same rate as your cardiovascular system. Your immune system may not be aging at the same rate as your metabolic system. Your joints and connective tissues may be your limiting factor, even if your lab panels look great.
And that matters because it explains why people can feel like they aged overnight, even when nothing big really happened. Sometimes what happened is that just one system became the bottleneck. And once a bottleneck emerges, you feel older,
don't you? Because everything runs through that one narrow point.
Maybe you've experienced this. I sure did in the past year. I felt like my joints aged overnight despite my metabolic and cardiovascular system being in as good a shape as ever. A bit of Achilles tendonitis became a major limiting factor for me. A bottleneck. In the past, I would have healed in a matter of weeks. This time it took months. And it led to a round robin of secondary hip and knee issues. In and of itself, a little tendonitis, no big deal, but when you look at how it impacted my exercise training for the better half of the year, it's easy to see just how fast slide can happen. And then if you stack on one more injury or illness, and a few months becomes a couple of "down years" and now my otherwise strong metabolic and cardiovascular systems are aging faster. No bueno!
The point is a burst in biomarker patterns can reflect real biology, or it can reflect major life transitions, or it can be the downstream effect of a smaller life event or change in lifestyle. Clearly our lifestyles don't stay constant across the lifespan. We could make any number of changes to our lifestyle that would age us prematurely. That might be a small shift in our diet, alcohol consumption, our sleep patterns, exercise training, our stress load, maybe caregiving responsibilities, medications, work demands, you name it.
Moreover, many of those small changes cluster together at certain ages, don't they? And in a way that can complicate the data. That doesn't invalidate the idea that biological aging can come in bursts. It just reminds us that lifestyle is a major driver of our biology. Bottom line is still the same. Transitions happen. Life happens. Your best defense is always going to be to build reserve and engineer your environment to support your lifestyle longevity.
Once you fully accept that aging often comes in bursts or step-changes, then you stop designing your Next Act as if you'll always have tomorrow's energy. You stop kicking the can down the curb and assuming that you're just going to "figure it out later". You start asking a different set of questions, don't you?
For example, you ask things like, is my home setting me up to preserve strength and mobility, or is it quietly taxing me every day? Does my environment support walking, strength training, social connectivity, good sleep, or does it just make those things more difficult? Am I being honest with myself, or just planning retirement around some fantasy version of my future self who has endless motivation and perfect joints?
This is why I want you to have a rightsizing mindset. It's proactive. It's not waiting for crisis. It's not waiting until a step-change forces an urgent move or lifestyle shift. choosing to align your home, your habits, and your calendar with your Go-Strong years while you still can. Because when you rightsize early, you get to make decisions from a position of strength rather than in crisis mode.
And that brings us back to the real reason I wanted to update this topic today. I don't talk about accelerated aging to make you anxious. I talk about it to make sure that you're being honest about what time and leverage you still have left. If you're in your Go-Strong years right now, even if you don't feel 100%, your job is to treat this as your window of opportunity. This is when strength training pays the highest dividends. This is when improving sleep can still reshape mood and energy. This is when shifting nutrition, even a little bit, can restore metabolic flexibility and slow cognitive decline. This is when you can build the kind of reserve that's going to make that next step-change far less disruptive.
Because the scary part isn't that your body changes. The scary part is how quickly a step-change can shrink your world if you haven't built any buffer. It isn't just a six to eight week recovery from a knee injury, it's the muscle atrophy and the loss of mobility that set you back for years. It's not just insomnia, it's the irritability and the loss of motivation that then leads to weight gain and social withdrawal. It's not just the scary lab result, it's the sudden realization that your future just shrunk and that you may never get to take that big trip that you were planning. These are small things that unexpectedly launch us into our Go-Slower or Go-Less years. It isn't age itself, it's the collapse of reserve plus the loss of confidence that comes along with it.
So here's the reframe I want to leave you with. If aging sometimes happens in bursts, your mission is not to react to every burst. Your mission is to proactively prepare for it simply by doing what we talk about here all the time. Build strength, protect sleep, stabilize your stress, and rightsize your environment so that your daily life supports the person you're becoming, not the person you used to be.
As always, I want you to start with simple questions that are going to reveal your friction points. Like asking, where is your daily life quietly costing you energy or movement or sleep or peace? Better yet, use my free 3-minute Scorecard just to quickly find those friction points. You'll find a link to that scorecard in the show notes. Because that friction is not just an annoyance. Over time, it's going to tax your Go-Strong years. And the goal of rightsizing your home and health is to reduce those taxes, increase your reserves. That's exactly how you're going to extend your Go-Strong years and delay sliding into the Go-Slower years. It is your secret to lifestyle longevity.
Alright Ninjas, that's it for today. Thank you for joining me on this Next Act journey. Until next time, live well, love more, age less my friends.