Laayla Moon
15-Sep-2026
For many of us, health only becomes a priority when something starts to go wrong. My own experience taught me not to wait for that moment.
By Laayla Moon, co-founder Human Upgrade Fest, women’s wellness practitioner
I faced health challenges in my 20s that forced me to pay closer attention to my body far earlier than I had expected. By my 30s, I actually felt healthier than I had in the decade before. That experience stayed with me because it challenged a deeply ingrained belief: that getting older must inevitably mean feeling worse.
My co-founder, Ruchi, had a similar wake-up call through her own experience around childbirth. Our journeys were different, but they brought us to the same conclusion. We should not have to wait for the body to break down before we start taking care of it.
That conversation becomes particularly important in our late 30s and 40s.
This is often the decade when the body begins asking for more attention. Hormones shift. Recovery can slow. Sleep changes. Muscle becomes increasingly important. Metabolic markers that once seemed stable can begin moving in the wrong direction.
But this is also where the opportunity lies.
What if we stopped looking at these changes as the beginning of decline and started seeing them as a prompt to intervene?
I often think of the body as the most valuable machine we will ever own. We expect it to carry us through 70, 80 or even 90 years of life, yet many of us only start paying serious attention to it when something goes wrong. We service our cars before they break down. We maintain our homes. We insure and protect the things we value.
Yet the body that carries us through every single day often gets our attention last.
If something is precious, we protect it before it is damaged.
That, to me, is the real shift behind the growing conversation around preventive health.
We are beginning to move away from waiting for disease and towards paying attention earlier. Changes in sleep, energy, body composition, blood sugar, cholesterol, hormones, nutrient levels and stress can all offer valuable information about what may be happening inside the body. Better diagnostics, wearables and access to health data are helping people become more informed and proactive.
But preventive health should not become another form of anxiety or obsession.
The fundamentals still matter most.
Strength training. Maintaining muscle. Eating well. Sleeping properly. Managing stress. Walking. Building meaningful relationships. Having a sense of purpose.
Technology, supplements and biohacking tools can support these foundations. They cannot replace them.
The reason the 40s can be such a powerful starting point is simple: health compounds.
Years of poor sleep, inactivity and chronic stress add up. But so do the right choices. Strength compounds. Better nutrition compounds. Good metabolic health compounds. The habits we build in this decade can shape how we feel and function in our 50s, 60s and beyond.
For me, preventive health is not about trying to live forever. It is about improving healthspan: having the energy, strength, mobility, mental clarity and independence to live well for as long as possible.
Ageing is real. The body will change. But change does not automatically have to mean decline.
Perhaps 40 should not be seen as the point at which youth starts slipping away. Perhaps it is the point at which we finally have the awareness, information and motivation to take our health seriously.
Not because something has gone wrong.
But because there is still so much we can do to get it right.
And that is why 40 is increasingly becoming less of a finish line, and far more of a start line.
That belief is also what led Ruchi and me to create the Human Upgrade Fest. We wanted to build a platform that gives people the information, conversations and, hopefully, the nudge to start thinking about their health before a diagnosis forces them to. The idea is not to tell people how to live, but to open up a wider conversation around prevention, health optimisation and the many ways we can take greater ownership of our wellbeing.
Cover Credits: Unsplash
