6 Habits to Support Your Brain Health

Your daily actions can add up

Tania Hannan

Updated September 12, 2025

A group of women running on grass by a body of water

Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

There’s nothing like waking up well-rested after a good night’s sleep. And who doesn’t love visiting with friends over a homemade meal or listening to music and moving to the beat?

These simple pleasures aren’t indulgences to save for vacation or a rainy day. They are habits that support good brain health if done regularly. AARP’s Global Council on Brain Health, a collaborative of scientists, health professionals, scholars and policy experts, reviewed decades of research on the ways our habits and choices may affect our cognitive and mental health. Their findings support the six pillars of brain health:

Eat right
Get restorative sleep
Exercise regularly
Be social
Manage stress
Engage your brain

The key is to make a habit of all six pillars. Many of them support each other: Regular exercise can help you sleep, for example, and socializing can ease the effects of stress. No one can promise that following the six pillars will prevent dementia, but we know that lifestyle can profoundly affect the aging process and the risk of chronic illness.

Let’s look at each pillar. As you’ll see, there’s a lot of room for choice — and fun.

1. Eat right. (Hint: You don’t have to choose between healthy and delicious.)

You hear a lot about eating for heart health. Well, as it turns out, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain. And the best news: This does not mean endless steamed broccoli and egg whites. The traditional, delicious Mediterranean diet — with a foundation of vegetables and fruit, beans, seafood, olive oil, nuts and whole grains — captured the interest of researchers in the 1960s because of the region’s low rates of chronic illness and high life expectancy.

Scientific support for the Mediterranean diet’s benefits continues to grow. A study that followed 60,298 people ages 40 to 69 for an average of nine years found that people who adhered most closely to a Mediterranean diet had a 23 percent lower risk of dementia compared with people whose eating habits least resembled a Mediterranean diet. The results were published in BMC Medicine in 2023.

There are other brain-healthy ways of eating, too, such as the traditional Okinawan diet from Japan — which emphasizes purple and orange sweet potatoes, plus other colorful vegetables — as well as offshoots of the Mediterranean diet, like the MIND diet. All of these diets emphasize plant foods, like vegetables, fruit, beans and grains and limit highly processed foods, fried foods, red meat and other foods high in saturated fat, sodium and sugar. In its report “Brain Food,” the GCBH further recommends including fish and seafood, nuts, poultry and low-fat dairy in your diet.

Staying Sharp offers meal plans and food prep videos to help you get started.

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**2. Get restorative sleep. (Hint: Quantity and quality matter.)**

The notion that we need less sleep as we get older is bunk. It’s true that some of the changes that accompany aging can make solid shut-eye elusive. But good-quality sleep, and enough of it, is still important as we age.

There’s research showing a link between poor sleep and dementia in older adults. In a study of 313,248 people age 50 and older published in BMC Medicine in 2025, those who had the worst quality sleep had a higher risk of dementia than those with the best quality sleep.

Your brain does important work while you sleep, flushing away toxins including a protein that is linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers hypothesize that chronic sleep loss may lead to a buildup of toxins that raises dementia risk.

Be sure you’re setting yourself up for a good night’s sleep, and talk with your doctor if you regularly have trouble sleeping or wake up feeling unrefreshed. A type of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) has been shown to help people with insomnia. And obstructive sleep apnea, which people often don’t realize they have, is treatable.

Try Staying Sharp’s challenge, Make Sleep Your Superpower, to learn how to get better sleep.

3. Exercise regularly. (Hint: Move more and sit less.)

Move your body! And keep it up. That, in a nutshell, is the takeaway from scads of studies linking physical activity to better brain health. If you’re intimidated by visions of spandex and barbells, keep in mind that there are endless ways to be active, from walking a few blocks to taking a Zumba class.

“Physical activity is an effective tool for promoting cognitive well-being,” and can make the brain “more efficient, flexible and adaptive,” wrote the authors of a systematic review of nine studies involving a total of 474 participants over age 60 published in Brain Sciences in 2025. The researchers found that even a single workout can help boost executive function in older adults, and that regular exercise over a period of two months or longer offers even greater brain benefits, such as improved memory. Recent research also points to the power of exercise to increase levels of a brain chemical called BDNF, nicknamed “Miracle Gro for the brain.”

Both formal exercise and everyday activities, like taking the stairs and gardening, can benefit brain health, according to the GCBH. To work on your aerobic fitness, pick activities you enjoy that get your heart rate up, whether it’s walking, swimming, biking, hiking or dancing around your living room. If you can work your way up to 150 minutes of aerobic exercise a week (that’s just 30 minutes a day for five days) and two weekly strength-training sessions, that’s ideal. But remember: Some exercise is better than none.

The brain health benefits of exercise go beyond thinking skills. Regular physical activity is linked to lower rates of depression and anxiety, according to a study published in 2024 in Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine that analyzed data from 526 people ages 65 to 96.

4. Be social. (Hint: We are wired to connect.)

Laughing with friends, gathering with family, chit-chatting with a stranger — these things may seem frivolous, but they’re profoundly important for our health. Too many Americans are lonely and isolated, according to a 2023 report from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. The health consequences can be as bad as a 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia for older adults — and a higher risk of premature death, similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

The good news is that social interaction tends to improve well-being, cognitive function and mood. A study of 312 U.S. adults ages 70 to 90 who had more frequent pleasant daily social interactions showed that they had better cognitive performance that day and two days following, as reported in 2021 in PLOS ONE.

Strengthening your social ties can start with simple acts, like calling an old friend or doing something kind for a neighbor. By taking small steps to strengthen our relationships and engage with others, and by supporting community efforts to rebuild social connection, we can rise to meet this moment together.

5. Manage stress. (Hint: It’s not what happens; it’s how we respond.)

Stress can be a good thing. It motivates us to climb mountains (metaphorical or literal) and try new things.

The body has an elaborate system to cope with occasional stress. For instance, cortisol — a hormone that’s part of our fight-or-flight reaction — increases in the blood during stressful times. When the stress eases, cortisol levels fall. But chronic stress is a different story. When cortisol stays elevated, it can damage the brain’s hippocampus, which governs learning and memory. Unrelenting stress can also trigger inflammation that can harm the brain. Among more than a million Swedish men and women ages 18 to 65, chronic stress increased the risk of both mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, according to a 2023 report in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy.

Frequent worry can contribute to chronic stress as much as bad things actually happening. The upshot: Make stress relief as integral to your routine as brushing your teeth. Other pillars of brain health, like regular exercise and socializing, are healthy ways to manage stress — as are practicing yoga or meditating.

Staying Sharp offers guided meditations here.

6. Engage your brain. (Hint: Keep on learning.)

You know that staying physically active benefits your health. Staying mentally active does, too. Engaging in activities that stimulate your brain may protect against cognitive decline, according to the GCBH. Learning and developing skills may also increase cognitive reserve — the brain’s ability to adapt and cope with challenges.

In two studies, 42 adults ages 58 to 86 learned at least three new skills simultaneously over three months — for example, a new language, music composition and drawing. Halfway through, the participants’ cognitive abilities had increased to levels similar to those of middle-aged adults, researchers reported in 2023 in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences. A year after the experiments were complete, participants’ executive function remained improved.

This doesn’t mean you have to enroll in a full schedule of classes. But staying mentally active — by playing a musical instrument, reading books or learning photography — may keep your brain in good shape. So follow your interests and stay engaged.