Your Brain in Your 50s

Your daily habits now can pay health dividends as you age

Tania Hannan

Updated January 29, 2025

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Think you’re “over the hill” in your 50s? Your brain would disagree. Research suggests that crystallized intelligence — the accumulation of facts, knowledge and skills — is typically very strong during middle age. And emotional intelligence — the ability to manage your own emotions and understand the emotions of others — can keep growing into your 60s and beyond.

As for memory, there are too many variables to make sweeping generalizations about cognition in middle age, says Mayo Clinic neurologist Philip Tipton, M.D. — but don’t let the occasional tip-of-the-tongue moment or misplaced wallet worry you. While you should talk with your doctor about cognitive changes you notice — at any age — there’s often a logical explanation for minor memory slips, he says. Middle age tends to be a busy time of life, with our mental plates stacked high with work and family responsibilities. “It’s not infrequent that I’ll walk out the door and leave my keys on the hook,” Tipton says. “But it’s not necessarily because I have a memory issue. It’s because I’m thinking about the half dozen other things … and my mind’s not attending to that detail.”

Being intentional about your attention can go a long way. “If you’re learning my name, you need to focus on it before you move on to something else in the conversation,” says clinical psychologist Cynthia Green, president and founder of Total Brain Health in Montclair, N.J. “If you don’t, you won’t acquire the information. It’s not that you forgot it. You never got it to begin with.”

Here's one sweeping generalization that’s true for your 50s: your daily habits matter. Your sixth decade is an excellent time to shift your lifestyle in ways that can up your chances of aging with good brain health. “In midlife you want to decrease some of the risk factors associated with late-life dementia,” says Jennifer Rose Molano, M.D., neurologist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

When preparing to make changes, set yourself up for success by getting family and friends on board and creating sustainable goals. “Support is so important,” Tipton says, adding that he recommends giving yourself an overarching goal, along with milestones to help you get there. Keep that advice in mind when working on the following research-backed steps:

Work up a sweat 

The importance of exercise for brain health “really can’t be overstated,” Tipton says. And not just any exercise: moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise —any activity that gets you “hot, sweaty and tired,” he adds. He points to extraordinary results from a long-term, ongoing study of 372 adults with a genetic mutation that “virtually guarantees they’ll get Alzheimer’s.” Compared with participants who exercised very little, those who reported doing regular aerobic exercise for at least 150 minutes per week developed dementia symptoms more than 15 years later, according to a 2018 report in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

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Research on the general population supports the exercise–brain health link, too; higher respiratory fitness at midlife was linked to a lower risk of dementia for more than 9,000 healthy adults, as reported in 2023 in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

Exercise increases levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein considered fertilizer for the brain for its ability to promote brain plasticity. “Brain plasticity is what allows us to learn,” says Tipton. “When the brain is trying to fight some kind of insult, like a neurodegenerative disease, having the ‘fertilizer’ for the brain to be plastic [helps it] figure out workarounds.”

Eat for brain health

Both the Mediterranean diet (which emphasizes vegetables and fruit, seafood, legumes and whole grains, and olive oil) and the MIND diet (which combines the Mediterranean and DASH diets and highlights berries and leafy greens) are associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Besides focusing on the “good stuff,” minimize sweets, red meat and highly processed foods like packaged snack and chips.

If you’re aiming to make major diet changes, ease into them by, say, adding more vegetables to your meals, rather than trying to overhaul everything at once. And stay flexible. Being too rigid and counting calories and macronutrients is often not sustainable. “You don’t want your diet to become a separate job,” Tipton says.

Prioritize good sleep

Nearly 6 out 10 adults ages 50 to 64 do not consistently get 7-9 hours of sleep per night, according to a 2023 poll by the National Sleep Foundation. So not surprisingly, almost 1 in 2 adults ages 50 to 64 are dissatisfied with their overall sleep experience.

That’s a problem, as good sleep is essential for brain health and overall health. An association between sleep problems and dementia is well established, and a large study published in 2023 in Nature suggests that poor sleep in middle age can harm the brain. More than 40,000 adults underwent brain MRIs, and those who reported regularly sleeping fewer than six hours were more likely to have brain markers that are known to precede stroke and dementia. Along with insomnia (trouble falling or staying asleep), sleep apnea is a common cause of disrupted sleep — one that people often aren’t aware they have. With sleep apnea, breathing stops and restarts repeatedly, reducing blood flow to the brain. “When I see patients, I always, always ask them if they snore,” Tipton says. If they say yes, he recommends testing for sleep apnea.

In exploring the link between sleep and brain health, researchers have homed in on the brain’s “glymphatic system”— aka its cleanup crew — which acts as a “highway for the brain to clear out garbage and other toxic substances” during stage 3 of normal sleep, he says. “The major hypothesis now is that people who have poor sleep cycles — decreased stage 3 sleep throughout life — may be at greater risk of accumulating these toxic substances … and more likely to develop neurodegenerative diseases down the road.”

The good news? Sleep apnea, insomnia and other sleep disorders are treatable. See your doctor for an evaluation if you don’t sleep well, and check out Make Sleep Your Superpower for information on daily habits that encourage good sleep.

Watch your blood pressure (and other heart-disease risk factors)

High blood pressure can damage blood vessels and reduce blood flow to many parts of the body, including the heart and brain. Having high blood pressure at midlife increases your risk for cognitive decline, according to the National Institutes of Health. It’s important to get blood pressure into a healthy range (120/80 mmHg or lower) with healthy lifestyle measures or, if necessary, medication, Tipton says. Smoking, high cholesterol levels, and diabetes can also harm brain health.

In Tipton’s experience, in patients in their 60s with these risk factors, “if we get an MRI of their brain, most likely we're going to see changes that we can attribute to what we call small vessel disease,” which can lead to dementia and stroke.

Use your 50s to address heart-disease risks with habit changes, medical treatment if necessary, and support from friends and family.

Challenge your brain

Mentally stimulating activities can help you maintain your memory, thinking, attention and reasoning skills as you age, according to a 2017 report from AARP’s Global Council on Brain Health. The report recommends doing activities you enjoy while remembering that it’s “the activity itself — and not how well you may perform it —that should be the main goal.”

Consider learning a language, playing an instrument or having a weekly game night with friends. Give yourself bonus points for activities that combine physical and mental exercise, like ballroom dancing, tennis or something even simpler: “Go for a walk with friends and talk about a book,” Green suggests.

Get serious about downtime

Your body knows how to deal with occasional stress, but unrelenting stress? Not so much. Chronic stress has a cascade of health effects and is associated with structural changes in the brain, including shrinkage of the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. That means regularly relaxing is every bit as important as eating well and exercising. Physical exercise, in fact, can be a great stress reducer, as can activities like yoga or meditation, spending time in nature, or starting a joy journal. And don’t go it alone. Positive relationships — having people to laugh with and lean on — are among the best stress reducers of all.