You walk into the kitchen and forget why. A word sits on the tip of your tongue for a full minute. You reread the same paragraph three times because your mind keeps drifting to your phone. None of this means something is wrong with you. It does mean your brain is responding to how you sleep, move, eat, worry and scroll, and that’s good news, because those are things you can change.
You’re also not alone in caring about this. In the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2026 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures report, released in April 2026, a companion survey found that 99% of American adults rate brain health as at least as important as physical health. Most of those same people said they didn’t know how to protect it. That gap is what this article is for.
A quick note on what “brain function” means here. Some of the research below looks at day-to-day skills like attention and memory. Some looks at long-term outcomes like cognitive decline and dementia. The habits overlap more than you’d think. What keeps your focus sharp this week tends to be what keeps your brain healthy for decades.
Below are 14 ways to look after your brain, each backed by named research, plus what to do when you fall off the wagon.
1. Move your body, at whatever intensity you can manage
If you only change one thing, make it this one. It also happens to have the biggest pile of evidence behind it.
In March 2025, Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia published the largest review of its kind in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. They pooled 133 systematic reviews covering 2,724 randomised controlled trials and 258,279 participants. In the 2025 umbrella review of exercise and cognition, exercise improved general cognition, memory and executive function (the planning-and-self-control system), with effect sizes of 0.42, 0.26 and 0.24. Those are small-to-moderate gains. They showed up across age groups and health conditions, and light activity like walking or yoga counted.
Two honest caveats. Most of the reviews it pooled were rated low quality, and when the authors kept only the strongest ones, the effects shrank (general cognition dropped to 0.23). So exercise won’t turn you into a genius. It does reliably nudge the needle, and very few things do that.
Interventions lasting just one to three months produced some of the biggest effects, which tells you the payoff doesn’t take years. Exergames, the kind of video game where you have to move your body, did surprisingly well too.
Start small: add a 20-minute walk to three days this week, and pick a time you can actually protect.
2. Treat sleep as brain maintenance
Skimping on sleep feels productive until you try to think.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of Neurology in October 2025 pulled together 76 cohort studies on sleep and cognition. Short sleep (seven hours or less) was linked to a 27% higher risk of cognitive decline. Long sleep (eight hours or more) carried its own risks: 23% higher for cognitive decline and 43% higher for dementia. Insomnia and poor sleep quality also showed up as risk factors. These are associations from observational studies, so they can’t prove poor sleep causes decline on its own, but the pattern across dozens of cohorts is hard to ignore.
Why would sleep matter so much? One mechanism is cleanup. During sleep, fluid moves through brain tissue and carries away waste products. A small preprint posted to bioRxiv in October 2026 by Georgia Brennan, Marie Rognes and colleagues tracked a contrast agent through 21 people’s brains on MRI and estimated that one night without sleep cut overall clearance by about 31%. It hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet and the sample is tiny, so treat it as a clue to the “why,” not settled fact.
More hours aren’t automatically better, given the long-sleep findings. A steady middle range, roughly seven to eight hours most nights, is the target. If you’re dragging through afternoons, these tips on fighting sleepiness at work can help bridge the gap while you fix your nights. Set a fixed wake-up time for the next two weeks, weekends included, and let your bedtime settle around it.
3. Lower the pressure before tasks that need insight
You’ve probably blanked in a job interview or a tense meeting. There’s a mechanism behind that, and it’s more specific than “stress is bad.”
Here is how it works, step by step. Your brain builds knowledge by linking new experiences to old ones. When you learn something that overlaps with an existing memory, the hippocampus reactivates that older memory and stitches the two together. That stitching is what lets you make leaps: if A goes with B, and B goes with C, you can work out that A goes with C.
In a study published in Science Advances in May 2026, Kai Schüren, Lars Schwabe and colleagues at the University of Hamburg put one group of volunteers through a mock job interview and hard mental arithmetic before a learning task. The stressed group remembered the direct pairs just as well as the calm group. What they lost was the leap. Brain scans showed their hippocampus reactivated the older memories less, and stored the overlapping events as separate items instead of linking them. Because stress was assigned at random in a lab, this is causal evidence, but only for short, acute stress. It doesn’t tell us what months of chronic stress do.
Alison Preston, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author, explained that stress seems to narrow focus to the present moment, which helps in a crisis but costs you insight across experiences.
So when you need to connect ideas (writing, planning, solving a messy problem), stress management becomes a thinking tool. Practices from Stoic exercises for daily calm are one place to start.
Next time, do this: before a high-stakes task, spend three minutes breathing slowly with a longer exhale than inhale, then write down the one question you’re trying to answer.
4. Put distance between you and mobile internet
This one gets more pushback than any other item. Fair enough. Phones are useful.
But consider this experiment. Noah Castelo, Adrian Ward, Kostadin Kushlev and colleagues ran a randomised trial with 467 adults (average age 32), published in PNAS Nexus in February 2025. Participants installed an app called Freedom that blocked all mobile internet for two weeks, while still allowing calls and texts, and computers stayed online. Sustained attention improved on an objective computer task. The researchers estimated the gain was roughly equivalent to reversing ten years of age-related attention decline, and 91% of participants improved on at least one of the three outcomes (attention, mental health or well-being).
The why seems to be time. Without mobile internet, people spent more time socialising in person, exercising and being outdoors. In other words, the block worked partly by making room for other items on this list.
Limitations matter here. Participants knew what the study was about, and only about a quarter stuck to the full two-week block. Still, the people who did showed the clearest gains.
You don’t have to go cold turkey. The principles behind digital minimalism help you decide which apps earn a place on your home screen.
Test it this week: block mobile browsers and social apps from 8 pm until morning for seven days, and notice how your evenings change.
5. Train your processing speed with games that adapt to you
Most “brain games” don’t live up to the marketing. One specific type has unusually long-term evidence behind it.
The ACTIVE study began in 1998, when researchers randomised around 2,800 healthy adults over 65 into memory training, reasoning training, speed-of-processing training or no training. The speed task asked people to spot and react to visual information on a screen, faster and with more distraction as they improved. Training was short: up to ten sessions over five to six weeks, with booster sessions roughly one and three years later for some participants.
In February 2026, Norma Coe, Marilyn Albert and colleagues published the 20-year follow-up in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, using Medicare records. As Johns Hopkins Medicine reported in its February 2026 summary, 105 of 264 people (40%) in the speed-training-plus-boosters group were diagnosed with dementia, against 239 of 491 (49%) in the control group. That works out to a 25% lower incidence. Memory and reasoning training showed no significant long-term effect.
Albert, who directs the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins, said the result suggests a fairly modest, non-drug intervention can have long-lasting effects. The authors think adaptiveness was key: the program got harder as each person got faster. One thing to keep in mind is that the speed training is now sold commercially, and the company that markets it has ties to the original software.
Your move: pick a game or app that adjusts its difficulty to your performance, and use it in short sessions a few times a week. If it feels easy, it’s not doing much. For deeper focus at work, our guide to entering the flow state covers the same principle of matching challenge to skill.
6. Make social contact a non-negotiable
Loneliness feels like an emotional problem. It’s also a brain problem.
On 30 June 2025, the WHO Commission on Social Connection, co-chaired by former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, released its global report, From Loneliness to Social Connection. It estimated that about one in six people worldwide are affected by loneliness, and linked loneliness to more than 871,000 deaths a year, around 100 every hour. The report lists cognitive decline alongside stroke, heart disease and diabetes as health risks raised by loneliness and social isolation.
Why would company protect thinking? Conversation is hard cognitive work. You track meaning, read faces, hold context in mind and come up with replies, all in real time. People with strong social ties also tend to move more and feel less stressed, which loops back to items 1 and 3. The WHO’s evidence here is mostly observational, so it shows strong links rather than proof that socialising alone prevents decline.
The commission’s suggestions for individuals are refreshingly ordinary: reach out to people, join a local group, volunteer. If conversation feels awkward, it’s a skill you can build, and these tips on improving social skills make it easier. Put one recurring social plan in your calendar this month, the same day every week, so it happens without needing willpower.
7. Learn a language (or keep using one you’ve neglected)
Switching between languages is a workout. You suppress one vocabulary, pull up another and keep track of which one the moment requires.
In November 2025, Lucía Amoruso, Agustín Ibáñez and colleagues published a study in Nature Aging using data from 86,149 adults aged 51 to 90 across 27 European countries. They estimated each person’s “biobehavioural age” from health, lifestyle and functional measures, then compared it to their actual age. People who spoke only one language were about twice as likely to show signs of accelerated ageing as multilingual people, and the protective effect grew with each additional language. The team adjusted for factors like wealth and immigration status, but this is still observational, and the multilingualism data came partly from country-level estimates.
Etu Ma’u, a dementia researcher at the University of Auckland, commented in November 2025 that the study suggests multilingual people’s brains come out a couple of years younger than their chronological age.
The researchers haven’t yet shown that picking up a language in your fifties gives the same benefit as lifelong use. That study is still to come. But the downside risk is close to zero, and the process itself trains attention and memory.
Here’s a simple way in: spend 15 minutes a day on a language you half-know from school, and once a week, try to use it out loud, even if only with a recording.
8. Get your hearing checked
This is the most overlooked item on the list.
The Lancet standing Commission on dementia prevention, intervention and care, led by Gill Livingston of University College London, published its latest report on 31 July 2024. It identified 14 modifiable risk factors and estimated that addressing all of them could prevent or delay about 45% of dementia cases. Untreated hearing loss in midlife was one of the biggest, accounting for roughly 7%. The report is a little over two years old, but it’s the current edition and the most cited summary in the field.
The reasoning goes like this. When hearing fades, your brain works harder just to decode sound, which leaves less capacity for understanding and remembering. People with hearing loss also tend to withdraw from conversation, which feeds into the isolation problem from item 6.
Newer data supports treating it. In January 2026, Lauren Cribb, Joanne Ryan and colleagues at Monash University reported in Neurology on 2,777 Australian adults with an average age of 75 and moderate hearing loss. Over about seven years, 5.0% of those prescribed hearing aids developed dementia, compared with 7.5% of those who weren’t, a 33% lower risk. More frequent use went with lower risk. Cognitive test scores didn’t differ, though, and this was an observational analysis, not a randomised trial.
This month: book a hearing test, especially if you’ve started asking people to repeat themselves or turning the TV up. If aids are recommended, wear them daily, not just for special occasions.
9. Know your blood pressure numbers
High blood pressure damages the small vessels that feed your brain. You won’t feel it happening.
In April 2025, Jiang He and colleagues published one of the most persuasive trials yet in Nature Medicine. The China Rural Hypertension Control Project enrolled 33,995 adults over 40 with uncontrolled high blood pressure across 326 villages. Half the villages got intensive care from trained village doctors, who adjusted medication to reach a target below 130/80 mm Hg and coached people on salt, alcohol and adherence. The other half got usual care. After four years, the intensive group had a 15% lower risk of dementia and a 16% lower risk of cognitive impairment without dementia. Serious adverse events were actually lower in the intensive group too.
Tara Spires-Jones, director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said the trial adds strong evidence for managing blood pressure to protect the ageing brain, while noting that treatment isn’t a guarantee. Some treated people still developed dementia.
Because this was randomised, it’s stronger than the observational links elsewhere in this article. It’s also a useful reminder that brain health isn’t only about puzzles and supplements. Sometimes it’s a cuff on your arm. Check your blood pressure at a pharmacy or at home this week, and if it’s above 130/80 on repeated readings, take those numbers to your doctor.
10. Drink less than you think is “fine”
A glass of wine to unwind is one of the most normalised habits there is. The brain data is less relaxed about it.
In April 2025, Alberto Fernando Oliveira Justo and colleagues at the University of São Paulo published an autopsy study in Neurology. They examined the brains of 1,781 people who had died at an average age of 75, and grouped them by drinking history based on interviews with family members. “Heavy” meant eight or more drinks a week, which some readers will recognise as an ordinary week.
| Group | Share with vascular brain lesions | Odds vs never-drinkers (adjusted) |
|---|---|---|
| Never drank | 40% | reference |
| Moderate drinkers | 45% | 60% higher |
| Heavy drinkers | 44% | 133% higher |
| Former heavy drinkers | 50% | 89% higher |
The lesions, called hyaline arteriolosclerosis, thicken and narrow small blood vessels and are linked to memory and thinking problems. Heavy drinkers also died, on average, 13 years earlier than never-drinkers. Former heavy drinkers had lower brain mass relative to body size and worse cognitive abilities. This is an association study, not proof of cause.
Leana Wen, an emergency physician at George Washington University, noted in April 2025 that the former-drinker findings point to lasting damage, even though stopping does appear to lower risk.
A quick experiment: count every drink for two weeks without changing anything. Then set a weekly ceiling below that number and keep it for a month.
11. Cut back on ultra-processed food, and watch your overall diet
The evidence on ultra-processed food (UPF) and the brain is genuinely mixed right now, and you deserve to hear both sides.
In April 2026, Barbara Cardoso and colleagues from Monash University, Deakin University and the University of São Paulo published a study in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring on 2,192 dementia-free Australians in middle and older age. On average they got about 41% of their energy from UPFs such as soft drinks, packaged snacks and ready meals. Each 10% increase in UPF intake was linked to lower attention scores and higher dementia-risk scores, even after accounting for how closely people followed a Mediterranean diet. Cardoso put a 10% increase at roughly one extra packet of chips a day. No link to memory turned up, and because this was cross-sectional (one snapshot in time), it can’t show cause and effect.
Then there’s the counterpoint. In February 2026, Chantal Buis, Hanneke Wijnhoven and colleagues at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam published a ten-year study of 1,371 Dutch adults aged 55 and over in the European Journal of Nutrition. They found no clear link between total UPF intake and cognitive decline. An earlier analysis of the same group did find that overall diet quality (vegetables, fruit, whole grains, unsaturated fats) mattered.
Put those together and the sensible reading is this: your overall pattern probably matters most, and swapping heavily processed snacks for whole foods is a reasonable bet either way. If cravings are what stop you, try these ways to overcome food cravings.
Give it a go: pick the one ultra-processed item you eat most days and replace it with a whole-food version, like nuts instead of crisps, for the next 30 days.
12. Quit smoking, whatever your age
The original version of this article opened with smoking, and for good reason. It’s one of the clearest examples of a habit that quietly drains brain function.
In October 2025, Mikaela Bloomberg, Andrew Steptoe and colleagues at University College London published a study in The Lancet Healthy Longevity using data from 9,436 adults aged 40 and over in 12 countries. They matched 4,718 people who quit with 4,718 who kept smoking. In the six years before quitting, both groups declined at the same rate. In the six years after, the quitters’ memory declined about 20% more slowly and their verbal fluency roughly 50% more slowly. In practical terms, each year of ageing brought three to four fewer months of memory decline and six fewer months of fluency decline.
The mechanism is mostly vascular. Smoking damages the blood vessels that carry oxygen to the brain, drives chronic inflammation and creates oxidative stress that harms brain cells. Remove the source and those processes ease, though not instantly. The study was observational, so unmeasured differences between quitters and smokers could play a role, and it didn’t look at dementia directly.
Bloomberg’s team noted that middle-aged and older smokers are less likely to try quitting than younger people, even though they carry more of the harm, and hoped the brain findings would give them fresh motivation. If that’s you, it isn’t too late. Book a conversation with your doctor or a local stop-smoking service this month and ask what support they offer.
13. Ask your doctor about the shingles vaccine
This is the item most people don’t expect to see in a brain article.
Here’s what happened in Wales. On 1 September 2013, the country began offering the shingles vaccine to older adults, but supply was limited, so eligibility was set by exact date of birth. People born on or after 2 September 1933 could get it. People born even a week earlier could not. That created two groups who were nearly identical in every way except vaccine access.
A team led by Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University, with first author Markus Eyting, used that quirk for a study published in Nature on 2 April 2025. Among roughly 282,000 older adults, getting the vaccine reduced the chance of a new dementia diagnosis over seven years by 3.5 percentage points, which works out to about a 20% relative reduction. The effect was stronger in women. A follow-up analysis in December 2025 suggested benefits extended to people already living with mild cognitive impairment or dementia.
Geldsetzer, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, has described the signal as unusually strong and consistent across the ways the team analysed the data. Two limits matter. The study involved the older live vaccine (Zostavax), not the newer Shingrix now commonly used, so whether Shingrix does the same is still unknown. And it covered people around age 79 to 80 in one country, though the team reports similar signals in other countries.
Next step: if you’re in the age group your country recommends for shingles vaccination, ask your doctor or pharmacist at your next visit. It protects against a painful illness either way.
14. Stack your habits, and get some support
Each item above helps on its own. The strongest evidence comes from doing several together.
The US POINTER trial, led by Laura Baker of Wake Forest University School of Medicine and published in JAMA on 28 July 2025, randomly assigned 2,111 older adults at risk of cognitive decline to one of two lifestyle programmes for two years. Both covered exercise, the MIND diet (leafy greens, berries, nuts, whole grains, olive oil, fish), brain and social challenges, and regular checks on blood pressure and other health markers.
The difference was structure. The structured group attended 38 facilitated team meetings, exercised 30 to 35 minutes four times a week plus strength and flexibility work twice a week, and did computer brain training three times a week. The self-guided group met six times and picked their own changes. Both groups improved on thinking tests. The structured group improved more, regardless of sex, ethnicity, genetic risk or heart health. Baker pointed out that even the lighter, self-guided version helped, which matters for anyone who can’t commit to the full programme.
Picture this (a hypothetical): you walk to a weekly class with a friend, then sit down together for a vegetable-heavy lunch and a half-hour of a language app. That’s three or four items from this list in one morning, and it’s the friend who makes you show up.
That’s the real lesson from POINTER. Accountability does a lot of the heavy lifting. If you need ideas for which habits to build around, start with these good habits to have in life.
Start small: pick two items from this list, tell one person you’re doing them, and ask them to check in with you every Sunday for a month.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. A late night turns into a week of bad sleep. A stressful month wipes out your walks. That’s normal, and it isn’t the end of anything.
The most useful research here comes from Ben Singh (again) and colleagues at the University of South Australia, who published a systematic review on habit formation in the journal Healthcare in December 2024. Across 20 studies and more than 2,600 participants, the median time for a health habit to start feeling automatic was 59 to 66 days, with individual estimates ranging from 4 to 335 days. So the popular 21-day rule doesn’t hold up. If something still feels effortful after three weeks, that’s expected, not a failure. Singh’s own advice was to aim for consistency rather than perfection: missing a day doesn’t undo the habit as long as you pick it back up the next day. Morning habits and habits people chose for themselves also tended to grow stronger.
When it happens, work through these steps:
- Restart the next day, not next Monday. Waiting for a “clean” start is a classic trap, and these strategies on how to stop procrastinating are built for exactly that moment.
- Shrink the habit for a while. A ten-minute walk beats no walk.
- Look at what broke the chain. Was it a schedule change, a mood, a missing cue? Fix that, not your character.
- Watch the story you tell yourself. “I’ve ruined it” is the kind of thinking covered in our guide to stopping catastrophizing, and it does more damage than the missed day.
If a single rough day is what derailed you, these steps for getting over a bad day can stop it spilling into the next one.
Conclusion
There’s no single trick that enhances brain function overnight. What the research offers instead is a set of ordinary levers: move, sleep in a steady range, keep stress from hijacking your thinking, guard your attention from your phone, stay connected, keep learning, and look after the boring medical basics like blood pressure, hearing and vaccines. Most of these protect your heart and mood too, so the effort pays off twice.
You don’t need all 14. Pick two that feel doable, give them two months rather than three weeks, and build from there. If you’d like more practical guides on habits, focus and personal growth, browse our self-improvement section.
