Brain Health Week 1: Simple Habits That Protect Your Heart AND Your Memory
How the same daily choices keep both organs healthy as you age
This is the first of a 4-part series on brain health. It introduces our monthly Deep Dive into Brain Health, which is available to Paid subscribers.
You’re standing in your kitchen, staring at the cabinet. You opened it for a reason. What was it again?
These little moments happen to everyone. But here’s what most people don’t realize: your brain isn’t just sitting up there thinking thoughts and storing memories. It’s an organ that needs blood, oxygen, and nutrients just like your heart does. In fact, what’s good for your cardiovascular system turns out to be remarkably good for your cognitive function too.
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The Blood Flow Your Brain Craves
Your brain is hungry. Really hungry. It uses about 20% of your body’s oxygen supply despite making up only 2% of your body weight. When you exercise, something remarkable happens.
Recent research from 2026 found that adults who engaged in regular aerobic exercise for just 12 months showed measurably younger-looking brains on MRI scans. Even more striking: you might not need marathon training sessions to see benefits. Studies suggest that as little as 25 minutes of moderate exercise per week can result in larger brain volumes compared to sedentary individuals.
But here’s where it gets interesting. After just 15 minutes of moderate aerobic activity, blood flow patterns in your brain change dramatically. The hippocampus—that walnut-shaped structure critical for forming new memories—shows a particularly strong response. While other brain regions experience an immediate drop in blood flow right after exercise, the hippocampus bounces back faster and stronger.
Why Exercise Makes Your Brain Younger
When you get your heart rate up, your body doesn’t just pump more blood. It releases a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. Think of BDNF as fertilizer for your brain cells. It helps neurons grow, form new connections, and survive longer.
Different types of exercise offer different benefits:
Aerobic activities like walking, swimming, and cycling enhance blood flow and stimulate BDNF release, supporting memory and executive function
Strength training helps regulate insulin levels and reduce inflammation, improving cognitive resilience
High-intensity interval training boosts neuroplasticity and cognitive flexibility
Mind-body exercises such as yoga and tai chi combine movement with mindfulness, reducing stress while enhancing cognitive function
The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity weekly, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity. That could be as simple as 22 minutes daily or 30 minutes five days a week. A recent study found that meeting this 150-minute weekly goal through regular aerobic exercise helped participants maintain younger brain ages over the course of a year.
The Mediterranean Diet’s Secret Weapon
You’ve probably heard about the Mediterranean diet for heart health. Turns out, your brain’s been listening too.
Adults who followed a Mediterranean-style eating pattern for four years demonstrated better overall brain function compared to those on traditional low-fat diets. The diet is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, fish, and poultry, with healthy fats from olive oil replacing saturated fats.
A comprehensive analysis of multiple studies found that high adherence to the Mediterranean diet reduced the risk of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. The diet appears to improve global cognition, working memory, and episodic memory.
Why does this eating pattern work? The Mediterranean diet provides anti-inflammatory compounds and antioxidants that protect brain cells. The healthy fats support the structure of neurons. The combination helps prevent or delay cognitive disorders while improving cognitive function across multiple domains.
Sleep: When Your Brain Takes Out the Trash
You might think of sleep as downtime. Your brain sees it differently.
During sleep, particularly deep slow-wave sleep and REM sleep, your brain actively processes and stabilizes the information you learned during the day. Slow-wave sleep handles declarative memories: the names, dates, and facts. REM sleep processes procedural memories: the skills and tasks you’ve picked up.
When sleep quality suffers, so does your cognitive performance. Research shows significant negative correlations between poor sleep quality and diminished cognitive abilities across multiple domains. People who don’t get adequate sleep struggle with memory consolidation, leading to difficulties retaining both factual and procedural information.
The Sleep Research Society and American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommend at least seven hours of sleep nightly for proper brain function. Sleep deprivation can cause difficulty remembering things, trouble learning and concentrating, reduced decision-making ability, and poor emotional control.
Here’s something that might surprise you: as we age, the quality of our deep sleep deteriorates. Older adults typically experience 75% lower quality deep sleep compared to younger people, contributing to 55% worse memory performance. The slow brain waves generated during deep sleep help transport memories from the hippocampus to the prefrontal cortex for long-term storage. When sleep quality declines, memories can get stuck and eventually overwritten.
The Cardiovascular Risk Nobody Talks About
High blood pressure and diabetes don’t just threaten your heart. They directly impact your cognitive health.
A 2025 case-control study found striking results: individuals with hypertension had an 18% increased risk of dementia, those with diabetes had a 26% increased risk, and people with both conditions faced a 53% higher risk compared to those with neither condition. The cumulative effect was particularly pronounced for dementia rather than mild cognitive impairment.
The longer these conditions persist, the greater the cognitive risk. People diagnosed with diabetes for 3, 5, or 10 years showed increasingly significant impacts on dementia occurrence as the disease duration lengthened. Similarly, individuals with hypertension for 3 years or more demonstrated elevated risk for both dementia and mild cognitive impairment.
How do cardiovascular risk factors damage the brain? High blood pressure and diabetes cause inflammation that affects the blood-brain barrier and reduces blood flow to the brain. This leads to small vessel disease, reduced perfusion, and ultimately cognitive decline. Common cardiovascular risk factors may also predict decline in episodic memory, working memory, and perceptual speed while contributing to neurodegeneration and vascular lesions in the brain.
Recent genetic research from January 2026 suggests that obesity and high blood pressure may play a direct role in causing dementia, not just increasing the risk.
Making It Work in Real Life
The solution isn’t complicated. Your brain needs three things: movement, good fuel, and rest.
Start with movement. You don’t need a gym membership or fancy equipment. Walking counts. Dancing in your living room counts. Gardening counts. The goal is 150 minutes a week of activity that raises your heart rate, but even smaller amounts provide measurable benefits.
For nutrition, shift toward a Mediterranean pattern gradually. Add more vegetables to your plate. Choose fish or poultry over red meat most days. Use olive oil instead of butter. Snack on nuts instead of chips. These aren’t all-or-nothing changes.
With sleep, consistency matters more than you’d think. Going to bed and waking up at similar times helps your brain establish the deep sleep patterns it needs for memory consolidation. Seven hours isn’t a suggestion—it’s what your brain requires to clean house and organize the day’s experiences into lasting memories.
The Connection You Can’t Ignore
Your cardiovascular health and cognitive health aren’t separate concerns. They’re two sides of the same coin.
When you take care of your heart through exercise, when you feed your body anti-inflammatory foods, and when you give your brain adequate sleep, you’re not just preventing heart disease; you’re also protecting your memory, decision-making ability, and capacity to learn new things.
The physical foundations of brain health aren’t mysterious. They’re the same things you’ve heard about for overall health. The difference is understanding why they matter for your mind, not just your body.
Your brain at 70 doesn’t have to look like your brain at 50. But the choices you make today—how you move, what you eat, how you sleep—are writing that story right now.
