The 5 Habits That Keep Your Brain Young
Brain fog, forgetfulness, and aging aren’t destiny. Here’s the science-backed plan to fight back.
The Big Idea: Your brain is not fixed—and aging doesn’t have to mean decline. With the right habits, you can actually grow a stronger, sharper, more resilient brain at any age.
Why it matters: Most of us assume memory loss, brain fog, and cognitive slowdown are inevitable. But decades of neuroscience suggest something very different: the cortex and hippocampus can expand or shrink based on how you live.
Try this today: Move your body for 20–30 minutes. Exercise is one of the fastest ways to increase blood flow to the brain and boost protective proteins that help grow new neural connections.
These ideas come from The Invincible Brain: The Clinically Proven Plan to Age-Proof Your Brain and Stay Sharp for Life by neurologist, professor, and neuroscientist Majid Fotuhi. Check out more of his age-proofing ideas below:
1. The most important—and most malleable—parts of your brain.
All your higher brain functions depend on two main brain structures: the cortex and the hippocampus.
The cortex is like a blanket that covers the surface of your brain. It supports cognitive functions such as reading, writing, planning, driving, cooking, problem-solving, doing your taxes, and creating art.
The hippocampus—about the size of your thumb, with one on each side of your brain—is essential for learning new information, forming and consolidating memories, and regulating emotions.
“All your higher brain functions depend on two main brain structures.”
The cortex and hippocampus have an incredible level of malleability. They can shrink or grow based on how you live. They can expand within weeks or months depending on how much you move, how well you sleep, what you eat, how you manage stress, and how you challenge your mind.
2. You can become more intelligent at any age.
Intelligence means being able to excel in many forms of cognitive functions, not only in areas like math, physics, and logic, but also in cooking well, playing a musical instrument, speaking in public, motivating an audience, fixing things around the house, being a comedian, or connecting with others on a deep emotional level.
In my book, I describe thirty different forms of intelligence and explain how you can excel in any of them you wish. Everything we call intelligence—every skill and talent—emerges from the health and connectivity of the cortex and hippocampus. When you learn something new, you engage different parts of your cortex and hippocampus and make them stronger.
When your cortex and hippocampus are healthy and optimally connected, you can learn and excel in almost any cognitive capacity, at any age. You can improve your memory, learn to play the piano, become better at public speaking, or even learn to juggle three balls in the air.
“Everything we call intelligence—every skill and talent—emerges from the health and connectivity of the cortex and hippocampus.”
If you also develop a growth mindset—the belief that your brain has the capacity to grow and improve and you can indeed get better at anything with practice—you will feel more confident and perform even better at any cognitive task.
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3. Cognitive decline is due to a soup of problems, not a single disease.
Decades of research have shown that late-life Alzheimer’s disease is not a single entity. When your grandparents appear confused or don’t know what year it is, their brain has shrivelled due to a soup of biological problems—not just a single disease.
The ingredients in this soup of brain shrinkers include gum-like aggregates of toxic proteins (amyloid plaques and tau tangles) as well as damaged and leaky blood vessels, inflammation, and silent strokes. Five common contributors to brain shrinkage with aging are chronic stress, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and poor sleep.
By preventing and treating these brain shrinkers, you can reduce the forces that slowly damage your brain tissue over the years. This is what I call building resistance to brain aging.
4. The five pillars of brain health build resilience.
Reducing damage to your brain is only half the story. The other half is building brain resilience: creating a healthy, strong brain that can function well even if there are footprints of Alzheimer’s disease in your brain.
The five pillars of brain health that boost resilience are:
Regular physical exercise
High-quality sleep
Brain-friendly food
A healthy mindset
Consistently challenging your brain
Together, these five pillars of brain health increase blood flow to the brain, reduce inflammation, boost protective brain proteins such as BDNF, generate new neurons, and strengthen neural connections. They literally help grow the size of the cortex and hippocampus in your brain, which is the most effective insurance policy you can ever have against developing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
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5. Brain reserve is the key to becoming a brain super-ager.
Brain reserve means building a brain with fewer brain shrinkers and more factors that grow and protect the cortex and hippocampus. The larger your brain reserve, the more likely you are to remain sharp and independent in your eighties and nineties. This is how you become a brain super-ager.
“The larger your brain reserve, the more likely you are to remain sharp and independent in your eighties and nineties.”
Recent research demonstrates that staying mentally sharp as we age is not reserved for a lucky few with great genes. People who follow the five pillars of brain health can remain independent and active at all times, even when they reach the last two decades of their life.