Stock up on brain-supportive nutrients: Just like probiotics are good for gut health and vitamin D is good for immunity, certain nutrients support brain health. These include nutrients like omega-3s, citrulline, and B vitamins. Try one of these 16 memory-supporting supplements that offer effective doses of nutrients for your brain health, cognition, and memory.
Meditate: Research shows that meditation boosts parts of the brain associated with memory, learning, attention, and self-awareness. Studies have also shown that meditation can help improve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Eat brain-supporting foods: Foods like dark chocolate, kefir, and lentils all contain super brain-supportive nutrients that can protect cognition throughout your life. Here’s a list of seven foods that support brain health.
Manage your stress levels: Studies show that psychological stress is a risk factor for Parkinson’s disease. Make an effort to schedule your days so they feel doable, and invest in stress-relieving practices that help you find relief. You can start by considering these 10 natural remedies for stress.
Ginger is a root vegetable that is well-recognized as a form of herbal medicine. It is a member of the same plant family as cardamom and turmeric.
Ginger has benefits beyond flavoring your favorite stir-fry recipe or easing an upset stomach. In fact, ginger is purported to have a variety of powerful therapeutic and preventive benefits. There is clear evidence of the effectiveness of ginger as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory agent2. It also may be helpful for treating nausea. Ginger is known to decrease markers of age-related oxidative stress3, such as inflammation, swelling, and pain, and has been used for thousands of years for the treatment of hundreds of ailments like these.
With its delightfully tangy and invigorating scent and flavor, ginger is one of the most commonly consumed dietary condiments in the world. The resin from its rhizomes (roots) contains many bioactive components, which is why this pungent ingredient is believed to produce a variety of remarkable pharmacological and physiological effects.
Interest in ginger has increased significantly in recent years. From scientific studies, we now know that ginger exerts its anti-inflammatory power by suppressing the action of COX-2, the enzyme responsible for swelling and pain, and inhibiting the biosynthesis of the inflammatory mediators prostaglandin and leukotriene5.
Beyond the basics, taking brain supplements may help you elevate your brain health and foster a blossoming environment for creative thought to take place.*
The idea of brain supplements may seem a bit strange at first: How could a tiny capsule make your brain work better? Well, that’s not exactly the mechanism.
Instead, you’re feeding your brain important nutrients or bioactives that you may not be getting in your every day diet, those being ingredients that directly benefit overall brain health and function.
In addition, keep an eye out for targeted nutrients like citicoline which is critical for neurotransmitter production and neuronal health and function and resveratrol which helps to increase blood flow to the brain and enhance processing speed, verbal memory, and cognitive task performance.*
Unless your job (think: construction or woodworking) requires it, you may not think to wear hearing protection in noisy spaces. But in reality, you should be wearing earplugs when you’re attending a music festival, riding a motorcycle, or even mowing your lawn, says Taylor.
Without them, “you could experience temporary tinnitus or temporary hearing loss,” she adds. “Sometimes after noise exposure, we see a temporary threshold shift, where if someone tested your hearing right after that concert, you would present with hearing loss. It can recover, but you would definitely leave the concert with ringing in your ears.”
In fact, sporting events are so loud, you might suffer hearing loss after just 15 minutes of exposure, and it can take as little as five minutes to harm your hearing while at a nightclub or concert. Generally speaking, the louder the sound and longer the exposure, the less time it takes and the greater the risk for hearing loss to occur, according to the CDC3.
People often push back on wearing ear protection at concerts, says Taylor, as they believe they won’t be able to hear the artist with plugs in. But there are earplugs on the market, such as those from Loop and Eargasm, that are specifically designed for music—and look pretty cute to boot, she notes. “You hear the music perfectly, it’s just a little softer,” she adds. “In my opinion, the music sounds a little better because it’s not, like, painfully loud.”
In other instances, you’re fine to use the cheap foam earplugs available at the hardware store. Just make sure to put them in them properly for adequate protection, says Taylor.
I feel an immediate difference taking focus+. The noticeable pick-me-up from the instant-release caffeine (from whole coffee fruit) paired with the sustained-release caffeine (from green coffee beans) makes for what one can only call a calm clearheadedness.*
Unlike after my second cup of pour-over coffee, I don’t get that jittery feeling or dreaded afternoon crash, and perhaps most importantly, I’ve seen no impact on my sleep.
Before, I oscillated between hyperfocus and lethargy; but with focus+, I feel a maintained level of productivity—something I never thought I’d be able to tap into. It’s like the concentration bandwidth I have is now evenly spread out throughout the day, as opposed to short, unreliable bursts of completing tasks.
When an email pops up, I’m able to stay on task, returning to my inbox only after I’ve completed what I was working on. I plow through my to-do list with more efficiency and thoughtfulness. As a result, my days are less stressful.
For over 15 years, scientists monitored these women for declines in speed and strength metrics. They found that women with significant declines in these areas were up to twice as likely as their counterparts to have a late-life dementia event (either a dementia-related hospitalization or death).
And while this might sound alarming to anyone getting older or watching their loved ones slow down with age, it is important to remember two things: For starters, some decline in strength and speed is normal for anyone in their 70s, especially if relatively mild. Also, early-stage research and findings like this may help identify early-stage dementia and encourage preventative therapies that can help stave off cognitive decline.
“Incorporating muscle function tests as part of dementia screening could be useful to identify high-risk individuals, who might then benefit from primary prevention programs aimed at preventing the onset of the condition such as a healthy diet and a physically active lifestyle,” study author Marc Sim, Ph.D. said in a statement.
Sim adds that grip strength and TUG tests aren’t currently performed in clinical practice, but both are inexpensive and simple assesments that could be introduced as part of dementia screening.
Let’s dive into how alcohol impacts the brain in general. “I’m very honest when I say no amount of alcohol is good for the brain,” Nicola states. This may not come as a surprise to everyone, but it’s important to note nevertheless.
Nicola clarifies that “good for the brain” means serving the brain in any positive way. But many folks have a drink in the evening to wind down and (so they think) sleep better. Is this true, or is it an illusion? Sorry to say, research points to the latter.
When you look at the composition of alcohol, the main ingredient that makes you feel relaxed at first and drunk after a few drinks is ethanol. That calming feeling is actually the sedative impact of ethanol, Nicola explains. “Sedating is very different from sleeping,” she states. “So if you drink, you actually block deep sleep and REM sleep, so you don’t even get into those stages.” In other words: You may feel sleepier and fall asleep faster after a few drinks, but the quality of sleep you get is likely quite poor.
Now, let’s chat brain health in general: When it comes to moderate drinking, which research1 describes as seven drinks for women and 14 drinks for men per week (in total), brain damage is totally a possibility. With that level of drinking, research shows you can have low-level brain damage, she adds.
The 2022 study1 Nicola references found that alcohol intake is negatively associated with global brain volume measures, regional gray matter volumes, and white matter microstructure. The affected brain regions include the frontal cortex, amygdala, and brain stem, to name a few—regions associated with creativity, memory, judgement, motor tasks, emotional regulation, heart rate, sleep, and more.
Vitamin B12 is critical to a number of cognitive functions, such as neurotransmitter production, DNA synthesis1, and maintaining nerve cell health. Sufficient B12 levels are also vital for regulating healthy methylation pathways2 and levels of homocysteine (a biomarker with massive health implications when elevated, including cardiovascular dysfunction and dementia).
When your body isn’t getting enough vitamin B12, it can cause a number of concerning dementia-like symptoms, like confusion, behavior changes, and memory impairment.
For women, this phase of life can be especially challenging mentally and emotionally thanks to perimenopause. After decades of menstrual cycles (and maybe a pregnancy, or a few) post-puberty, your hormones are shifting to prepare you for menopause. With this comes hormonal changes that can have a profound impact on your cognitive functioning and overall brain health.
During this transition, many women experience hormonal brain fog—i.e., clouded thoughts, forgetfulness, and difficulty concentrating—thanks to decreasing estrogen and progesterone levels leading up to menopause. This phenomenon can be downright discouraging, as it affects cognitive functioning in a palpable way. (For specific tips to reduce mental fogginess and promote mental clarity and performance during perimenopause, check out this article.)
According to neuroscientist, nutritionist, and associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College Lisa Mosconi, Ph.D., the drop in estrogen levels, specifically, can do more than just increase the likelihood of brain fog. In this mindbodygreen podcast episode, she explains how reproductive hormones play a massive role in protecting our brains from the amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other damage that contributes to neurodegenerative diseases.
“The interactions between the brain and the reproductive organs are really crucial for brain health and brain aging—especially in women. We tend to think of testosterone [and] estrogens as involved in reproduction, having kids. But in reality, these hormones have a lot of effects inside our brains,” Mosconi says.
These reproductive hormones push neurons to bring glucose and make energy—thus, if your hormone levels are high, your brain energy is high. “But then what happens to testosterone is that it doesn’t quite decline that much over time; whereas for women, estrogens pretty much plummet when women go through menopause,” she explains. “If you think of these hormones as having some kind of superpowers for the brain, women lose the superpower around the time that menopause hits, right? And the brain is left a little more vulnerable.”
One recent study published in JAMA Network looked at signs of hypertension1 (high blood pressure) in early and mid-adulthood, as well as how those markers influenced brain health and dementia risk later in life.
Researchers studied over 400 adults in and around the San Francisco Bay Area over many years, collecting data when participants were around 30 and 40 years old and then following up with a brain health assessment around 75 years old.
They found a significant correlation between hypertension in young adults, or those who eventually developed hypertension, and poorer brain health. Noted brain health factors included decreased brain and gray matter volume, as well as impacted white matter integrity.
They observed these effects to be particularly strong in men, although present in women as well.
While hypertension is often discussed in regard to heart health, this study demonstrated that our bodies possess an immense degree of interconnectedness, meaning that one system can strongly influence another.
Hypertension is certainly not something to be ignored, as it can lead to heart disease, and now it seems it could also contribute to poor brain health as you age.
Higher-than-average blood pressure can be seen in young adults, especially in association with unhealthy lifestyle factors, such as high stress levels, alcohol and tobacco use, as well as following an unhealthy diet and not getting enough physical activity.
Elizabeth H. Margulis, professor, Princeton University, and director of the university’s Music Cognition Lab.
David Silbersweig, MD, chairman, Department of Psychiatry, and co-director, Institute for the Neurosciences, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
Michael K. Scullin, PhD, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, Baylor University, Waco, TX.
Elaine Jones, MD, , neurologist, Hilton Head, SC; fellow, American Academy of Neurology
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic: “Stuck in my head: Musical obsessions and experiential avoidance.”
Consciousness and Cognition: “Tunes stuck in your brain: The frequency and affective evaluation of involuntary musical imagery correlate with cortical structure,” “Musical hallucinations, musical imagery, and earworms: a new phenomenological survey.”
PLOS One: “Sticky Tunes: How Do People React to Involuntary Musical Imagery?”
Psychology of Music: “Musical activities predispose to involuntary musical imagery.”
British Journal of General Practice:“Stuck song syndrome: musical obsessions – when to look for OCD.”
New Music Express:“Scientists name the ultimate earworm and explain what makes songs addictive.”
Harvard Gazette: “Why That Song is Stuck in Your Head.”
Music Perception: “Singing in the Brain: Investigating the Cognitive Basis of Earworms.”
Annals of General Psychiatry: “Major depression with musical obsession treated with vortioxetine: a case report.”
Brain: “Minds on replay: musical hallucinations and their relationship to neurological disease.”
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: “Want to block earworms from conscious awareness?B(u)y gum!”
If you’re at all interested in supporting your longevity efforts (like we are), you may have heard that having shorter telomeres is a sign of biological aging—and thus, having longer telomeres is a sign of living a longer life. These little chromosomal caps help protect our DNA from damage, and measuring the rate of their decay over time can give us an accurate prediction for lifespan.
While we don’t quite know if telomere shortening is the cause of death or simply a byproduct of it, one thing is for certain—telomere length is, in fact, associated with biological aging. And as it turns out, having longer telomeres is linked to a reduced risk of dementia as well.
As explained by neuroscientist, nutritionist, and associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, Lisa Mosconi, Ph.D., in a mindbodygreen podcast episode, reproductive hormones play a massive role in protecting our brains from damage (such as the amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease).
“The interactions between the brain and the reproductive organs are really crucial for brain health and brain aging—especially in women,” she says. “We tend to think of testosterone [and] estrogens as involved in reproduction, having kids. But in reality, these hormones have a lot of effects inside our brains.”
“In particular, they literally push our neurons to bring glucose to make energy. So if your hormones are high, your brain energy is high. But then what happens to testosterone is that it doesn’t quite decline that much over time; whereas for women, estrogens pretty much plummet when women go through menopause,” Mosconi shares.
It’s this plummet in estrogen that leaves women’s brains especially vulnerable when they hit menopause in their 40s or 50s. “If you think of these hormones as having some kind of superpowers for the brain, women lose the super power around the time that menopause hits, right? And the brain is left a little more vulnerable,” Mosconi says.
Like menopause, having your uterus or ovaries removed (i.e., a hysterectomy or oophorectomy) also results in a drastic drop in estrogen levels. Other periods of hormonal fluctuations—such as puberty and pregnancy—influence estrogen levels as well, which explains why some hormonal health factors leave women at higher risk while others help protect their brains.
Researchers analyzed participants of the Rush Memory and Aging Project (MAP)—an ongoing longitudinal study that aims to identify risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive decline disorders—before and after death to see how their vitamin D levels affected cognitive function in their later years.
Free of known dementia at the time of enrollment, all MAP participants agreed to participate in annual evaluations and organ donation when they died. In this study, the average age of participants was 92 at the time of death.
Total serum vitamin D levels [25(OH)D] and global cognitive function were assessed antemortem, while vitamin D3, 25(OH)D3, and 1,25(OH)D3 (the active form of vitamin D3) were measured in four brain regions (the mid-temporal cortex, mid-frontal cortex, cerebellum, and anterior watershed white matter) post-mortem.
The main form of vitamin D3 found in the brain (and thus, the form researchers focused on in their analysis) was 25(OH)D3. It’s worth noting that there are two types of vitamin D—D2 and D3—and brain concentrations of vitamin D2 (the form found in most fortified food sources) were not measured in this study.
Vice president of scientific affairs at mindbodygreen Ashley Jordan Ferira, Ph.D., RDN, elaborates on this limitation: “Vitamin D3 is found in animal sources and key algae and lichen, while vitamin D2 comes from plant sources like yeast and irradiated mushrooms. If your health care provider accidentally measured serum 25(OH)D3, but you were knocking back irradiated mushrooms or a vitamin D2 supplement, your lab results wouldn’t reflect your intake. Serum total 25(OH)D is best to capture the full picture.”
While the results of this study are still pertinent to dementia research, it’s important to keep this discrepancy in mind as you read the results.
Have you ever been stumped by a math equation, or even a riddle? You spend hours staring at the problem or mulling over the solution to no avail. Exhausted and frustrated, you throw your hands in the air and give in to a break. And after stepping outside for some fresh air and a walk around the block, or making and eating a home-cooked meal, you sit back down and solve your problem within minutes.
Sometimes, when you’re too involved in a situation, you have to take a massive step back—only then does the solution appear to you, clear as day. The first signs of dementia can operate in this manner; it’s often the people closest to a dementia patient (e.g., their partner, children, or best friend) that fail to catch the first signs of cognitive decline.
Though you can’t change your genetics, there are a number of things you can do to prevent your risk of developing dementia (both early-onset and late-onset). Monitoring your alcohol intake and protecting your brain from TBI (i.e., by wearing a helmet during contact sports and a seatbelt in the car) or a good place to start.
Allison: I call OCD a grab bag of mental illness—mine also came with generalized anxiety and bouts of depression throughout my life.
I don’t have a great memory of growing up, but from what I can recall, there was always a lot occupying my mind and I experienced many issues socially. I had very black and white thinking, when it comes to people’s actions, which made it challenging to interact with others. I also didn’t really have the ability to self-regulate in terms of what I was saying, so I would voice a lot of inappropriate things or compulsively say things I shouldn’t.
Since then I’ve really worked on my social skills, learning what’s appropriate behavior and what’s not. I’ve also gotten a much better handle on my depression and anxiety over the years.
There were some phases of my life when I was really adamant about ditching my medication—and I spent most of my 20s off the SSRIs. Even as recently as 2021, I experimented with going off my meds. However, these experiences solidified that, for me, medication is really necessary—it makes a big difference in my internal world. I’ve accepted that I’m perfectly happy and eager to stay on SSRIs long term. Of course, it’s not necessarily the right option for everybody, and impacts individuals very differently. For some people, it works all of the time or part of the time—but I’ve embraced that I do need it all of the time.
I’ve learned and grown so much over the years, and I have a very full life. I’m able to maintain relationships and friendships, plus pursue my career goals.
To this day, the thing that interferes with my life the most are my contamination fears, which is a common subtype of OCD1. This means, I’m moving through a lot of cleaning compulsions during the day, and planning my life around fear of contamination.
This is by far the hardest thing to fight and move away from. My OCD contamination fluctuates in terms of how bad it is, and COVID obviously didn’t help. I have a lot of new compulsions, and my OCD is overall worse than it was before the pandemic—which I think is true for a lot of people.
For example, before the pandemic, I was able to take my dog places, then go home without thinking about it. Now, if my dog lies on the ground when we’re outside, I feel like I need to wash her immediately when we get home.
I’m also having a harder time coming home after visiting certain public places. For instance, right now I’m in graduate school for psychology, and for whatever reason, my brain has decided that school is the dirtiest place on the planet. So when I get there, I need to wipe down my seat and desk, then shower when I get home. I’ll also leave my school bag in the car between the days I have class, because I believe it’s contaminated, and I don’t want to bring it in my house.
For some people with OCD, their compulsions take up 10 hours of the day, so in a lot of ways, I consider my current state as mild-to-moderate on the vast spectrum that is OCD. But it does impact my day-to-day life, every single day, multiple times a day.
The review finds that citicoline shows consistent improvement of cognitive function in individuals with MCI (especially those with vascular origin), including improvements in cognitive test performance and mental functions—e.g., memory, concentration, counting, and visual-motor coordination.
Citicoline has been shown to improve both memory and behavior in patients with chronic cerebral disorders (such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease) and cognitive deficits linked to cerebrovascular disorders (such as stroke and aneurysms). In Parkinson’s patients, the bioactive has even demonstrated significant improvements in cognitive status, akinesia, tremor, speech, and handwriting.
Simply put, citicoline has clinically backed benefits in enhancing cognitive function and longevity for folks with healthy brains and individuals that struggle with mild cognitive impairment and other brain health concerns.
