New Light on Preventing Alzheimer’s

There’s no known cure for Alzheimer’s, so it makes sense to focus on prevention. How can we support the health of our brains to lessen the chances that we will be affected by Alzheimer’s disease as we age? Well, it’s not hard to find information on activities that help prevent dementia. The advice is always the same: get physical exercise, eat healthy, be socially engaged, minimize stress, and exercise your mind with word and memory games.

Finding a list of activities is easy. Sticking with them is the hard part. In fact, if your brain-health routine consists of adding more chores to your to-do list, the extra stress might even seem counterproductive.

So instead of presenting a list of helpful activities, I’d like to approach the topic of how to foster brain health from a different direction, with some suggestions for how to integrate dementia-preventing, brain-healthy habits into daily life smoothly and without adding stress.

Make a commitment that sneaks a healthful habit in the back door

You might resolve to take a daily walk for exercise, which you know is critical for maintaining a healthy brain. But you know how it goes—something you hadn’t planned on always comes up to interrupt your day, and before you know it, it’s too late. So the trick is to make the walk a priority. I’ve known people who have adopted a dog for just this reason. Now it’s the demand for exercise that’s interrupting your other priorities—often quite insistently.

Similarly, if you leave social engagement as a vague intention on your to-do list, you’ll find yourself thinking, at the end of the day, “Well, I never did get around to calling my old friend. Maybe tomorrow.” But if you sign up for a volunteer opportunity that occurs every week, the commitment moves from “some day soon” to “Thursday at 7:00 p.m.” You’re more likely to make it happen.