The trial’s results are now the first solid confirmation that lowering blood pressure reduces the risk of both mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a degree of brain decline that’s considered the gateway to dementia, and probable dementia. […]
While there are many ways people can change their behavior to lower their risk of heart disease and cancer–such as eating a healthy diet, exercising and avoiding or stopping smoking–there are few similar steps that have been scientifically proved to reduce the risk of degenerative brain disorders like Alzheimer’s. Genes play a prominent role in determining who will develop the disease, and age is also a major factor–neither of which are under human control.
The [SPRINT MIND study] provides the strongest evidence yet that there may be something in people’s control that lowers their risk of cognitive decline.
“Controlling blood pressure is not only good for the heart but good for the brain,” says [Dr. Jeff Williamson, chief of geriatric medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine and the leader of the study]. “This is the first intervention of any kind that has proven in a randomized trial to reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment.”
Nicholls surveyed the latest medical research on sleep, interviewed many of the researchers involved, and underwent intense sleep therapy to treat his own condition. […]
The simplest thing is to work on something called “sleep stability,” which is very common advice in insomnia clinics […] Sleep stability means pinning your bedtime to the same time every night, even on weekends, and waking up at the same time every morning, even on weekends. The key is to settle into a groove or a cycle that your body understands and responds to. Once you do this, it’s really quite amazing. You’ll sleep better, feel better, have more energy, and worry less.
[…] it’s not true that everyone needs eight hours of sleep a night. […] Everyone varies, and this is why you need to find out how much your brain needs. And you do that by keeping a sleep diary over a week or two, and just taking an average of how many hours you are actually sleeping. […]
I think most people don’t understand the importance of light and how we consume it. Artificial light is completely at odds with our biology.
[…] minimizing exposure to artificial lights like smartphones and TV screens and increasing exposure to natural lights like dawn and dusk helps sync our internal clock and prepare the brain for sleep […]
Let’s cut to the chase–psychologist Ron Friedman told the Harvard Business Review that most people “typically have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused.” Our own data backs this number up as well. When we analyzed over 225 million hours of working time, we found that the average knowledge worker (someone who deals with information for a living, like a writer, developer, designer, or manager), is only productive for 12.5 hours a week. That’s roughly 2.5 hours a day. […]
If you planned your day assuming you would have eight hours of time for productive work, and you end up with just over one hour, it’s going to be really frustrating.
Even worse, you’re going to keep adding more and more to your plate, thinking you have all this extra time to do “core work” each day.
It’s upsetting. But it’s also human nature.
For decades, psychologists have called this behavior the Planning Fallacy–our bias toward being overly optimistic when it comes to how much time is needed to complete a future task. In other words, we’re notoriously bad at looking into the future and figuring out how long a task will take us. […]
One of the most frustrating things about the modern workplace is not feeling like you’re making meaningful progress. And while you might get paid for 40 hours of work each week, you can’t realistically schedule 40 hours of work. We all have biases that get in the way of scheduling our days properly. Only by understanding and acknowledging them are we able to set ourselves up for success.
Study findings indicate that the benefits of midlife cardiorespiratory fitness extend well into the later part of life.
“The benefits of cardiorespiratory fitness extended well into the later part of life for employed, middle-aged men without cardiovascular disease, and were significantly related to longevity over 4 decades, according to a study published in Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
A team of Danish researchers sought to investigate the associations between cardiorespiratory fitness and very long-term prognosis in a study with 46 years of follow up. Study participants were middle-aged, employed men without cardiovascular disease from the Copenhagen Male Study (N=5107; mean age, 48.8±5.4 years). Participants were stratified into 4 age-adjusted VO2max (maximal oxygen consumption) categories: above upper limit of normal (5%), high normal (45%), low normal (45%), and below lower limit of normal (5%). VO2Max levels were estimated using a bicycle ergometer, and restricted, multivariable, mean survival time models of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality were performed using Danish national registers.”
The trial’s results are now the first solid confirmation that lowering blood pressure reduces the risk of both mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a degree of brain decline that’s considered the gateway to dementia, and probable dementia. […]
Let’s cut to the chase–psychologist Ron Friedman told the Harvard Business Review that most people “typically have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused.” Our own data backs this number up as well. When we analyzed over 225 million hours of working time, we found that the average knowledge worker (someone who deals with information for a living, like a writer, developer, designer, or manager), is only productive for 12.5 hours a week. That’s roughly 2.5 hours a day. […]
