A Review of the Alzheimer's Association’s Top 10 Healthy Habits for Your Brain
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Introduction: Beyond Awareness Month: A Personal Journey to Brain Health & Longevity
June was Alzheimer’s and Dememtia Awareness month. It’s wonderful that the media gives Alzheimer’s awareness a spotlight for 30 days, but for some families, the attention on the disease lasts every day, every month, all year.
I lost both my grandmother and my beloved aunt to dementia-related brain diseases. The horror of watching them deteriorate so cruelly and so young broke my heart. Piecing it back together and overcoming my own fears about being a possibly being genetic heir to the disease, led me to found the Pounce Pot.
Our mission involves finding commonality between the world’s longevity experts, research institutions, and influencer doctors. I’m most curious about how they overlap in their ideas and pillars of knowledge.
As an example of this, let’s review how the Alzheimer’s Association organizes their list of the top 10 habits to help avoid dementia. If you’re wondering what avoiding dementia has to do with longevity, remember that it’s vibrant longevity (often called healthspan) that we are striving to achieve, not just longevity.
Brain health leads the way toward the vibrancy we’re striving for. What use is our strong, active body if we don’t recognize our loved ones? So let’s examine the Alzheimer’s Association’s (alz.org) list of 10 healthy habits for your brain.
The Alzheimer's Association's Top 10: Foundational Habits for Cognitive Well-being
The Alzheimer’s Association asserts (absolutely correctly so) that the following actions will help to strengthen brain health:
Challenge your mind (learn new and hard skills)
Stay in school (get the highest education possible, continue your classes)
Protect your head
Control your blood pressure
Eat right
Be smoke free
Manage diabetes
Maintain a healthy weight
Get moving
Sleep well
The organization emphasizes that their tips “can lower the risk of cognitive decline and possibly dementia, This is true “even for people with a history of dementia in their families.” Sounds promising! But do these fit in with the Pounce Pot Protocol?
Or to think of it another way: Does our protocol cover everything that the Alzheimer’s Association recommends? I hope so.
That’s my goal: to have a system (a protocol) that covers exactly what you need to do to lengthen your years of good health, regardless of which specific doctor, organization, researcher, or influencer you “follow.” Does our five-part protocol truly incorporate current, science-backed best practices? Is it at the center of a Venn diagram of all best current practices?
Pounce Pot Protocol: How Our 5 Essential Actions Align with Brain Health Wisdom
Let’s take a look one by one and place the Alzheimer’s Association’s healthy habits into our Protocol categories.
Pounce Pot Protocol #1: Boost Your Brain and Challenging Your Mind for Lifelong Cognitive Vitality
Right at the top of the Alzeheine’s Association’s list, we find “Challenge your mind” and “Stay in school.” These fit right into “Boost Your Brain.” If you subscribe to the Weekly Pounce, these will be familiar to you.
Learn new and hard skills, get the highest education possible, and continue your classes. These are absolutely essential actions that the Pounce Pot stand behind. Use your brain or lose it. Fortunately, these add a great deal of fun to our lives as well, encouraging us to play, be creative, and add hobbies, games, and joy into our busy work and school schedules..
Pounce Pot Protocol #2: Connect & Thrive to Find a Missing Link for a Fuller Life and a Healthier Brain
Surprisingly, I believe the Alzheimer’s Association is actually missing out on an essential healthy brain tip here. None of their 10 tips specifically addresses social connections as a major boost to our brain health, when in fact, it’s a vital part of our ability to thrive.
I am not criticizing the Alzheimer’s Association. But I would like to point out that comparing and contrasting various longevity, anti-aging, and brain health systems (check lists, recommendations, tips, pillars -- whatever they may be called), can help you see not only where they overlap (which is helpful to verify and reinforce helpful facts, kind of like a second or third opinion), but also where they might be missing a step.
I do believe the Alzheimer’s Association is indeed missing a step in their top 10 list. I encourage you to also actively and critically examine the systems that you follow.
Pounce Pot Protocol #3: Harness Hidden Powers to Protect Your Brain and Body from Silent Threats
The Alzheimer’s Association puts a lot of emphasis on this important category.
They list the following “hidden” powers in their top ten:
Protect your head
Control your blood pressure
Be smoke free
Manage diabetes
Sleep well
All important steps toward reaching vibrant longevity, we can certainly agree! Remember, we call them “hidden powers” here at the Pounce Pot because these steps are often internal processes inside of your body that you might easily overlook (like managing a silent killer like high blood pressure). They can also simply be smart moves like those in our “Don’t be a Dumb A**” (DBDA) group of logical actions (like wearing a seat belt in a car or wearing a helmet while riding a bike).
While their list certainly isn’t comprehensive, it does hit upon five major components within the Pounce Pot’s hidden power category.
Pounce Pot Protocol #4: Fuel Your Journey to Nourish Your Brain and Body for Optimal Performance
The Alzheimer’s Association boils our fourth essential action down to two habits:
Eat right and
Maintain a healthy weight
Simple, but sure, that’s a good start. Knowing what eating “right” means is the hard part. And how to maintain a healthy weight is also a challenge. I would suggest following these two tips and taking a deeper dive into both of them. You can start here →
Pounce Pot Protocol #5: Stay Active for a Sharper Mind and Longer Healthspan
I’d say their advice to “Get moving” exactly parallels our protocol to Stay Active. Again, you’ll need more than just this command; you’ll need specifics and motivation. Hopefully, you can get moving or stay active with your favorite trainer, by participating in sports, or by dancing to your favorite Spotify playlist. Even housework counts for staying active as I wrote in our newsletter.
I invite you to follow our encouragement in the Weekly Pounce where I send out budget-friendly and science-backed tips each week to help give you some fresh ideas on staying active. If you’re like me, sometimes you just need someone to tell you what you can do to get going again.
Conclusion: Navigating Your Path to Pro-Aging with the Pounce Pot Protocol
I’m confident that the Pounce Pot Protocol can help you remember the major paths toward a longer healthspan, and if something new arises in the current science, we’ll review it immediately.
Our protocols aren’t set in stone; they will be updated as current research demands. However, unless there’s some major discovery in the healthspan field, I’m confident that our five-part protocol can be an on-going compass for those looking for the right direction toward a future filled with more “life” in your life…and aging that we can get excited about rather than dread.
Absolutely keep up with important organizations such as the Alzheimer’s Association. They stay on the cutting edge of the latest research and news. However, let’s also keep a balanced overall picture and continue to use the Pounce Pot Protocol to help carefully examine the ever-changing advice landscape out there.
My dream is to create a safe place for our community to gather and learn about current brain health and longevity research. The more we know, the less helpless we will feel, at least that’s my theory. Take for example my unfounded fears of genetic decline. Turns out, that’s most likely not going to be the case! (Read why here.)
I’ll spend my time curating and condensing longevity, brain health, and pro-aging studies into easy to understand essays and weekly newsletters. You get the facts; I get the joy of helping others in our growing community.
Navigating it together keeps us more informed, and gives us a forum that helps us connect and thrive. And that’s something we can all benefit from.
P.S. If you enjoyed this article, I bet you’ll like my free newsletter, The Weekly Pounce. I’ll help you power up your future self by sharing research and 5 tips each week to help you achieve the Pounce Pot Protocol: 5 essential actions to achieve vibrant longevity and active pro-aging. Sign up here!
Not quite sure? Check out the expanding newsletter archive. It’s growing thanks to your support and encouragement!
For a deep dive into the Pounce Pot Protocol, five essential actions to achieve vibrant longevity and active pro-aging, read more here.
The Five Essential Actions of the Pounce Pot Protocol:
Keep reading the Pounce Pot Post to explore more in depth. Click here to see our mission statement. Pounce on our recommended products for each essential action.
Which sections did you find the most useful? I would love to hear from you, learn from your stories, and share in your experiences as we take this journey together. You can read more about me here, and I’ll look forward to learning more about you, too. Contact me with your feedback. Is there something specific you’d like me to research? Which protocol do you find the most challenging?
Finally, I’d like for you to meet our Pounce Pot advisory team. Welcome to the community!
