Everyone has some experience with the devastation of Alzheimer’s. If the disease has affected someone you love, you are intimately acquainted with the special sorrow that dementia brings.

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.