Good Life Project

Your brain does not have to decline with age. Recent research reveals that for most people, staving off cognitive decline or dementia is more about lifestyle, especially in your 30s to 50s, than age or genetics. And, amazingly, retirement might be the single biggest danger zone for your brain health.

Neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood has spent his career studying what actually predicts a declining brain, and the answer has almost nothing to do with age. It's what happens the day you stop being challenged, especially the day you retire. This week: why the smartest, most accomplished people you know may be the ones most at risk, and the two-part check you can run at your next doctor's visit that sets the stage for the next fifty years.

What you'll explore:
Why age-specific dementia rates have quietly been falling for decades, even as headlines warn of a coming epidemic
The real difference between forgetting a name (a retrieval problem) and never actually experiencing it in the first place (an encoding problem), and why only one of those predicts dementia
Tommy's 3S model: stimulus, supply, and support, the framework he uses to make sense of everything that keeps a brain sharp
The truth about brain games, and what really works to keep your brain primed with age
Why the most educated, highest-achieving people often face the steepest cognitive drop right after they stop working
The exact numbers to get checked at your next doctor's visit if you're in your 40s or 50s

If you're standing at the edge of any major life transition, or supporting a parent who is, this conversation will change how you think about what actually protects your mind.

You can find Tommy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Jessica Shepherd, alongside guest host Karen Walrond, to talk about why so much of what we've been told about menopause is either outdated or flat wrong, and what personalized care for this stage of life can actually look like. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

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Every night, while you're asleep, your brain runs a cleaning cycle that clears out the kind of toxic buildup linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And, with age, most of us sleep less. We are shortchanging the benefits without ever realizing how much control we actually have over sleeping longer, and better.

Dr. Rebecca Robbins is an Assistant Professor in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Sleep Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where her research spans sleep's relationship to cognitive function, cardiometabolic health, and long-term brain health. She's published more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, co-authored Sleep for Success!, and her work is exactly the kind of research most of us never hear about until someone frames it the way she does here.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

Why sleep really does shift around age 38 to 40, and what that shift does and doesn't mean for you
The neuroscience discovery of the brain's overnight "wash cycle," and what Dr. Robbins's own eight-year study found about sleep complaints and dementia risk
Why jumping your bedtime back an hour almost never works, and the fifteen-minute method that does
The at-home test Jonathan didn't realize he'd already run on himself
The "sleep divorce" reframe one of Dr. Robbins's patients calls a "sleep marriage," and what it means for couples

If you've quietly decided your sleep is just what it is at this stage of life, this conversation will change what you think is actually possible tonight.

You can find Rebecca at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Tommy Wood to talk about what the research actually shows about keeping your brain sharp across decades, including which levers matter most, what's mostly noise, and what you can realistically start tomorrow, whether you're 45 or 65. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You can have a genuinely excellent self-care practice, the meditation, the training, the tracked sleep, the nutrition, and still be using every bit of it to avoid the one question that actually needed asking.

In this episode, I turn the mic on myself. After 14 years and thousands of conversations about what it takes to live well, I trace the year my own "robust" wellness practice, meditation, training, nutrition, connection, everything, ended in a stress-induced medical diagnosis at the exact moment I'd have called myself the most dialed-in version of my life.

Turns out, you cannot self-care your way out of a fundamental misalignment in a core area of your life.

So, today, we’re exploring:
The real distinction between self-care that restores you and self-care that just makes a misaligned life more bearable, or worse, hides what actually needs your true attention.
Three 90-second tests, duration, imagination, intensity, that tell you honestly which one you're running
The five places structural misalignment hides in midlife, including the "cumulative weight" version almost nobody names
Why subtraction, not another practice, is usually the actual fix
A six-move menu for making one concrete structural change in the next 30 days

If your practice has been working harder for smaller returns lately, this conversation will tell you whether that's a regulation problem or a fit problem, and what to do about either one.

Episode Transcript

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

Mentioned in this episode: How to Finally Have the Talk You’ve Been Avoiding.

Next week, next week we're sitting down with Dr. Rebecca Robbins to talk about why the sleep advice most of us are following was built for a body and a schedule most of us don't actually have anymore. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've been calling it a loneliness epidemic and treating it like a mental health problem. NYU developmental psychologist Niobe Way says that's the wrong diagnosis, and she has almost 40 years of data on teenage boys to make her case.

Niobe Way has spent nearly four decades running longitudinal studies with teenagers, tracking the same kids from middle school into adulthood. Her research on boys, friendship, and masculinity has made her one of the go-to voices on loneliness, connection, and what's actually driving rising rates of depression, anxiety, and violence among young men, along with similar struggles with girls. And, these all tend to follow us well into adulthood. Her latest book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

Why mental health is a symptom, not the root problem, and what Way calls "social health" instead
The moment, around age 15, when boys start hiding their feelings in public
Why boys learn to sacrifice the relationship to protect themselves, and girls learn to sacrifice themselves to protect the relationship
The dinner-table questions that build real closeness instead of shutting kids down
A simple, almost embarrassingly doable practice Way uses with total strangers to rebuild a sense of belonging

Whether you're raising a teenager, trying to figure out why your own friendships have gone thin, or just wondering why everyone feels so alone lately, this conversation reframes the whole question.

You can find Niobe at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, it's just me, flying solo, to talk about the self-care trap: the difference between practices that actually help you thrive, and ones that just help you tolerate a life that no longer fits. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page
Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.
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What if the kindest thing someone told you about your pain was that it didn't have to mean anything?

Marisa Renee Lee has spent her career inside other people's grief and her own. She's the bestselling author of Grief Is Love, a former deputy director in the Obama White House, and now CEO of Beacon Advisors. Her new book, Waiting for Dawn, comes out of her own experience with chronic illness, and it argues against nearly every wellness cliché about turning pain into purpose.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

Why Marisa refuses to promise anyone that their suffering serves a purpose, even her own family's
"Gray grief": a name for the grief that has no end date, no diagnosis, and no cultural script
The difference between identity (what you built) and essence (what's still there when it's gone)
Why she calls hope a discipline, not a feeling, and what that looks like on the worst days
How her family held onto hope through her aunt's most devastating loss, and what happened after

If you've ever felt ashamed for not finding the silver lining in something genuinely hard, this conversation is your permission to put that pressure down.

You can find Marisa at: Website | Instagram | Holding Both Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Niobe Way to talk about why so many of us feel lonelier than ever even when we're surrounded by people, and what decades of research say is actually driving it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page
Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.