【推荐1】There’s more evidence that what’s good for your heart is good for your head. A new study shows that people who run, swim or do other moderate intensity (中等强度) exercise have brains that look, on average, 10 years younger than the brains of couch potatoes.

“Our study showed that for older people, getting moderate intensity exercise may be protective, helping them keep their brains work better,” said Dr. Clinton Wright of the University of Miami, who led the study. But it’s not necessarily easy. Walking, golf, bowling and yoga don’t count, and people need to start before they begin showing memory loss, Wright’s team reported in the journal Neurology.

The study of nearly 900 people who exercise regularly showed that 90 percent fell into the low-intensity group. These people are part of a larger group taking part in a bigger study called Northern Manhattan Study. They were asked how long and how often they exercised during the past two weeks. Five years later, they were tested for memory and thinking skills and got a brain MRI (核磁共振). Seven years after that, they took the memory and thinking tests again. The 10 percent who said they took part in moderate intensity exercise scored better on the tests. These included running, climbing, swimming, riding bicycles and so on.

“We found that those with moderate intensity activity had higher scores and slower memory decline (下降) than inactive people when comparing the results,” the study team wrote.

Many studies have shown that exercise may not prevent Alzheimer’s disease but may delay it. The findings fit in with a study that found two years of exercising, eating healthier food and brain training can promote people’s memory function.

【推荐3】We can all have a bad night of sleep and that’s perfectly normal, but how could we try to improve both the quantity and the quality of our sleep?    1    

Let’s start with regularity.    2    Regularity is king, and it will actually help your sleep, no matter whether it’s the weekday or the weekend or even if you’ve had a bad night of sleep. Many of us use an alarm to wake up but very few of us use a to-bed alarm, and that’s something that can be helpful.

    3    It turns out that your brain and your body need to drop their temperature by about 1℃ in order to begin sleep and then to stay asleep. And this is the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold than too hot.

The third tip is darkness. We need darkness specifically in the evening to produce a hormone called melatonin（褪黑素）. In the last hour before bed, try to stay away from all of those computer screens and phones.    4    You’d actually be quite surprised at how sleepy that can make you feel.

The final tip is to walk it out. Don’t stay in bed awake for long periods of time. And the general rule is that if you’ve woken up and you can’t get back to sleep after 25 minutes,     5    And you can go and do something else. Only return to bed when you’re sleepy. And in that way, gradually, your brain will relearn the relation that your bed is this place of sound and continuous sleep.