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Today’s Health Upgrade
Number you won’t forget
The daily brainpower booster
Weekly wisdom
The day after Christmas (and the mindset to avoid)
Health
Number You Won’t Forget: 5 Years
Most people think of sleep as something they “should get more of.” A recent study offers a wiser perspective: the way you sleep — not just how long — quietly shapes the length of your life. When five simple habits line up, your body behaves as if it has more time.
Researchers created a simple 5-part sleep assessment, and then followed more than 170,000 adults for four years. The assessment included: getting 7–8 hours of sleep, falling asleep easily, staying asleep, waking up refreshed most days, and avoiding sleep medications.
People who checked all five boxes had a 30% lower risk of dying from any cause, including a 21% lower risk of heart-related death and a 19% lower risk of cancer death, compared to those with poor sleep patterns.
Add it all up, and the adults who met all five “healthy sleep” habits lived up to 5 years longer. And the effect held up even after adjusting for lifestyle, health conditions, and socioeconomic factors.
The researchers believe these habits reflect a body whose nightly recovery systems are working the way they’re supposed to: hormones stable, inflammation lower, stress responses calmer, and metabolism running on smoother rails. When sleep is consistently poor, those systems stay under strain, and the risks slowly accumulate.
This was an observational study based on self-reported sleep, so it can’t prove cause and effect. But the pattern is consistent, and this is far from the only study linking quality sleep to longevity.
If you’re looking to improve your rest, here are a few quality checks:
Try to sleep at least 7 hours per night, and ideally, avoid sleeping less than 6 hours
Create a short evening routine (such as reading a book) to make it easier to fall asleep.
If you wake up in the night often, look for triggers like late meals, drinking too much before you sleep, caffeine, screens, or alcohol.
Try to go to sleep and wake up at a similar time each day, which will help you wake up more refreshed.
Together With Babbel
The Daily Practice That Builds Brainpower
Forget brain games. If you want to protect your memory and sharpen your focus, it might be time to pick up a new language.
Researchers found that learning a second language increases grey matter in the parts of your brain responsible for memory, attention, and self-control. And the earlier you start — and the more consistently you practice — the bigger the brain benefit.
Other studies show language learners have faster reaction times, better concentration, and may even delay age-related cognitive decline.
The best part? You don’t need hours of study. Just 10 minutes a day can make a difference.
If you want to start learning a new language in the new year, Babbel is the award-winning language app designed by over 200 linguistic experts, not machines or gimmicks. You’ll get access to bite-sized lessons, binge-worthy podcasts, and real-world speaking practice through.
With Babbel, you can start speaking a new language in as little as three weeks — and keep going all year long. Right now, you can get 65% off a Babbel Lifetime subscription — just $199 for access to every language, forever.
Your muscles aren’t the only part of you that deserves a daily workout. Strengthen your mind, build new skills, and invest in the kind of growth that lasts.
Mindset
Weekly Wisdom
There’s a kind of strength that doesn’t look impressive on the outside. It doesn’t lift more weight or outwork the competition. It doesn’t announce itself or demand credit.
It’s the strength to release what could keep you small.
Forgiveness isn’t permission. It isn’t weakness. And it isn’t forgetting.
It’s choosing to stop carrying the weight that someone else handed you.
It’s the quiet discipline of refusing to let an old wound become today’s identity.
It’s the grace that protects your future instead of preserving your hurt.
The violet doesn’t choose its circumstances — only its response. And in that response, it shows a deeper kind of power: the ability to create something beautiful from something painful. You have that power too.
Because sometimes the strongest thing you can do is stop rehearsing the story of how you were wronged, and start practicing the story of who you’re becoming.
Turn Wisdom Into Action
Identify one resentment you’ve been carrying (big or small) that drains your energy each time you revisit it.
Then let it go.
You’re not excusing what happened. You’re reclaiming the strength it has held onto.
Let forgiveness be the weight you finally set down.
Better Questions, Better Solutions
The Holiday Shutdown Trap
The mindset that sneaks in after Christmas (and how to escape it).
The Old Question: “Why did I lose control this week?”
The Better Question: “What story am I telling myself that makes me think a few days erase an entire year of progress?”
It’s the day after Christmas. Where’s your mind at right now? Hopefully, somewhere good, no matter what happened yesterday.
But if not, if you ate or drank more than you wanted, pause before you misinterpret what’s really going on.
When you blame yourself for holiday eating or drinking, you’re not reacting to the choices — you’re reacting to the story. The “I blew it” narrative convinces you to stop trying altogether. But when you question that story, you realize nothing is broken, except the belief that progress only counts when it’s perfect.
Researchers who study habit maintenance consistently find the same pattern: people don’t fail because they slip; they fail because they interpret the slip as proof they can’t succeed.
Scientists have examined why people abandon goals in the final weeks of the year. A common theme wasn’t what they ate or how much they exercised, but whether they believed a setback meant they should “start over” on an artificial date.
This works against you every time. Your body doesn’t operate on a calendar. A few heavier meals don’t undo months of effort. And a few days of return-to-normal behaviors are enough to settle things back into place.
Don’t start over. Resume.
Instead of checking out until January 1, ask: “What’s the smallest action that reconnects me to who I want to be today?” A walk. A glass of water. A protein-forward meal. One early bedtime.
Small steps today beat perfect steps later, because the healthiest people aren’t the ones who avoid December slips. They’re the ones who don’t let those slips become a story about failure.
We can’t believe it, but the new year is around the corner. We’ll be back on Monday, but we hope you enjoy your final weekend of 2025!
-Arnold, Adam, and Daniel
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
