Key takeaways:
Meet Ana Hernandez, RD: Brain Health Coach
Ana is a Registered Dietitian with over 20 years of experience helping people build habits that stick. A New Mexico native and mom of two teenage sons, she believes that understanding why we make the choices we do is just as important as knowing what to do. Her approach is collaborative, helping clients build routines that support clarity, emotional steadiness, and long-term well-being in the context of real life.
What draws Ana to working with BetterBrain clients is the opportunity to support her clients in a truly holistic way. "The mind and body are not separate systems. Helping clients understand that nurturing their brain is also a way of tending to the whole body is preventative medicine at its best!"
A transformative Coaching Program journey
"One of my clients came to our first appointment completely overwhelmed. She was raising four children, supporting a mother with dementia, and working two jobs. We started simply: ordering the BetterBrain essentials labs. In our second session, after the results came back, they helped us identify clear opportunities for action. She reinitiated key medications she had stopped taking, we worked on supporting her circadian rhythm for better sleep quality, and we made small, non-restrictive shifts to her nutrition.
Over seven weeks and five appointments, her energy and focus have shown subtle but real improvement. Her habits around sleep, movement, and technology use are small but compounding. That compounding creates psychological momentum, and that momentum becomes its own motivation. It is a powerful reminder of how much consistent, small shifts can do."
Ana's Top Recommendations
"I go to Body Jam twice a week. It's a Les Mills dance fitness class that blends hip hop, Latin, and street dance into a high-energy group workout set to current music. Reconnecting with this kind of movement from my childhood has been genuinely life-changing.
It brings together so many of the things we know protect the brain: friendship, joy, flow state, cardiovascular challenge, and something researchers call collective effervescence, that intense sense of energy, unity, and shared emotion that happens when people move together toward a common purpose."
In our BetterBrain portal the technique summary for the practice is "Dance is unique in that it simultaneously integrates motor coordination, balance, memory, and emotional expression, activating multiple brain regions at once. Longitudinal research consistently shows that regular dancers have a significantly lower risk of dementia compared to non-dancers. One landmark study found up to a 76% reduction.
If you want to protect your brain, add challenge and joy to your movement routine, I believe Dance is hard to beat.
A mindset shift that makes a big difference
“Our brains have a negativity bias. We are wired to scan for what is not working. Add in the information overload of modern life, and motivation can fade fast even when real progress is happening.
In every coaching session, I start by reviewing the small things that went well: a habit that stuck, a moment of feeling better, a choice that aligned with a value. This is not just feel-good coaching. Recognizing and naming wins activates the brain’s reward circuitry, reinforcing the neural pathways that make a behavior more likely to repeat. That is neuroplasticity in action.
I also remind clients that the knowing-doing gap is real for everyone. Motivation is a state that fluctuates. Progress is not linear. Normalizing that, and building in a daily practice of noticing even the smallest forward movement, helps recalibrate the brain away from deficit and toward momentum.
When clients feel stuck, I ask: what is one thing, however small, that went better this week? Start there.”
Her go-to brain-boosting ritual
“Most mornings or evenings I take what I call an AWE walk, and it has become one of my most anchoring practices.
Awe is a complex emotional state that arises when we encounter something vast, beautiful, or beyond our current understanding, something that challenges the way we see the world. We tend to think of awe as rare: the first time you stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or watched the Northern Lights. Those experiences are profound, but most of us cannot access them daily.
What science is revealing is that we do not need grand spectacles. Awe is available in small doses, every day. I find it in the way the sunset colors the Sandia Mountains, the first blooms appearing on a tree, or the way wildflowers may bloom in strange places. Researchers call this “everyday awe,” and its effects on our biology are measurable and meaningful.”
A 2020 study published in Emotion by Virginia Sturm and colleagues at UC San Francisco found that participants who took weekly awe walks for eight weeks reported greater positive emotions, less distress, and showed increases in positive affect compared to a control group who took ordinary walks. The awe walkers also showed reductions in self-reported stress, and the researchers observed changes in how participants oriented their attention, shifting from inward rumination to outward curiosity.
Dacher Keltner’s lab at UC Berkeley has similarly found that awe reduces levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, the same markers linked to chronic stress, cognitive decline, and depression. Awe also quiets the default mode network, the brain region most associated with worry and self-referential thought, which is why it tends to produce that distinctive feeling of calm clarity.
Researchers also describe a “small self” effect: when we encounter something larger than ourselves, our problems shift in scale. Stress becomes more manageable. Perspective returns. And none of it requires a trip to a national park. It just requires slowing down enough to actually look.
The simplest practice: on your next walk, look up. Notice the sky, the sunset, the flowers, the glistening of the snow on the sidewalk. Your brain will thank you.
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