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Key takeaways:
Stimulation
The first S, Stimulation, is the one that surprises people. Tommy’s argument is that the brain, like muscle, needs ongoing challenges to maintain its structure. The novelty is the variable. Doing the same crossword every day is not stimulation in the sense your brain cares about. Learning a language, taking up a new instrument, taking a class on something you have no prior context for, are stimulating.
This connects to what is called cognitive reserve, the buffer your brain builds through years of varied learning. Cognitive reserve is one of the strongest predictors of who maintains function in their 70s and 80s, even in the presence of pathology like amyloid plaques.
What you can do this week: pick one thing this month that you do not already know how to do. It does not have to be heavy. A new recipe technique, a new fitness class, a new route on your morning walk that requires you to navigate. The brain treats novelty as a signal that it needs to keep adapting.
Support
The second S is the one most people know is important and still underestimate. Recovery, especially during sleep, is when the brain adapts and improves.
While you sleep, your brain runs a waste-clearance system that flushes out the proteins that build up during the day, including amyloid, the same protein that accumulates in Alzheimer’s disease. Think of it like a dishwasher that only runs at night. Skip enough nights, or get consistently shallow sleep, and the dishes pile up. Disrupted sleep is associated with elevated pTau-217, lower cognitive scores, and higher long-term dementia risk.
Tommy is direct about this in the book: there is no supplement protocol that compensates for chronically poor sleep. And the work has to start with the structure of your sleep itself, meaning how much time you actually spend in the deep and REM stages, not just how many hours you’re in bed. You can sleep eight hours and still miss most of the stages where the real restoration happens.
What you can do this week: protect a consistent wake time. The wake time matters more than the bedtime because it anchors your body’s internal clock. Pair it with morning light within 30 minutes of getting up, and you’ve done more for your sleep quality than most people manage with supplements or sleep trackers alone.
Supply
The third S is where a meaningful part of your biomarker picture lives, though it’s worth noting that sleep and stimulation have their own markers too. Your brain runs on a continuous supply of glucose, oxygen, omega-3 fatty acids, B vitamins, and a long list of micronutrients. Deficits in any of these can quietly compromise function for years before they show up as symptoms. And the flip side is equally true: when these markers are at optimal levels, they actively protect your brain, often for decades.
The first place to look is diet. What you eat every day is the primary driver of whether your brain gets what it needs, and it’s also the first lever your coach will pull when something looks off. Targeted supplementation comes second, once you know where the gaps actually are.
The biomarkers we look at first in the Blueprint panel are homocysteine, vitamin D, vitamin B12, ferritin, and folate. These are the ones most likely to flag a nutrient supply problem before you feel it. And the fix is usually targeted, not maximal. Most clients don’t need fifteen supplements. They need the right two or three, chosen based on what their labs actually show.
If you haven’t had a full brain-health panel in the past year, that’s where to start. The reason we look at the whole picture rather than a single marker is that everything is connected. Your metabolic health affects your brain. Your inflammatory markers affect your brain. Your cardiovascular health affects your brain. A nutrient gap rarely shows up in isolation, and the right intervention for you depends on seeing how all of it fits together, not just the one number that looks off.
Why all three matter together
The argument the book makes is that the components that support brain health aren’t a long list of individual variables, but an integrated network. Stimulation without sleep does not give the brain time to consolidate. Sleep without nutrient supply leaves the brain trying to do its overnight work without raw materials. Nutrient supply without stimulation gives the brain everything it needs to grow but no reason to.
This is consistent with what BetterBrain’s coaches see in practice. Clients who arrive working hard on one of the three but ignoring the others tend to plateau. The ones who address all three see the biggest shifts in biomarkers, cognitive scores, and how they actually feel.
The Bottom Line
The Stimulated Mind is the best communication of modern brain science today and is worth reading whether you are at the beginning of thinking about your brain health or several years into a protocol. The three s model is an incredible framework and working with our coaches to find the right techniques across the 12 practices will help you make sure you are improving at all three S’s.
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