Adopting even just one of these easy strategies can make a meaningful difference in how you feel and function.Are you feeling mentally ready for 2025?Whatever your answer, there are some tried-and-true habits to help you feel sharp, alive and well in the coming year — and they’re easy to practice.As journalists who cover the mind and brain, we are continually asking experts about the behaviors, conditions and outlooks that influence mental and cognitive health. The tips listed here — some of our favorites from the past year — aren’t meant to ensure you’ll be upbeat and performing at your best 24/7 (frankly, that just isn’t realistic), but they can help you build resilience, find balance and prioritize the things that you hold most dear.1. Move your body.If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it 1,000 times: Physical activity is one of the best things you can do for your brain.Immediately after a workout, people tend to report feeling better emotionally, and their performance on tests of working memory and other cognitive functions improves. But the real benefits come from exercising consistently over time: People who do have a lower risk of developing depression and dementia.How can exercise do all this? Scientists think that moving your body leads to extra blood flow and chemicals released in the brain, which can help build new connections between neurons. In both depression and dementia, many of these connections are lost, so a beefed-up brain can serve as a buffer against impairment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Kevin Lopez had just stepped out of his house, on his way to meet his girlfriend for Chinese food, when it happened: He began to hallucinate.It was just a flicker, really. He saw a leaf fall, or the shadow of a leaf, and thought it was the figure of a person running. For a moment, on a clear night last month, this fast-moving darkness seemed to hurtle in his direction and a current of fear ran through him.He climbed into the car, and the door shut and latched behind him with a reassuring thunk.“It’s nothing,” he said. “I don’t know why — I think there’s a person there.”Light had always caused problems for Kevin when symptoms of schizophrenia came on. He thought that the lights were watching him, like an eye or a camera, or that on the other side of the light, something menacing was crouched, ready to attack.But over time, he had found ways to manage these episodes; they passed, like a leg cramp or a migraine. That night, he focused on things that he knew were real, like the vinyl of the car seat and the chill of the winter air.He was dressed for a night out, with fat gemstones in his ears, and had taken a break from his graduate coursework in computer science at Boston University. A “big bearish, handsome nerd” is the way he styled himself at 24.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

In his decades as a former president, he and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, helped bring lifesaving treatments and sanitation to poor people around the world.Jimmy Carter’s five decades of leadership in global health brought a hideous disease to the brink of elimination, helped deliver basic health and sanitation to millions of people and set a new standard for how aid agencies should engage with the countries they assist.It was quiet work and drew relatively little attention because it was focused on afflictions that plague the poorest people in the most marginalized places, but it had enormous impact.“The work in global health may turn out to be some of the most important work that he did,” said Dr. William H. Foege, who helped lead the successful effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s and played a key role in drawing the former president into the field of global health after he left office.Mr. Carter, the former president who died on Sunday at age 100, saw his health-care work through the prism of a larger effort for basic rights and as a tool for peace building.“We believe access to health care is a human right, especially among poor people afflicted with disease who are forgotten, ignored and often without hope,” he wrote in 2001 after a trip to lobby Latin American leaders on neglected diseases. “Just to know that someone cares about them not only can ease their physical pain but also remove an element of alienation and anger that can lead to hatred and violence.”He used his rare status as a former head of state to lobby presidents and prime ministers on behalf of their poorest citizens. He and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, trekked to remote corners of countries including Chad and Ethiopia to visit and comfort the sick. Then they traveled back to capital cities where in private meetings or, if those did not produce results, news conferences, they pressed for action on behalf of those same people.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

John ThompsonJames Hunt used to spend his days commuting to London, where he ran a successful marketing firm.

A community first responder has been praised for “almost certainly saving the life” of a man in his village by attending a 999 call about chest pains as he neared the end of his shift.

Jenny Smith PhotographyHundreds of women who are “plunged into surgical menopause” are “being failed by the NHS”, says a menopause support campaigner.

Isobel PerlFour years ago, Isobel Perl was living with friends in London and thriving. She was working for a big accountancy firm and had a busy social life.

Tiny genetic alterations could help the bird flu virus enter cells in the upper respiratory tract, the C.D.C. said. But there is no sign that mutations are widespread in nature.After someone in southwest Louisiana was hospitalized with a severe case of bird flu, the first such illness reported in the United States, health workers swabbed the person’s nose and throat, looking for genetic clues about the virus.On Thursday, federal health officials reported some unsettling results. Some of the genetic samples contained mutations that in theory might help the bird flu virus, H5N1, infect people more easily.One of those mutations was reported last month in a viral sample taken from a teenager with a severe case of bird flu in British Columbia, Canada. The teenager was placed on a ventilator during a long hospitalization.Worrying as those severe cases are, the new report about the Louisiana patient contained some reassuring findings, scientists said.For one thing, the mutations seemed to develop as the virus adapted to its human host. The genetic changes were not present in H5N1 samples from a backyard poultry flock that infected the patient, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.That suggested that viruses in nature had not yet acquired the concerning mutations. Still, every additional human case gives H5N1 more opportunities to adapt to people, potentially making it more capable of spreading from one person to the next.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The astronauts on the I.S.S. — including two who were scheduled to return months ago — held a zero-gravity cookie-decorating contest and built a reindeer from storage bags.In June, two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, set out for what was expected to be an eight-day trip to the International Space Station.On Wednesday — around six months and several spacecraft malfunctions later — they donned Santa Claus hats and wished their families the best from hundreds of miles above sea level as their tenure, which is likely to keep them in Earth’s orbit for at least two more months, stretched on.Ms. Williams, 59, and Mr. Wilmore, 61, docked at the space station during a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner, which was intended to be a commercial option for ferrying people to and from the station.But after a spate of malfunctions called the safety of the return flight into question, NASA leaders decided to bring the Starliner to Earth uncrewed, leaving the two astronauts behind until another aircraft can take them back.So Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore had a chance to participate in the long, strange tradition of celebrating the holidays in space, which began in 1968 when the Apollo 8 astronauts read verses from the Book of Genesis while broadcasting a video of the lunar surface to roughly one billion viewers.A view of the rising Earth greeted Apollo 8 astronauts as they approached from behind the moon on Christmas Eve 1968.NASAWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Sofia BrizioSofia Brizo spends four hours a day on what she calls “disability admin”.