I am a big believer in the power of supplements to address nutritional deficiencies and to support your body’s natural chemical processes, including detoxification.

I’ve spent 15 years studying the brain, and five years as a medical director of a residential memory care facility. Nearly every patient I see leaves with a list of recommended supplements.

There are five supplements that I recommend to just about everyone — although I suggest working with your healthcare provider to discuss if they are appropriate for you, dosages and possible interactions with any medications you may be taking. Some nutrients and herbs can interact with prescribed medications in potentially dangerous ways, such as nootropics and mood-stabilizing psychiatric medications.

“Nootropic” is a fancy word for a substance that supports cognitive function. They typically include a blend of vitamins, fats, amino acids, herbs and sometimes caffeine.

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My personal experience with nootropics is that they help with focus, mental clarity, mood and better-quality sleep. It can give you a level up on days that you haven’t gotten enough rest or eaten well.

I take them on days I’m giving talks or when I have a lot of work to get through and need to be on all day —they help me power through, feel productive and sleep better at night.

These fat-soluble vitamins have roles all over the body, particularly in maintaining bone health, but they are also directly related to brain health.

Although we don’t fully understand the connection between vitamin D and cognitive functions, when people have enough vitamin D, it appears to prevent cognitive decline.

Vitamin K works with D to direct calcium into the bones. Like vitamin D, having higher levels of circulating vitamin K is associated with better cognitive function.

Omega-3 essential fatty acids are anti-inflammatory — and are believed to help reduce neuroinflammation and heart disease risk (and what’s good for the heart is also good for the brain).

In addition, when there are ample omega-3s on hand in the bloodstream, they become incorporated into cellular membranes throughout the body, including brain cells. Once there, they enable those membranes to stay pliable and well functioning.

No matter what kind you buy, you want to store them in the fridge so that they don’t become rancid — in which case they become harmful to your cells, not helpful.

Probiotics help improve your gut health, and there is a strong documented link between gut health and brain health. Your friendly gut bacteria help digest your food, making the nutrients more bio-available so that you can assimilate more of them.

They also manufacture neurotransmitters, playing a crucial role in mood and mindset — which we know, thanks to research by Becca Levy, an associate professor at Yale University’s School of Public Health and Psychology, have a huge influence on our dementia risk.

As you age, your levels of hydrochloric acid — which helps break down your food so that you can access and assimilate the nutrients within it — decline. Taking digestive enzymes in supplement form can counteract this decline and help your body adjust to a healthier diet.

There are different types of digestive enzyme supplements, and different enzymes help break down different categories of foods. For example, lipase helps break down fats, protease targets proteins, and lactase breaks down the naturally occurring sugar called lactose in dairy products.

Hydrochloric acid helps digest everything, but it can aggravate acid reflux if you have it.

Ideally, you’d work with a healthcare professional who can steer you toward a digestive enzyme that will help you digest your food and assimilate nutrients in a meaningful way, as well as help with bloat, indigestion and nutrient depletion.

Dr. Heather Sandison is a naturopathic doctor specializing in neurocognitive medicine and the founder of Solcere Health Clinic, a brain optimization clinic, and Marama, the first residential memory care facility to have the goal of returning cognitively declined residents to independent living. Her latest book, “Reversing Alzheimer’s” is out now.

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What’s in short supply for just about everyone these days? A sense of control and influence. 

Things might seem like they’re increasingly out of our hands, impossible to understand let alone alter. But the truth is that you can have more influence — at least in your immediate circles — with just a few words.

I’ve been studying how influence works for 30 years, and even wrote a popular book about it: “Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization.” 

Here are six phrases that will give you more influence over people — both at work and in life. 

Everyone likes praise. But it becomes influential when you give a special brand of praise I call “informed encouragement.” That is, encouragement that’s backed up with specific reasons and rationale.

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For example, you could just say “Great job!” to your child. Or you can say, “Great job! You worked hard studying for that test, tackling material that didn’t come easily. You persevered and learned a lesson about overcoming obstacles.” 

The specificity gives the praise credibility and power. When the recipient understands what they did well, sees why it matters, and knows that you notice and appreciate it, they’ll be more motivated to do it again.

One of the easiest ways to have more influence is to truly listen. Think of how drawn you are to someone who’s really attentive, and how frustrated you feel when you know they’re not. 

As a listener, you have two goals:

1. Understand what’s being said.
2. Show the other person you’re interested, engaged, and invested in them and what they’re telling you.

You accomplish all of this by asking questions and prompting them at the right moments to “tell you more” (or asking, “What happened next?” or, “How did you feel about that?”).

As you listen, use acknowledging rather than discounting language. For example, instead of saying, “Oh, it’ll be okay,” try something like, “I hear you, sounds like you’re frustrated with your husband’s behavior right now.” 

By using validating, empathetic language, you’ll make people feel heard rather than dismissed. You’ll build the trust it takes to earn respect and influence.

The key here is the “er,” a subtle but powerful word change. I’ll explain. Influence is sometimes about appealing to people’s desired identity. For example:

• Don’t ask people to help, ask them to be a helper.
• Don’t ask them to lead, ask them to be a leader.
• Don’t ask them to listen, ask them to be a listener.

You’ll get a “yes” far more often. After all, who wouldn’t want to be thought of as a helper, leader, or listener? These are all identities we’d love to be associated with. 

This language swap also works to discourage undesirable actions. In one psychology study, participants were given the opportunity to claim money they weren’t entitled to. Some were instructed, “Please don’t cheat,” and others, “Please don’t be a cheater.”

Those who heard the latter — who were instructed with an appeal to their identity — showed no evidence of cheating because the experimenters had invoked “people’s desire to maintain a self-image as good and honest.”

The key here is “you have.” This is about helping people feel ownership of ideas, and motivating them to move forward. It’s a subtle form of influence, but it works. Think about it: Would you be more excited to work on someone else’s idea, or one you came up with? No contest. 

Let’s say a coworker shares an idea you were thinking about too, something you’d really like to implement. You know you’d need your peer’s help to make it happen. You could try to wrestle credit away from them and make them less inspired to help, or you can say, “That’s a good idea you have. Let’s run with it.”

Just like that, you’ve linked your agenda to their agenda. 

Notice I didn’t say, “Can I get your help?” Seeking advice is far more influential.

People often feel flattered that you value their opinion and expertise and because you’re asking for their advice, they’ll try to see things through your eyes. They’ll often become your supporters as a result, because now they’ve invested in you by sharing their wisdom. 

This is about supporting the people around you as you’d like to be supported, and understanding human nature to trigger good will and reciprocity. 

Offering to help someone with something that’s important to them — and, crucially, following through to make good on your offer — makes them more likely to want to help you with something that’s important to you down the line. 

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

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One simple skill can help you succeed — in business, relationships or anything else — more than nearly any other, says billionaire entrepreneur Ron Shaich.

Simple, though perhaps not easy: You need to be able to combine long-term vision with short-term execution. “You have to be both strategic and detailed,” says Shaich, 71, the former Panera Bread co-founder who sold that business for $7.5 billion in 2017 and is now chairman of multiple restaurant chains including Cava and Tatte.

“The real key in running and building [a business] — in doing almost anything — is to actually be able to operate on multiple planes at the same time, to be thinking five years [ahead] and then thinking [about the next] five weeks,” says Shaich, whose net worth was most recently estimated at $1.6 billion by Bloomberg.

If you want to advance your career or enrich your personal life, you’ll benefit from having a clear idea of what you hope to accomplish, possibly even years in advance, says Shaich.

Simultaneously, successful people are proactive enough to recognize and act on the first steps they need to take — and detail-oriented enough to know which steps they aren’t ready for yet, he says.

″[It’s] a continual process of asking: ‘What is it today? What is it that in three years, four years, five years, when we look at ourselves at that point, we’re going to wish we had done today?’ That’s the most important question we’re asking,” he says.

Each year, Shaich spends a day or two writing down goals he wants to achieve in the coming few years. They cover everything from physical health — exercising more, building up to be able to run a 10K — to enhancing his cognitive and spiritual health by learning to play chess and studying Judaism, he says.

Then, he maps out exactly what incremental steps he first needs to take, and when. He checks the list every few months to ensure he’s on track, or make adjustments if he thinks he’s falling behind, he says.

“You need to hold yourself accountable,” Shaich says. “It isn’t enough to write it [down]. You’ve got to sit down [and], in a clear way, say, ‘This is how I’m getting there.’”

Other leaders tend to share the same sentiment, according to a 2024 survey by consulting group McKinsey of more than 600 executives and managers from companies around the world. Roughly half of respondents said organizations that make short-term decisions that fully align with the companies’ long-term goals were “much more likely” to report revenue growth that outpaced competitors, McKinsey said.

As CEO of Panera, Shaich set a long-term goal in 2010 of using technology to improve customer experiences and stay relevant in the long run, he wrote in his 2023 book, “Know What Matters.” His shorter-term steps toward accomplishing that goal included digital ordering and mobile payments, he wrote.

Those initiatives cost money to implement. But long-term success requires putting your ultimate plan ahead of “making a few dollars more” in the immediate future, Shaich told CNBC Make It in 2023: “It’s really about the deeper issues: What is it you are trying to create with your life? What are you going to respect?”

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If you’re young and looking to build wealth, you may not care about dividends. After all, the cash distributions companies pay to shareholders are often seen as a way for retirees to earn some extra income from their portfolio.

But if you’re invested broadly in the U.S. stock market, dividends may be doing more heavy lifting than you think when it comes to boosting your bottom line.

Consider the historical returns of the S&P 500. From 1960 through 2024, a $10,000 investment in the index would have grown to more than $982,000 based solely on the upward trajectory in stock prices, according to a CNBC analysis of data from FactSet and NYU Stern.

But all the while, many of those companies were distributing cash to shareholders. If an investor during that period had reinvested that cash — as many investors do — they’d start 2025 with $6.42 million.

Going back to 1960, compounding growth of reinvested dividends has accounted for 85% of the S&P 500′s total return, according to Hartford Funds.

It’s easy, then, to see why some investors make dividends a focal point of their portfolios.

“There’s some comfort you can get by homing in on those [dividend-paying] companies,” says Brian Bollinger, founder of Simply Safe Dividends. And for younger investors, he adds, you can “make a really long-term focused dividend growth portfolio that’s optimized more for long-term capital appreciation and total return.”

As the data implies, if you own an S&P 500 fund or similar broad market index fund, you already have dividends working for you. And if you want to add an extra dividend component to your portfolio, there are plenty of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that allow investors to take advantage of dividend strategies.

A quick refresher on how dividends work. Profitable companies have a choice of what to do with their excess cash. Some growth-focused firms may elect to reinvest it all back into the business, say by opening new locations or funding product research.

Many financially mature firms choose to distribute some of that money back to shareholders as a sort of token of gratitude. These regular cash payments are dividends, and if you’re invested in a broad stock index, chances are you’re already getting them.

To quantify a stock’s dividend, investors look to the dividend yield — a calculation which divides the amount of cash you receive in a year, per share, by the stock’s price. If you owned a stock worth $100 and received quarterly payments of $0.25, you’d divide your $1 annual payout by $100 for a 1% yield.

The S&P 500 currently does a little better than that, with a yield of about 1.3%.

That means, for every $1,000 in your S&P 500 ETF, you’re getting about $13 a year deposited into your brokerage account in cash. Reinvest that back into the fund you own, and congratulations, you’re taking advantage of the compounding mentioned above.

If you want to increase your portfolio’s dividend exposure, you can add a mutual fund or ETF that focuses on dividends, which tend to come in one of two basic flavors.

1. Dividend growth

These funds typically focus on companies that have increased the value of their payout on a yearly basis over a certain period of time. The thinking here is that companies that have a long track record of boosting their dividends are likely to continue doing so in the future.

“It’s not guaranteed,” says Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at TMX VettaFi. “But they’re more likely to do so because it’s part of their ethos.”

Funds that follow the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index, for instance, will invest in companies that have raised their payout for at least 25 consecutive years. A fund following the S&P 500 Dividend Growers Index would require 10 years of growth.

These funds will prominently feature what investors call high-quality, or even blue-chip stocks, says Dan Sotiroff, a senior manager research analyst at Morningstar. “Those are usually the types of companies that have really stable balance sheets. They’re consistently profitable year over year,” he says.

2. Equity income

Rather than focusing on growing payouts, equity income funds look to own stocks with high yields.

“This is what a lot of people think of when they think of dividend funds, and that’s dividend income,” says Sotiroff. “It’s where you see a lot of retirees because they want a regular payment.”

Funds that track the FTSE High Dividend Yield Index, for instance, yield 2.6% — double what you’d get with the S&P.

You’re unlikely to get dynamic price appreciation from these funds, says Rosenbluth. That’s because they tend to be concentrated in slower-growing sectors that traditionally hold up well when markets decline, such as consumer staples and utilities.

“With a yield-focused strategy, you tend to get a bit more exposure to some of those defensive sectors,” he says.

The FTSE index, for instance, has its heaviest weighting — 23% — in financial stocks, compared with a 10% holding in tech firms.

Whether you favor one style of dividend fund or the other comes down to your goals as an investor, says Rosenbluth.

“Investors need to decide whether they want some dividend income to add to the capital appreciation upside for the total return, or are they looking for dividends to be more of an income generator where the capital appreciation is less meaningful?” he says.

If it’s the former, opt to add a dividend growth fund to your core portfolio, he says. If it’s the latter, choose a high-yield strategy.

But make sure you look under the hood. Even though two funds may be branded the same way, they could have very different holdings once you dig into their portfolio strategies.

“One fund’s technology stocks might be Broadcom and Microsoft, another’s might be IBM,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with either. Check the fund website and holdings to make sure it’s something you want to hold.”

And keep in mind, financial pros recommend against making any wholesale changes to your portfolio in order to pursue a dividend strategy. You can always ask a trusted financial advisor to help steer you in the right direction.

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Kids who communicate well, handle emotions effectively and build healthy relationships aren’t just naturally skilled at social interactions. They’ve learned these skills from their parents or trusted adults.

I’ve worked with thousands of kids and families, often helping them navigate tough moments. People skills — like empathy, communication, boundary-setting and conflict resolution — are crucial during life’s biggest challenges. They also shape how kids handle everyday stress, friendships and family dynamics. 

Here are six things that parents who raise kids with strong people skills do on a regular basis:

Rather than shielding their kids and avoiding difficult topics like illness, death or big life changes, these parents build trusting relationships by approaching tough conversations with openness, honesty and compassion.

They use simple, clear language and invite questions, teaching children that it’s okay to talk about uncomfortable topics and to seek support. 

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Parents who create a home environment where kids feel safe expressing their thoughts and emotions raise children who have an easier time communicating and advocating for themselves. 

These parents are comfortable naming and showing their own emotions in front of their kids, including joy and playfulness in difficult times. 

When their children feel frustrated, sad or overwhelmed, they don’t dismiss those emotions or say things like, “Don’t cry,” “It’s not a big deal,” or “You’re okay.” Instead, they validate their child’s experience:

• “It’s okay to cry. I’m here with you.”
• “I see you’re feeling upset.”
• “Your feelings make sense.”

This teaches kids that all feelings are okay, helps them learn and practice coping strategies to regulate their emotions, and allows them to feel safe expressing themselves. 

When conflicts or challenges arise, these parents don’t force quick apologies. Instead, they guide their children to consider the other person’s feelings, asking questions like:

• “How do you think your friend feels about what just happened?”
• “Does your sibling seem okay right now?”
• “What do you think would help them feel better?”

This helps kids develop perspective-taking skills, gives them a better understanding of what’s within their control, and shows them how both their actions and external factors impact others — ultimately making their apologies more meaningful and their relationships stronger.

Rather than immediately stepping in to fix conflicts or ease discomfort, these parents empower their kids to navigate challenges themselves. Instead of dictating solutions, they ask:

• “What do you think we could try to make this better?”
• “Would you like some ideas, or do you want to try something first?”

They help their children recognize when they need to set a boundary, teaching them to express limits clearly and respectfully:

• “I don’t like that. Please stop.”
• “I need some space right now.”
• “I’m not comfortable with that.”

By combining problem-solving with boundary-setting, parents help their kids develop the confidence to advocate for themselves and work through social challenges. They also recognize that not every situation has a clear solution or a quick fix — and in those moments, they focus on providing support. 

Instead of pushing their kids into new interactions and hoping they’ll figure it out, these parents set kids up for success by preparing them ahead of time and giving them opportunities to practice.

They help their kids feel more confident by:

• Talking about what to expect before a new event, like a medical procedure or birthday party: “We’re going to the doctor for a check-up. They’ll measure how you’re growing, listen to your heart and lungs, and look inside your ears, nose, and mouth.”
• Role-playing tricky interactions, such as advocating for their needs. “Let’s practice what you might say if someone keeps asking why you can’t eat the cupcake.”
• Teaching them how to set boundaries in social situations: “If someone is pressuring you to do something that feels unsafe or unkind, what can you say?”

Play isn’t just about having fun. The parents I’ve seen raise socially and emotionally skilled kids aren’t afraid to be silly, but they also understand that play is a child’s natural way of processing emotions, working through challenges, and building relationships. They:

• Engage in play to help kids work through tricky situations or feelings: “Whoa! Lets get those mad feelings out in a safe way. Can you pretend to be a bear or imagine blowing out birthday candles!?”
• Prioritize unstructured play time for kids to feel connected and build their own creativity, cooperation and confidence: “You have my undivided attention right now. What would you like to play? I want you to be in charge of the game.” 
• Use playful moments to prepare for new experiences and teach boundaries, empathy and communication: “Teddy needs a check up! Can you play doctor with him?”

By valuing play, these parents establish connection and trust while helping their kids develop social and emotional skills that are critical for their growth and development — and will serve them for a lifetime. 

Kelsey Mora is Certified Child Life Specialist and Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor who provides custom support, guidance, and resources to parents, families, and communities impacted by medical conditions, trauma, grief, and everyday life stress. She is a private practice owner, mom of two, the creator and author of The Method Workbooks, and the Chief Clinical Officer of the nonprofit organization Pickles Group.

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