After 20 years of treating heart disease, clogged arteries and metabolic dysfunction, I began to notice a less discussed driver of cardiovascular health: what happens in the hours after the workday ends.

Heart disease develops over years through repeated signals, including blood pressure patterns, inflammation, glucose regulation and sleep quality. Many of these are shaped by routine evening behaviors. Nighttime choices determine whether the body shifts into repair or stays in stress mode.

Here are seven things I consistently avoid after 7 p.m. as a cardiologist.

Metabolic function follows circadian rhythms. In the evening, insulin sensitivity declines and the body becomes less efficient at processing glucose and fats. Late meals are associated with higher post-meal blood sugar levels, impaired lipid metabolism and increased inflammatory signaling.

Research on time-restricted eating shows that earlier meal timing supports healthier blood pressure, glucose control and cardiovascular risk markers. Nighttime digestion also competes with the body’s overnight repair processes, which are critical for vascular health.

Exposure to bright, blue-heavy light after sunset suppresses melatonin release. Melatonin plays a role in sleep regulation, blood pressure control, and antioxidant activity within the cardiovascular system.

Studies have linked nighttime light exposure with increased risk of coronary heart disease and disruption of normal nighttime blood pressure patterns.

Opt for warm bulbs and eye level lamps to mimic the lighting conditions of sunset. I even use red lightbulbs in my bathroom to brush my teeth and get ready for bed.

Your nervous system doesn’t know it’s just a show. Whether it’s a political debate, a reality TV meltdown or a high-stakes playoff game, psychological stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing heart rate and blood pressure.

Decades of research show that both acute and chronic stress contribute to endothelial dysfunction — the earliest stage of cardiovascular disease. In people with underlying risk, intense emotional stress can even trigger real cardiac events.

Personally? I love a good series as much as anyone. I just don’t watch it at night. I’ll save other people’s crazy drama for the weekend, when my nervous system can afford the hit. Revving your stress hormones right before sleep is like flooring the gas pedal as you pull into the garage.

Exercise is one of the best things you can do for your heart, but timing matters.

Hard workouts late at night keep cortisol elevated and delay the shift from fight-or-flight into rest-and-repair mode. That can delay sleep onset, raise overnight heart rate and reduce heart-rate variability (an important marker of cardiovascular resilience.)

Yes, some movement is always better than no movement. But high-intensity training at 9 p.m., for example, often compromises recovery, which is where the real cardiovascular benefits actually happen. Your heart needs a runway to slow down, not one last sprint before midnight.

Alcohol feels relaxing. Physiologically, it’s doing the opposite. Even moderate evening drinking disrupts sleep architecture, suppresses REM sleep and interferes with melatonin production.

It also raises resting heart rate and blunts the normal overnight drop in blood pressure, a pattern strongly associated with increased cardiovascular risk. Poor sleep amplifies inflammation and worsens metabolic regulation, compounding long-term heart risk.

Anger and emotional stress have very real cardiovascular consequences. Acute stress spikes cortisol, lowers heart-rate variability, and can trigger arrhythmias or cardiac events in vulnerable individuals.

Evening arguments with the wife don’t just ruin the mood; they flood your system with stress hormones at the exact time your body should be powering down. Some conversations matter. They just don’t all need to happen tonight. 

Phones, tablets, and televisions emit blue light that delays melatonin release and shifts circadian timing. This leads to later sleep onset and reduced sleep quality.

Chronic sleep disruption is independently associated with hypertension, insulin resistance, inflammation, and elevated cardiovascular risk. Protecting sleep consistency supports long-term cardiac function.

Of course, I always recommend consulting with your physician before making any drastic changes to your routine. For me, after 7 p.m., my rule is simple: Reduce circadian disruption and sympathetic stress, and let your heart recover.

Dr. Sanjay Bhojraj, MD, is a board-certified interventional cardiologist and certified functional medicine doctor. A pioneer at the intersection of precision cardiology and lifestyle medicine, he is the founder of Well12, a wellness program helping individuals reverse chronic disease through nutrition, breathwork, and genomic insights. Dr. Bhojraj is also a national educator for the Institute for Functional Medicine. Follow him on Instagram.

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Gigi Gonzalez has a new rule for herself: She doesn’t work Fridays.

“Fridays are my errand day,” says Gonzalez, 36. “That’s when I go to the dentist. That’s when I take my dog to the groomer [or] when I get my nails done.”

For the rest of the workweek, Gonzalez keeps her schedule tight, working Monday through Thursday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

That wasn’t the case one year ago, when Gonzalez says she logged a more traditional 40 hours of work a week as her own boss running The First Gen Mentor, where she’s a financial educator, content creator and author.

It’s not that she’s landed a sudden windfall or considerably increased her rates. Rather, Gonzalez moved from Chicago to Valencia, Spain, with her husband in May 2025. Since then, her personal expenses have gone down enough to make a 16-hour workweek possible.

The move has transformed her work-life balance, her finances and her outlook on a long-term future abroad.

Gonzalez’s journey abroad kicked off in 2019. One day, she was discussing her financial services job at a high-school career day and advised students to study abroad if possible, something she regretted not doing herself.

After repeating her regret through seven different presentations that day, Gonzalez decided it wasn’t too late for her to live abroad as an adult. She says she spent the next two years saving about $20,000 with the goal of taking a year-long sabbatical from work.

The Covid-19 pandemic upended her plans, so in April 2021 Gonzalez says she used her savings to launch her own business, The First Gen Mentor, where she offers financial education to first-generation students and young professionals of color. A few years into being her own boss, Gonzalez realized she could do her job from around the world, and she revived her plan to move overseas.

After some research, she and her husband set their sights on Spain, where Gonzalez can apply for citizenship after two years of residency through her Mexican citizenship. (She currently holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and Mexico, where her parents were born.)

Spanish was Gonzalez’s first language, so there wouldn’t be a major language barrier. Plus, Spain launched its digital nomad visa in late 2023, which allows foreign freelancers, remote workers and self-employed business owners to live in the country while earning money from overseas.

From July 2024 to April 2025, the couple saved over $20,000 to move abroad by selling their furniture and focusing on values-based spending. “It didn’t feel like deprivation; it felt like I was budgeting towards a greater purpose of moving abroad,” says Gonzalez, who is a financial advocate for Intuit.

She also limited her impulsive spending. That meant no new furniture, plants or clothes. “Basically, anything I couldn’t pack in three suitcases [wasn’t] going to make the cut,” she says.

Gonzalez got her digital nomad visa in April 2025 and added her husband as a dependent; he works in operations for an international company and secured a transfer to their Spanish subsidiary. Gonzalez’s visa gives her three years of residency, during which she says she plans to apply for citizenship in Spain.

Gonzalez says her cost of living in Spain is much lower than it was in the U.S., which means she can work less, typically 16 but sometimes up to 20 hours per week, and still live comfortably.

As a result, she says her sense of work-life balance has “completely transformed.” She can enjoy the luxury of a slow morning, starting with breakfast, exercise, self-care and lunch before logging on at 2 p.m. when her U.S.-based clients are starting their days.

Gonzalez says some early and aggressive investments are also paying off. During the pandemic, Gonzalez says she invested up to 35% of her income into her retirement accounts. It was enough to hit a number where she’ll be able to stop working and live off the distributions from her portfolio in retirement. Gonzalez currently has over $220,000 stashed for retirement.

“That means that I have enough in my investments now that I don’t have to add more money,” Gonzalez says, “and I can still retire at the traditional age of 65 without adding another dollar, just by letting compound interest do its magic.”

With her retirement income taken care of, Gonzalez says she only has to work enough now to support her everyday spending. “If one day I want to stop [running my business] and just go be a barista or a waitress, I can do that, because I just need to pay for my current expenses,” she says. “I don’t need to earn more to put towards retirement.”

Gonzalez hopes to stay in Spain long-term and says retirement is even more within reach given its lower expenses, especially around medical care. That being said, she says her newfound sense of work-life balance and a slower pace of living don’t make her dread working a few more decades.

“I’m not rushing to retire because I’m semi-retired,” she says.

Gonzalez says her personal expenses have gone down since moving abroad. Rent for her and her husband’s downtown Chicago apartment was $3,700 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit; meanwhile, in Valencia the couple pays 1,900 euros (roughly $2,200 USD) for a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom apartment.

Health insurance is another huge difference. In the U.S., Gonzalez says she and her husband paid more than $400 per month for employer-sponsored coverage with a high-deductible plan; in Valencia, their private health care is about $200 per month with no copays or deductibles.

“It’s really shocking as an American,” she says. “I don’t think twice about going to the doctor for something because there’s no copays; it’s already paid for.”

Not all of Gonzalez’s expenses are lower these days. Doing business in two countries is pricey.

Gonzalez says she employs a U.S.-based tax team to keep her LLC active and in compliance; her digital nomad visa also requires that she registers her business in Spain, so she has a Spanish tax team to help with that.

Given the added complexities of her business since moving, Gonzalez’s $350 monthly tax help has doubled to nearly $700 a month. “It was a big learning curve in the beginning, but I’ve adjusted,” she says.

Gonzalez says that when she told friends and family about her plans to move abroad, many of them didn’t realize how long she’d been planning for it.

“A lot of people see [others] living their best life in Europe, and then they look into the process, they get overwhelmed, and they don’t do it,” Gonzalez says. She recommends people really explore why they want to move abroad. Then, “create the systems and change their money mindset to be able to meet those goals.”

Gonzalez says her big moments of inspiration came from that high-school career day, but also when binging “House Hunters International” episodes or traveling abroad and wishing she could stay longer. It was enough motivation go keep her going through researching, saving up for and adjusting to her new life overseas.

“This is definitely one of the things for me, if I would have been on my deathbed, I would regret never experiencing life abroad,” she adds. “You get one life. Live it right.”

Conversions from euros to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to $1.16 USD on March 9, 2026.

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While progress toward gender parity remains slow, several career paths offer above-average representation of women as well as high pay, according to a report from Resume Genius published Mar. 3.

Resume Genius, an online career platform and resume builder, identified the top 10 careers with high median salaries and projected job growth in which women make up 50% or more of workers, using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“All of these roles are very high-paying, and require specialized knowledge and skills,” says Resume Genius career expert Eva Chan. “For women who are very ambitious [and] want to go up the career ladder, those are very good roles to aspire to.”

Chan notes that many of the jobs are in the health care industry, including roles like physician assistant and nurse practitioner. Historically, women have been drawn to jobs in health care because they can be “a little bit more flexible” with scheduling, according to career coach Colleen Paulson, which “helps to keep women in the workforce through life changes like having kids.”

Health care roles often come with well-defined advancement opportunities and attractive salaries and benefits, Chan says, making it easier for women to make long-term plans. These jobs also offer “very stable” career paths due to the rising demand for health care professionals, she says.

According to Resume Genius, these are the top 10 highest-paying, women-led careers, as well as each role’s median salary, the percentage of women in the field, its estimated growth between 2024 and 2034 and the educational requirements associated with it.

Median annual salary: $161,700

Proportion of women: 53%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 15%

Education: Bachelor’s degree

Median annual salary: $140,030

Proportion of women: 76%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 5%

Education: Bachelor’s degree

Median annual salary: $137,480

Proportion of women: 60%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 5%

Education: Doctor of Pharmacy

Median annual salary: $133,260

Proportion of women: 73%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 20%

Education: Master’s degree

Median annual salary: $132,870

Proportion of women: 70%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 5%

Education: Bachelor’s degree

Median annual salary: $132,050

Proportion of women: 88%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 35%

Education: Master’s degree

Median annual salary: $125,510

Proportion of women: 69%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 10%

Education: Doctor of Veterinary Medicine

Median annual salary: $117,960

Proportion of women: 74%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 23%

Education: Bachelor’s degree

Median annual salary: $98,340

Proportion of women: 88%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 14%

Education: Master’s degree

Median annual salary: $95,410

Proportion of women: 95%

Estimated job growth 2024–2034: 15%

Education: Master’s degree

The report also identified several high-paying careers in which women’s representation is low but rising, including roles like mechanical engineer and surgeon. Still, occupational segregation remains a concern, Paulson says.

For example, while the percentage of women in mechanical engineering has nearly doubled — from 6% in the 1980s to 11% in 2024, according to Resume Genius’ data — women are still vastly underrepresented in the field, says Paulson, who previously worked as a mechanical engineer.

In Paulson’s experience, woman are often deterred from pursuing these career fields by the prospect of being the only woman in a male-dominated environment. “While it’s great to see that representation is increasing, it’s still probably not where we really want it to be,” she says.

Part of the solution is for companies to prioritize an inclusive workplace culture, she says. That could mean sponsoring internships for early-career women, creating mentorship groups or hosting networking events.

“It starts with welcoming younger women in a real way and making it so that they want to stay in the field,” Paulson says.

Chan is encouraged to see more “leadership, influence and progress” for women in these high-paying but historically male-dominated roles, she says. But “there is always going to be more work to be done.”

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Anyone who’s spent time around Gen Z — or watched news stories about them — has heard the stereotypes: They are more anxious, fragile, and coddled than previous generations. 

As a developmental psychologist at Harvard, I study the experience of growing up across generations and I’ve heard every variation on this theme. To be sure, Gen Z is struggling: Research shows that they’re more likely to report mental health challenges and face greater obstacles to job security than previous generations. 

But I’ve also documented how narratives about generational differences can be wildly exaggerated. While conducting research with my co-author Nancy Hill, we studied interviews with college students from the class of 1975. We then re-interviewed those participants, now in their seventies. What we discovered stunned us. 

Fifty years later, they remembered triumphal narratives of their experiences navigating college and career. They told stories about the certainty they felt in their choice of profession. They described how they navigated obstacles with confidence and recalled the warmth of friendship and community they felt when they struggled. But listening to the tapes, it turns out that, at the time, they felt just as uncertain and lonely as students today. 

This gap between our memory of lived events and reality is a predictable human phenomenon. According to the peak-end rule, we recall the most emotionally intense moments and the endings of experiences, while the messy middle fades.

Forgetting the messy middle — the hard, confusing parts of our experiences — isn’t a problem in itself. It becomes an issue when we leave out the parts young people most need to hear. Each time we tell these incomplete stories, we risk building barriers, leaving them thinking: I guess I’m the only one struggling. Everyone else had it figured out.

There’s a better way to help when we’re talking with young people. Try these four things: 

It’s tempting to say: “Why can’t they just figure it out? I did!” 

Instead, ask yourself: How did I feel the first time I met a roadblock — before I had it all figured out? What was it like to fail for the first time? The first heartbreak or rejection letter lands harder when you don’t have the lived experience to put it into a broader context.

By tapping into the emotion of those experiences, you can enter the conversation with empathy instead of judgement.

Don’t assume that your outcome or your uncertainties mirror those of the Gen Zer you’re talking to. Ask questions before you jump in with advice. Probe for emotional details of what they are going through by asking: “What are you most worried about?” 

Help them identify the emotions behind those concerns, like embarrassment over failure, fear of the future, or grief over the loss of what they had hoped for. 

Then give them the space to process those feelings. Each of those emotions calls for a very different kind of response, and you can meet them where they are by allowing them to frame the conversation.  

It’s tempting to tell stories about the past when we want to help inspire young people. But we can also connect with them based on our current experiences. Rather than telling a story from when you were their age, lean into stories about the present day.

Share a more recent challenge at home or work that relates to what they’re experiencing and how you’re thinking about solving it. It’s helpful for them to see the emotion of a puzzle still in process and to know that you can relate to what they’re going through. 

If you do have a good example to share from the past, you can overcome the peak-end framing so that it can genuinely help. 

Before sharing your own story about the class you barely passed in college or the job you had your heart set on that didn’t work out, take some time to think back and tap back into the emotions you felt. 

Lead with that part of the experience to connect with what young people are feeling in the moment. You can still tell them how everything worked out in the end, if that’s the case, but make sure your story doesn’t make the answer seem quick and easy — since it’s unlikely to have been either. 

By sharing a more authentic version of our own stories, we’re far more likely to build connections with young people and help them develop the skills they need to overcome obstacles on their own journeys. In fact, that’s the part young people most need to hear when they’re struggling and doing the hard work of trying to figure things out.

Alexis Redding is a developmental psychologist and leading expert on young adulthood. She is faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she runs the Transition to Adulthood Lab and is the Faculty Director of the Mental Health in Higher Education program. She is coauthor of ”The End of Adolescence″ and the editor of ”Mental Health in College.”

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In investing, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But if you’re hoping to grow your money over the long term, there’s plenty to learn from investing pros who have built lengthy and impressive track records.

Earlier this year, analysts at investment research firm Morningstar identified the three mutual funds that have delivered the best performance over the 25 years that ended in 2025. The winner: Baron Opportunity Fund, which turned in a 13% annualized return. For reference, the S&P 500, a benchmark for the broad U.S. stock market, logged a 6.8% annualized return over the same period.

This month marks manager Michael Lippert’s 20^th year at the helm of the fund, though he’s quick to share credit for Opportunity’s outperformance, crediting the ethos at the firm, led by billionaire growth investor Ron Baron, as well as the work done by the team of analysts who help him choose investments for the fund’s portfolio.

Still, over the past quarter century, Lippert’s strategy of identifying and investing in fast-growing companies benefitting from disruptive and innovative technological advances had put his fund ahead of virtually all others.

Lippert recently spoke with CNBC Make It about his approach to picking stocks, lessons from his career and his advice for young investors. Be sure to consult with your own financial professional before making any major moves in your portfolio.

CNBC Make It: You and your team spend all day evaluating businesses. Which are the ones you look to add to your portfolio?

Lippert: We’re really focused on companies that can grow for a long time.

They have durability, sustainability of outsized growth because there’s a big total addressable market that they could address. They have differentiated products or services, what we call competitive advantages, such that they’re going to capture a large market share of whatever that opportunity is, and they have the type of business model that can turn long-term revenue growth into significant profit or free cash flow growth.

Where does long-term growth happen? How do you find it?

It’s about relying on a team of really smart industry and sub-industry analysts so that we know industry themes, changes and trends that are happening — the ones that we think are intact and sustainable.

Sometimes I use the S-curve that everyone learns about in business school for this example. There are plenty of things that are here and exciting — NFTs, different things — and they never quite inflect. But once a big trend inflects, it can last for a very, very long time.

In my career, we’ve had the internet, the first massive trend — we’re now 30 years into the internet. We had mobile, then we had cloud computing. And now we’re in the AI age.

We look at these trends, these themes, these big changes, where we think that S-curve could last for what we would call a business generation — maybe 10 to 20 years. Long-term investing for us is five years at a time. We constantly roll that, so we’re always thinking at least five years into the future.

What attributes do you tend to see among the companies that emerge as winners of these trends?

The best companies that we found, they don’t only do one thing. The best companies don’t just have one S-curve. They stack multiple S-curves on top of each other.

The greatest companies in the world, every single one of the “Mag Seven,” started off doing something different than what they’re doing today. Apple started out with computers, then it was the iPhone. Google was search. Now we have YouTube [and other business lines]. Amazon was books, selling everything.

What’s one of the big winners that you think was exemplary of your process?

We started doing work on Nvidia in 2017. Our first investment was in 2018 and the whole world was looking at Nvidia at the time as a video game chip company. And if you remember, it was a somewhat volatile stock, because video game chips back then were also used for bitcoin mining.

Our analyst, Guy Tartakovsky, and I were thinking about the data center opportunity, which today is associated with AI, and how Nvidia [graphics processing units] would be positioned in data center applications, not just in gaming. A whole team of us visited [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang in the fall of 2018.

[Huang] literally spent hours at the whiteboard teaching us about AI and machine learning, [including] why their architecture that was initially built for graphics would work for applications that he believed data centers would be using. And why he would win, and why it wasn’t just the chips, but it was their ecosystem and all the different libraries, all the things that have honestly led them to win in AI. And we made an investment.

Obviously you’ve picked some losing investments, too. How do you deal with your misses?

Over my history, I’ve had lots of mistakes. One book that was really impactful for me was called “Startup Nation.” It’s about innovation in Israel, and why they have a lot more innovation than they should have at their size. And one of the things they track back to is, in Israel, you have to go to the army, literally, before you go to college. [In the Israeli army] they do an after-action report on every single mission, whether it’s successful or it doesn’t work. And particularly when it doesn’t work, they really look at it to know why.

So I already had that as part of my process, but I can’t tell you many times I’ve sent around quotes from that book [to] my team to say, “Hey, look, if we made a mistake, it’s fine. We’re going to make mistakes. Let’s not push it aside. Let’s look at it. What can we learn from this mistake? What can we take away from it about our analysis of an industry, about our process, whatever it is, and how do we iterate and constantly get better?”

When you’re constantly looking for the next big thing, how do you separate the real trends from hype?

Fact-based investing. Look for the facts — what’s real, not what’s hype when it comes to the world we live in today, the world of social media.

When it comes to the world of AI, if you go on X, you’ll get yourself spinning. You’ll have somebody telling you that Nvidia is the greatest company in the world that can never be disrupted. And you’ll have someone else say, “No, they’re done. Nvidia is a great short.” And you’ll have that for every single company.

The other thing I always say is, step back for a second. Does it make sense? Does it make sense that blockchain technology is going to completely disrupt the payment system? Does it make sense when you know how blockchain works, and really, is it going to disrupt human beings that can take their MasterCard or Visa out, when all of us that love our rewards? Are we going to give those up?

What’s your best piece of advice for younger, long-term investors?

Investing is easier than short-term trading. Find a company that you think is special, you can articulate why it’s special and different, why it should grow for a long time.

And when it comes to long-term investing, the way we think about it at Baron Capital [is] every quarter, every new product release is a step-by-step in some line of data, facts, evidence. If you have a number of points on that curve, you just got to point the next one, the next one, the next one. It’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure what’s going on on any given day. What next tariff is going to come out? Which company is going to make which announcement, which podcaster is going to say what?

We live in a world today that, you have lots and lots of tools. You may not have Baron researchers, but you do have ChatGPT or Gemini. You can say, “What did XYZ company report last quarter? What are their new products?” And unless it’s a business-to-business product, you could test their product out. You can use it. Does it make sense that this company is going to be a fast-growing company and do it for a long time? That’s what I would do.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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