Wellness Wednesday Issue #201

✅ Today’s Checklist:

• Alzheimer’s signs to watch for
• How to actually get a job using AI
• Recipe of the week: Spinach-Stuffed Baked Salmon

🤔 Trivia: Which two US states skip daylight saving time? (Hint: Indiana used to be on this list, but it switched in 2006.) Find out.

QUICK LINKS

BRAIN HEALTH

Two Thirds of Alzheimer’s Patients Are Women. Here’s What Lowers Your Risk.

Someone you love asks the same question three times in one phone call, and you laugh it off because she’s always been a little scattered. For a lot of families, that’s the moment someone starts keeping score.

November is National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month, and it lands differently for us. Almost two thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer’s are women, and a woman in her sixties is about twice as likely to develop it as breast cancer. Researchers say that’s mostly because women live longer, so the raw numbers overstate the biological difference. The caregiving numbers hold, though: more than 60% of dementia caregivers are women, and over a third are daughters.

What counts as a warning sign

Forgetting a name and remembering it an hour later is normal aging. The signs that matter are the ones that get in the way of daily life:

• Forgetting things she just learned and leaning on notes for what she used to track in her head
• Losing the thread of a familiar recipe or the monthly bills
• Reaching for a word that won’t come, or calling a watch a “hand-clock”
• Misplacing things with no way to retrace her steps
• Pulling back from the book club she loved, or a mood shift that shows up most where she used to feel safest

Rule out the boring explanations first

Thyroid problems, low B12, depression, sleep apnea, dehydration, medication interactions and untreated hearing loss can all look like early dementia, and all of them are treatable. Add perimenopause to that list, since the brain fog that arrives with hot flashes and broken sleep is real and well documented. A physical with bloodwork rules most of this out in one visit.

What lowers the risk

Fourteen risk factors could delay or prevent up to 45% of dementia cases worldwide. They matter most in midlife, but researchers found benefit at every life stage, so it’s never too late to start.

Treating high blood pressure may cut risk by about 15%. Untreated vision loss is linked to roughly 50% higher risk, and two or more head injuries or depression can each more than double it. On the protective side: 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, seven to eight hours of sleep so your brain can clear itself out, and a Mediterranean-style plate of fish, beans, nuts, produce and olive oil. As one Weill Cornell brain health expert puts it, what’s good for your heart is good for your brain.

Where to start

Book the physical, get your hearing and vision checked, treat the blood pressure and wear the helmet. Then keep the standing dinner with friends on the calendar, because isolation sits on that list of fourteen right next to smoking.

AI DELEGATION

Still Doing It Yourself Because Explaining It Takes Longer?

You know there’s a stack of tasks AI could take off your plate. Figuring out how to hand them over feels like one more thing to do, so they stay on your list.

HubSpot’s free AI Task Delegation Playbook walks you through it with a bundle of Google Sheets templates you can copy and use today:

• An AI assistant overview that keeps every AI tool you use in one place
• A user guide template for setting AI up as your personal assistant
• A task delegation organizer for deciding what to hand off first
• An effectiveness calculator that tracks the time you’re getting back
• A feedback and improvement section for sharpening results as you go

Pick one recurring task this week, hand it off, and see what it does for your Friday.

👉 Get the free delegation playbook.

THE MESSY MIDDLE

The AI Job Search Playbook That Landed Her a VP Role

Alexis Piazza spent 22 months job hunting before landing a VP role at JPMorgan Chase, and she’s adamant that AI didn’t get her the job. A search still runs on a system, a network and the discipline to work your leads. AI makes each of those faster, and here’s how she used it.

She turned the five prompts behind all of this into a toolkit covering narrative, evaluation, outreach and interview prep, and you can get it in Smart Girl Society.

1. Name the problem you solve before you rewrite anything

A product coach told Alexis her resume had the flaw he sees in almost every resume: accomplishments with metrics, and no answer to why she’d done any of it. Then he asked what problem she actually solves. Her career spanned banking, pharma, manufacturing and consulting, so she’d been casting a huge net, and that one question narrowed her to the two things she does exceptionally well. Before AI touches a single bullet, have it interview you until you can name your problem too. Your resume, LinkedIn and networking pitch then all tell the same story.

2. Be honest about what you can win

Qualified, interested and winnable are three different things. Alexis wanted a product management role, but she’d never owned a product end to end, and in a flooded market she’d lose to someone who had. She went after process and enablement roles instead, which is where she landed.

3. Let a tool rank your leads

One job can show up fifteen times across company sites, LinkedIn, Indeed and aggregators, and that noise eats whole days. Grading jobs A through F leaves you with thirty A’s. Don’t Bother, built by a hiring manager, scores roles against your priorities so there’s always a clear next move. Overrule it whenever you know someone at the company.

4. Swap the cover letter for a positioning statement

A Chase recruiter told her cover letters mostly go unread. Write one or two sentences on why the role interests you, plus two or three bullets tying your experience to the employer’s problem. Draft it with AI against your narrative, then edit it yourself, and do the same for free-form application fields.

5. Debrief every conversation

Use recruiter screens to ask what the hiring manager cares about and what questions to expect. Afterward, run your notes and the job description through your AI tool and ask what to do differently. When Alexis lost a finalist round and heard she talks too much, that became something she could practice.

6. Do the networking yourself

Her breakthrough week was six interviews, and every one traced back to a relationship. AI can research the person and prep you for the room, and the relationship part is still on you.

Want more of this?

This piece came out of a workshop SGS member Alexis Piazza ran inside Smart Girl Society, our private community for women who want to master modern tools and move their careers forward. Her full toolkit lives there too. Enrollment is closed right now, so join the waitlist to get in the next round.

SALES SHORTCUT

Your Next 50 Leads, Found Before Lunch

You finally hit send on a cold email you spent 20 minutes personalizing. Two minutes later, it bounces. Your contact left the company in March.

Prospecting is slow enough without working from stale data. Apollo gives you a live database of 240M+ contacts across 30M+ companies, so you’re reaching people where they actually work now.

• Find the right people fast with filters for title, industry, company size and location
• See who’s ready to buy with intent signals that flag companies researching what you sell
• Follow up automatically with email sequences that run on schedule

Working in Claude or ChatGPT? Connect Apollo and search for prospects in plain English, right inside your chat.

More than 600,000 companies use Apollo, and there’s a free plan, so you can test it on your next list this week.

👉 Start free with Apollo.

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