Dr. Sonia Eden operates on brains for a living, and the first thing she wants Black women to stop doing is treating stress as separate from the organ.
Eden is a neurosurgeon at Semmes Murphey Clinic in Oxford, Mississippi, and an associate professor at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center. She is also, as the piece published October 4, 2026 puts it, one of just 0.6 percent of Black women neurosurgeons in the U.S.
Her list of what she would never do reads less like a wellness roundup and more like a surgeon’s chart review.
She would never ignore what is inside her control. Movement, food and sleep, and she aims for eight hours. One good reading is not a clearance. “Feeling fine or getting one normal reading doesn’t mean high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes don’t need to be managed,” she said.
She would never file stress somewhere other than brain health. Eden points to weathering, the body’s accumulated response to chronic stress and discrimination, and connects it to conditions that reach the brain. That is the line that separates this from every other brain health list, and it is a neurosurgeon saying it.
She would never assume the brain stops changing. Neuroplasticity is real, and cognitive reserve gets built by new activities, by company and by being mentally stretched.
She would never follow eating advice she cannot keep. Not a diet that fights your preferences or your people’s cooking. “If you don’t like something, you’re not going to do it long term, right?” she said.
And she would never call a new change just aging. New trouble with balance, new stumbling, a hand that is not working the way it did. Those get looked at, not explained away.
She tells people to find a provider they trust, “whether they look like us or not.” The goal she names is plain: to help people “lead a long life with the best quality of life possible.”
“Movement is key to longevity and a healthy life,” she said.
