Get Healthy!

• Posted January 15, 2026

Small Daily Habit Changes Could Add Years to Your Life, Study Finds

You don’t need a new diet plan or a gym membership to improve your health in 2026. 

New research suggests that very small daily changes like sleeping a few extra minutes, moving a little more and eating slightly better may help people live longer and stay healthier as they age.

University of Sydney researchers studied more than 59,000 older adults using data from the UK Biobank, a long-running health database. 

For one week, participants wore wrist devices that tracked sleep and physical activity. Their diets were scored from 0 to 100 based on self-reported eating habits.

The researchers compared people with the poorest health habits — such as those who slept about 5.5 hours a night, exercised 7.3 minutes a day and had a diet score of 36.9 on a 100-point scale — to those who made small improvements in these areas.

The findings were published Jan. 13 in the journal eClinicalMedicine.

The researchers found that people with the least healthy routines could add about one year to their lives by making all three of these small changes together:

• 5 extra minutes of sleep per night

• 1.9 more minutes of exercise per day

• A 5-point improvement in diet quality, such as eating a half-serving more vegetables or 1.5 servings more whole grains daily

Even if people couldn't make improvements in all three areas, they still saw benefits. A similar one-year gain was linked to:

• 25 extra minutes of sleep per night, or

• 2.3 extra minutes of exercise per day, or

• A 35.5-point jump in diet score

“All those tiny behaviors we change can actually have a very meaningful impact, and they add up over time to make a big difference in our longevity,” lead author Nicholas Koemel, a registered dietitian and research fellow at the University of Sydney, told NBC News.

After following participants for just over eight years, researchers also looked at how long people lived without serious disease, including heart disease, cancer, dementia and type 2 diabetes.

People with the poorest habits could add up to four healthy years if they combined:

• 24 more minutes of sleep per night

• 3.7 extra minutes of exercise per day

• A 23-point boost in diet quality, such as an extra cup of vegetables per day, a serving of whole grains, and two servings of fish per week

Larger combined changes were linked to even longer life, but researchers stressed that small, realistic steps are a better place to start.

“The message here should not necessarily be that making these small tweaks is a silver bullet,” Koemel said in an NBC News report. “It’s more so about where we take that first step and trying to look at how we can make sustainable opportunities that are more achievable for some people.”

Nearly 37% of U.S. adults don’t get the recommended seven hours of sleep, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Adding five minutes may not help you that one day, but ... at the end of the month, it will add up to a lot of hours,” said Dr. Maha Alattar, a medical director at VCU Health in Richmond, Virginia. “That can translate to long-term better health because I look at it the other way, and that’s how we look at sleep deprivation.”

Exercise showed a similar pattern. Benefits were strongest for people going from very little activity to some movement. Researchers found that benefits peaked at about 50 minutes of exercise per day.

“It doesn’t require a mass overhaul of your lifestyle to achieve health benefits,” said Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”

More information

Harvard Health has more on longevity.

SOURCE: NBC News, Jan. 13, 2026