Hello, hi, đ
Happy November to ya, my friends. Hereâs hoping youâve already managed to throw away every piece of Halloween candy that snuck in your house over the last week. đ
Letâs get into it.
YOUR BRAIN IS GETTING WEAKER
We track physical obesity carefully. We measure it, study it, create interventions around it. We know that eating ultra-processed food and not exercising leads to predictable health problems.
But weâre ignoring cognitive obesity.
Your brain is starving for contemplation. Itâs losing its ability to take in complex information and make sense of it. Itâs forgetting how to sit with difficult ideas and form original thoughts. And just like with physical obesity, our initial responses are tweaks that donât address the scope of the problem.
âTake a break from your phone on Saturday.â âTurn off your notifications.â âTry to be more mindful.â
These suggestions are the equivalent of âtake the stairs instead of the elevatorâ for someone struggling with severe obesity. Theyâre not wrong. Theyâre just nowhere near sufficient.
The real problem is what weâre consuming - the writer Cal Newport calls it ultra-processed content. TikTok videos algorithmically optimized for maximum engagement. Endless social feeds designed to keep you scrolling. Information fragments chosen not for truth or value, but for how well they capture attention.
This is the Dorito of information. Hyper-palatable, engineered for addiction, and ultimately empty.
The solution requires the same level of commitment it takes to get physically healthy. You need to radically restrict what you consume and you need to exercise your brain with hard things.
Calâs advice: Cut out ultra-processed content entirely. Be sparing with processed content like television and casual web browsing. And start doing cognitive exercise - reading difficult books, taking contemplation walks where you work through ideas without your phone, watching challenging films and understanding why theyâre good.
Your brain is a muscle. If you never strain it, it atrophies. If you only feed it junk, it gets sick.
The small tweaks arenât going to save us. We need a strong response to a cognitive health crisis thatâs only getting worse.
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The One-Page Practice That Answers Questions Stuck in Your Head for Years
Most of us carry questions in our heads for months or years - questions about career moves, relationships, health, purpose - and they swirl endlessly without resolution.
This week, we sat down with Mark England from Enlifted to explore Kidlinâs Law: any question sufficiently worded and written down is half answered.
The Gateway Effect: How One Consistent Habit Creates a Cascade of Positive Change
The question sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it: How does doing pull-ups lead to peace of mind? Yet if youâve ever built a consistent training practice, you already know the answer.
Physical movement acts as a gateway drug to intentional living - teaching you life skills that extend far beyond the gym and creating a compound effect that transforms how you show up in the world.
The Daily Chase
Brief essays, delivered each weekday morning to Chase Club members.
#126: Choose Your Ending
On Tuesday, Ben and I are joined by Trevor Ragan from The Learner Lab to talk about the difference between being a learner and being a knower - and how choosing the wrong identity might be the biggest thing holding you back from growth.
Itâs a good one and Iâm excited to get it to ya.
Until then, keep on chasing.
đ¤đź Patrick
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