Your Brain Is Getting Weaker
Daily Chase #130
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 we’re ignoring cognitive obesity.
Your brain is starving for contemplation. It’s losing its ability to take in complex information and make sense of it. It’s forgetting how to sit with difficult ideas and form original thoughts. And just like with physical obesity, our initial responses are tweaks that don’t address the scope of the problem.
“Take a break from your phone on Saturday.” “Turn off your notifications.” “Try to be more mindful.”
These suggestions are the equivalent of “take the stairs instead of the elevator” for someone struggling with severe obesity. They’re not wrong. They’re just nowhere near sufficient.
The real problem is what we’re 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.
Cal’s 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 they’re 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 aren’t going to save us. We need a strong response to a cognitive health crisis that’s only getting worse.
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