It happens to all of us. You walk into a room to get something, and by the time you cross the threshold, your mind is blank. You stand there staring at the wall, wondering where the thought went.
Or maybe you try to do basic mental math in a meeting and hit a wall. You feel slow. You feel foggy.
When this happens, we immediately jump to the worst conclusion. We tell ourselves we are getting old. We worry about early dementia. We assume our IQ is dropping.
I have some good news for you. You aren’t stupid and you aren’t sick. You are just rusty.
It isn’t age. It is atrophy. You haven’t taken your brain to the gym in ten years.
The Couch Potato Brain
If you sat in a wheelchair for five years, your legs would stop working. They wouldn’t be broken, and you wouldn’t be sick. Your body would just be efficient. It stops sending energy to muscles you don’t use.
Your brain works the same way.
Most of us stop doing hard thinking after college. We switch to what I call Passive Consumption. We spend our days scrolling social media, watching Netflix, and skimming headlines.
We are feeding the brain, but we aren’t making it lift any weights.
The brain is an efficiency machine. When it realizes you don’t need deep focus or complex problem-solving skills anymore, it scraps those circuits to save power.
The Taxi Driver and the Garden
There is a famous study on London taxi drivers that proves this point. To get a license in London, drivers have to pass a test called “The Knowledge.” They have to memorize twenty-five thousand streets and thousands of landmarks. It takes years of study.
Researchers looked at the brains of these drivers and found something incredible. The hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and spatial navigation, had physically grown larger.
This proves that the brain is not fixed hardware. It is wetware. It changes based on what you ask it to do.
If a guy in his forties can physically grow a bigger brain by memorizing maps, you can remember your grocery list.
Think of your brain like a garden. It waters the flowers you look at, and it kills the weeds you ignore. If you spend all day on TikTok, your brain waters the “short attention span” flowers. If you ignore deep reading, your brain kills the “focus” plant to save water.
Cognitive Resistance Training
You don’t have brain fog. You just have a well-manicured garden of useless information.
To fix this, we need to apply resistance. Crossword puzzles aren’t enough because they are mostly just recall. You need to feel the burn.
Here is the protocol I am using to wake my brain up:
1. Kill the GPS We have outsourced our sense of direction to robots. Once a week, drive somewhere new without the voice navigation. Force your brain to build a mental map of the space. It will feel frustrating. That is the point.
2. The Phone Number Rule Stop just tapping contact names. Force yourself to type the digits from memory for your closest friends and family. If you can’t remember them, learn them.
3. Read Hard Things The internet has rewired us to skim. As Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows, we are losing our ability to deep read. When you read a text and find yourself skimming, stop. Go back. Force yourself to read it slowly. That irritation you feel is the mental muscle growing back.
The Good Headache
Your brain isn’t broken. It is just out of shape.
Do one hard thing today that makes your head hurt. Do some long division on paper. Read a philosophy article. Memorize a poem.
That pain you feel isn’t age. It is you getting smarter.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login