Do I Need a “Brain Gym”? | Monday Advice

Someone recently sent me one of those long form idea articles that you you post on x and hope that it does well. This one was titled, your brain is about to need a gym. Now at a high level, this new piece is responding to my own New York Times op ed that came out in March in which I argued that we need a cognitive fitness revolution to save our increasingly fried brains much in the same way that in the twentieth century, we needed a physical fitness revolution to save our increasingly unhealthy bodies. Now this new article takes that proposal and follows it through to all of its implications. Here, I wanna read a quote from it. I also think cognitive fitness becomes a market, a big one. Imagine the cognitive equivalent of what the fitness industry built between 1980 and 2020. Apps that force you to think slowly, coaches who train your attention the way trainers train your hamstrings, schools that reteach deep reading after generation lost to lost it to scrolling, corporate programs that audit and report your team's cognitive endurance the way they currently audit lines of code, insurance discounts for verified daily reading habits, a Strava for hours spent away from a screen. The Peloton of writing by hand. I'm half joking and half not. Alright. So this new article, in other words, is asking a fascinating question. Fitness is a $100,000,000,000 industry. What would our commitment to cognitive fitness look like if we got equally serious about it? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to explore some answers. Alright. So here's my plan. I wanna approach this topic with tiers organized from moderate to intense commitment to cognitive fitness. At each tier, I'm gonna give you an ever more intense set of tools or ideas to think about for how to push your cognitive fitness to the next level. We'll end up on some prediction for some perhaps truly insane places that this revolution might end up in the near future. So if you feel like the onslaught of the onslaught of the digital from hyperpalatable distractions on your phone to the increasing urge to offload mental strain to AI is making you dumber, and if you're fed up and you're ready to start pushing back, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. Alright. So let's start on our first tier of commitment to cognitive fitness. We'll call this moderate intensity. Now last month on this show, I described a collection of five simple exercises for your brain that I say are the, the laying the foundation of sort of good cognitive fitness. They're the the mental health equivalent of what we do in physical health where we say, like, get enough steps or eat some vegetables. Easy things …