I got rid of my social media account. After a couple stints of temporarily deactivating my account, last summer I made the decision to delete my account for good. I haven't looked back. I realized I was craving connection and validation and decided to pursue that in the real world instead.
You settle in for a quick scroll through your feed, maybe just to unwind for a minute or two. But somewhere between a cooking hack and a clip you've already forgotten, forty minutes vanished. It's all a blur. Welcome to the era of infinite content and finite attention, where our brains are working overtime just to keep up with the deluge.
One of the reasons we did this work is because we saw this happening to people who were perceived as really high performers. In the study, 14 percent of workers said they had experienced mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity.
I am a professor of public health who studies health behaviors and the gap between intentions and outcomes. I became interested in this self-care paradox recently, after I suffered from a concussion. I was prescribed two months of strictly screen-free cognitive rest-no television, email, Zooming, social media, streaming, or texting. The benefits were almost immediate, and they surprised me. I slept better, had a longer attention span, and had a newfound sense of mental quiet.
Maladaptive daydreaming is when you're listening to music, watching a movie, or just staring into space while imagining different scenarios in your head,' she explained in a recent TikTok video. 'It is a form of dissociation where your brain is imagining alternate realities to cope with how scary your actual reality is,' she added. LePera explained that often in these scenarios, people will replay situations where you have the 'perfect response' to a past uncomfortable interaction.
Think of your creativity like a high-performance garden: If you focus only on the visible harvest (outputs) and never allow the soil to lie fallow (liminal space) or the bees to roam freely (play), the ground eventually becomes depleted. Boredom is the signal that the soil needs replenishing, ensuring that your next season of work is a flourish rather than a struggle.
Digital interfaces, as convenient as they are, bypass many of the sensory pathways that help us process and retain information. Think about it this way: when you write something by hand, your brain engages multiple systems simultaneously. You're planning the movement, feeling the texture of paper, hearing the scratch of pen on page, and seeing the words form. This multi-sensory engagement creates what psychologists call "embodied cognition"-the idea that our physical actions directly influence our thinking patterns.