“we take for granted that diet and exercise are vitally important for our health and well-being. But we didn’t always think this way. Much of this awareness emerged in a remarkably short span of time during the middle of the last century”
“The larger point is that transformations in understanding can unfold quickly. Just decades after President Eisenhower and Dr. Cooper, we got the food pyramid, the term “low fat,” the running craze and Jane Fonda videos. Americans would never think about food and exercise the same way again”
“In our current moment we face a new crisis, one that affects our minds more than our bodies: the negative impact of digital technology on our ability to think”
“When I published my book “Deep Work” 10 years ago, I argued that email and instant messages were degrading our ability to concentrate on hard mental tasks. I recommended putting aside long stretches of time for uninterrupted thinking and to treat this cognitive activity like a skill that you can improve through practice”
“In 2016, my main concern was helping people find enough free time for deep work. Today, I think we’re rapidly losing the ability to think deeply at all, regardless of how much space we can find in our schedules for these efforts”
“Research from Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, indicates that our attention spans have decreased by more than a factor of three since 2004, with the biggest drops happening around 2012”
“Long-running surveys reveal that the share of U.S. adults who struggle with basic reading or math has risen markedly over the past decade, while the percentage of 18-year-olds who report difficulty thinking and concentrating jumped in this same period”
“Many of these declines in cognitive skills became notable starting in the mid-2010s, exactly the same period in which smartphones became ubiquitous and the digital attention economy exploded in size”
“A meta-analysis released last fall showed that consuming short-form video content, as delivered by apps like TikTok and Instagram, is associated with poorer cognition and reduced attention, while the results of a clever experiment from 2023 found that the mere presence of participants’ smartphones in a room significantly reduced their ability to concentrate”
“A study from January, based on surveys and interviews with more than 600 participants, revealed a “significant negative correlation between frequent A.I. tool usage and critical thinking abilities.””
“Another recent study, which tracked the brain activity of research subjects who were writing with the help of large language models, found that “brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support.””
“We should consider taking as strong a stance against ultraprocessed content as we already do against ultraprocessed food”
“Don’t use TikTok. Don’t use Instagram. Don’t use X. Their sugar-high benefits aren’t worth the costs”
“The cognitive equivalent of aerobic activity is contemplation — the intentional focusing of your mind’s eye on a singular topic with the goal of increased understanding”
“Just as the sedentary lifestyles that emerged in the mid-20th century degraded our bodies, our current lack of contemplation is degrading our brains”
“What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand”
““Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness”
“Another way to exercise our brains is to reject the constant companion model of phone use, in which we keep smartphones on our persons at all times. This places us in an untenable mental environment in which bundles of neurons in our short-term motivational systems, trained through experience to expect a quick reward from looking at our phones, are constantly firing, creating an insistent urge to pick up the device”
“When you’re at home, keep your phone charging in your kitchen instead of in your pocket. If you need to check your messages or look something up, do it in the kitchen. If you’re waiting for a call, turn on the phone’s ringer. This strategy allows you to participate in activities such as eating meals, watching a shared show or talking with your family, without the distraction of constantly wanting to glance at a secondary screen”
“A 2025 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that school phone bans were followed by “significant improvements” in student test scores; similarly, three-quarters of the 317 high schools surveyed by a Dutch research team reported that phone bans improved focus, and two-thirds reported that they improved the “social climate” in their school”
“Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Report found that the office workers it studied were interrupted once every two minutes on average”
“In 2021, I published a book titled “A World Without Email” that argued we should aggressively transform collaboration strategies so we’re no longer dependent on a steady stream of back-and-forth messaging to accomplish work. (Looking at you, Slack.)”
“In September, a splashy article in the Harvard Business Review reported on the rapid rise of “workslop,” which the authors defined to be “A.I.-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.””
“Another recent study, conducted by researchers at the Boston Consulting Group, found that offloading difficult tasks to A.I. led to increased mental exhaustion — a state they called “brain fry” — because of the constant context switching required to monitor and manage the A.I.’s behavior”
“Your writing should be your own. The strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout by an athlete — it’s not an annoyance to be eliminated but a key element of your craft”
“Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of “Slow Productivity,” “Digital Minimalism,” “A World Without Email” and “Deep Work,” which just celebrated its 10th anniversary”