Cal Newport (0:00)

Not long ago, I published a splashy op ed for the New York Times. It was titled there's a good reason why you can't concentrate now. It argues that technology is rapidly diminishing our ability to think and that this is a major problem for both the individual as well as the success of our society more broadly. In it, I propose that the solution is a revolution in cognitive fitness, not unlike the physical fitness revolution that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. Here's how I conclude the piece I write. My intention is to spur a shift in understanding that can build into a larger revolution. I'm done seeding my brain, the core of all that makes me who I am, to the financial interest of a small number of technology billionaires or the short sighted conveniences of hyperactive communication styles. It's time to move past fretting about our slide into the cognitive shallows and decide to actually do something about it. Now, this essay's made the rounds and I'm proud of it. But there's one question that I've been asked more than any other by people who read it. How do I become more cognitively fit? I gave a few ideas in the essay, but people want a more systematic brain fitness routine, a sustainable way to push back against the digital forces trying to make us dumber. Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for a Monday advice episode of this show, which seems like the perfect opportunity to dive deeper into this question. All right, so here's the plan. In the weeks since this piece has come out, I've refined my cognitive fitness program into five different components. And I'm going to go through each of these. I'll justify why each makes sense and then give some practical advice for making that component work. Now, these five components add up to a basic cognitive fitness plan that I think basically everybody should consider adopting. So if you've been feeling like you've literally been losing your mind to technology and you're ready to start taking back control, 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. And we'll get started right after the music. All right, so let's get started with our first component. Here we'll do a reveal and it is read every day. I think this is a very effective tool in physical fitness. Rather, there's a very effective idea, is that you need to lay a base of regular activity. This is my inspiration here. So in physical activity, physical fitness, we might say, for Example, you need to walk at least 7 to 10,000 steps a day. This is associated with all sorts of positive health benefits. Well, I think we need a similar base layer of fitness when it comes to cognitive training, and I think that should be reading. Reading rewires your brain in a way that literally makes you smarter. I want to actually read a quote from my New York Times piece about exactly this effect. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Marianne 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. All right, so what's being said here is that the more time you spend reading, the more you're rewiring your brain to basically harness together different regions that were originally evolved for different purposes, but when combined, gives you this intellectual superpower, complicated thought, nuanced thoughts, that brings more of your brain matter to bear at trying to understand and produce original ideas and original understanding. But there's another justification for daily reading as well. It gives you practice with the fundamental skill of aiming your mind's eye at a desired internal target. Now, we're already naturally born to be very good at aiming our attention to. At a salient external target. So if I say I want you to really pay attention in this basketball game to player number 23, we're very good at that. Oh, I can fix my attention and just watch that player. But when it comes to putting our mind's eye on an internal topic, like a thought or an idea, that requires practice that doesn't come naturally. Reading is giving you that practice. So if we read more, we're going to rewire our brain to be capable of smarter thought. And we are getting practice directing our mind's eye in a way that will help us actually take advantage of that wiring. All right, so if that's the big idea for the first component, let me give you some practical tips for actually succeeding. If you're not a big reader, I think the key is to start with reading things that you are excited to read. Do not be snobby early on. Do not think, I need to be reading a good book that's going to impress my book club friends, or I need to be reading a big profound book, or otherwise it's a waste of my time. Now, there's the act of decoding the symbols themselves at first is what we want to get used to the act of putting your mind's eye on one target for a sustained amount of time is something we want to get used to. So pick something you're excited to read. It doesn't matter if it's simple or fun or trashy. If it's a romance novel or like a highly emotional Colleen Hoover novel, or if you're reading really trashy genre adventure fiction, doesn't matter. Whatever you're excited about coming back to now, I would start with 15 to 20 pages a day. Let me tell you how you hit that target consistently. Read with your lunch, read in bed before you go to sleep. That'll get you to 15, 20 pages, no problem. So it's a good automatic way to get to that base layer. Over time, you want to increase those pages, maybe get closer to 30 to 50 pages. This might require that you develop a little bit more of a reading habit. Oh, like I have some time before dinner, I'm going to actually sit and read. I'm on the subway going to work. I'm going to sit to read. So as you get more used to reading, it'll be easier to develop a reading habit where you read in more times during your day. The final place I want you to get is is once you're used to reading, you can aim your mind's eye. You're starting to build those connections is to integrate more what I am going to call hard books. So you start with books you're just excited to read. So you do it once you're up to this 30 to 50 pages a day and aren't having much trouble hitting it. Make one book in three, quote unquote, hard and by hard. I think of that as if it's nonfiction. It's presenting sophisticated original ideas or analysis. And if it's fiction, it's going to be a more challenging literary genre that is ultimately going to be more rewarding, but takes more concentration to understand what's going on, who's who, slower consumption to make better sense of what's actually unfolding. So you can think of the difficulty of the book you intake, like your mile time. If you're an amateur jogger, if you're new to running, you're not going to be like, hey, I'm just going to whip off a 5:30 mile because I really want to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. But on the other hand, if you're continuing to train and you're running more and you're building up your endurance, then you can see that mile time coming down. That's the way to think about hard books. The more you read and the more sophistication you begin to interleave in, the more ease you'll have with tackling more and more difficult books. And so where you want to end up here is this a solid amount of reading every day. One out of three books hard. One little addendum I'll add to that is you should feel free to reduce the daily page count if you're reading a very hard book. So what matters there is the slow contemplation, not the raw pages. At that point, let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. If you're growing a business that sells things to people, your ability to successfully and efficiently fulfill orders is critical to your success. This is why you need ShipStation. With ShipStation, everything you need to manage getting orders to customers is in one place. We're talking about a single tool that can pick the best carrier, find you the best rate, print labels in bulk, send and track, give you tracking updates, right? And that's not all. ShipStation's ability to share tracking details cuts customer service inquiries by 12%. 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What I'm suggesting here is that you consider rejecting this trend in your own life and seeking out as many opportunities to write as possible. Now, to be clear, I understand why people don't like writing. This is not a moral failure. It's actually a physiological reality, a rational response to a physiological reality. I want to read a quote I wrote in a New Yorker piece I published a couple years ago about what happens in the brain when you write. All right, so here's what I wrote. Writing is hard. It requires us to use multiple parts of the brain in an improbable symphony of high strain effort. Our hippocampus summons relevant facts. The prefrontal cortex tries to organize them. A brain region known as Broca's area helps us narrate in a familiar inner voice. Our verbal memory stores and manipulates the narration as we transfer to the page. Meanwhile, our brain recruits our spatial working memory, which evolved to track our location, physical space, to orient our words within a whole. Right. So this is why we feel resistance to writing. We basically have to orchestrate many, many regions of our brain to work together in a way that they weren't evolved to do. It's hard and we feel strained. But here's the thing. That sense of strain or difficulty that you experience when you face the blank page serves a useful purpose from a perspective of cognitive fitness. If we think of reading as helping to rewire your brain in a way that makes it capable of smarter thoughts, then writing we can think about is an activity that actually then makes use of those capabilities. It makes your brain more capable. It takes those yoked together regions of your brain, reverses the flow and says, let's use this to produce original thoughts. We wire these to understand complicated thoughts. Now we can use them to produce original thought. So if we want to follow the fitness analogy we've been using here, reading is sort of like building a cardiovascular base and Getting your body used to activity. You know, I jog, I walk every day, I stretch. I'm no longer inactive. Writing is like the intense gym workout. You need that base to be able to go to the gym and do a hard workout without just ripping every muscle. But it's that hard workout that's actually going to then grow demonstrable strength. So writing creates more strain and resistance than reading. It's harder, but it gives us a lot of cognitive strength. And if you think about it that way, I think it makes more sense. Like, you can walk and do steps and maybe even get in light runs every day. So you should be reading every day. Writing's like your gym workout. You want to seek out writing, but also recognize that it's going to require more concentration. It's harder. It's a harder thing, but we get the bigger gains from it. So I want you to change your mindset about writing. Instead of thinking of that strain of facing the blank page, to write that group email as an intolerable feeling. Like, I would do anything to get away from this. Instead, think of that strain you feel when facing the blank page, like the burn of a muscle in the gym. And if you're working out, you learn to retrain your brain to say, ooh, I like that feeling. That means I'm about to get stronger. Yeah, it's hard in the moment, but I'm going to feel good afterwards and I'm going to get stronger. That's how I want you to think about the strain of writing. Do not flee it. Do not say, Gen AI will do this. And somehow this will make me more productive. As if that's really the bottleneck to your value production is how quickly you write the occasional email. It's just you fleeing the strain. Don't you want to get that muscle stronger? All right, so here's some practical tips. Your self perception matters. So you say, hey, I'm someone who likes to write. Just keep telling yourself that. Make that part of your identity. When our group at work is like, hey, who wants to send this message to the client? You be the one who says, I can do it, I can write it. I like writing. I'm good at writing. I don't mind doing two study technique when you read, hey, why was this article good? What's the author doing here? Why is this flowing so well? Oh, look at this rhythm. Look at the switching back and forth between A and B. Look at this integration of quotes. It's like quote, sentence, quote, explanation, callback. Begin looking for analyzing, understanding, and appreciate the art of writing in your reading. What you're doing there is you're pulling out techniques that you can then utilize in your own writing. It's gonna make your own writing feel better. Use journaling, or if you have a newsletter or whatever it is, but have some way that you are writing regularly but also doing in a way that forces you to structure your thoughts. That's why I like journaling, or maybe if you're publishing a small newsletter. These activities force you to not just write words, but to use the writing to organize your thoughts. To take something that seems kind of clear in your head and have that feedback loop of, like, how I express this clearly on words. Oh, it wasn't as clear as I thought in my head. And that feedback makes me clarify it. And then the writing helps me again. And you get much more complicated thoughts out of it. You have to practice structuring your thoughts with text. So you need something that you're doing semi regularly that does force you to do that. It really could even be, if you're reading interesting books, just taking notes in a word file somewhere about the core ideas from each chapter as you read it. Even that internal exercise alone can help you make sense of thoughts. It add much more structure to the thoughts that are in your head. I also want you psychologically to acclimatize to the 10 minute rule. So the hardest part about writing is the first 10 minutes. That's the part where you feel the peak intolerable seeming resistance. Because again, remember that symphony of brain regions I talked about earlier? You have to coordinate a lot of your brain together before you could effectively start producing words. That takes time. That could take 10 minutes. So until all of those areas are successfully connected together and firing together, the writing's gonna feel really bad. But then once they are, it gets easier. So if you're used to that, oh, the first 10 minutes are gonna stink, and then it's gonna feel better. It feels much more tolerable. Like, I know how this movie plays out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is really hard. I'm writing nonsense. But it's gonna get better once I get to the other side of that 10 minutes. So really acclimatize yourself to that. And I think you're going to find writing to be less demanding. All right, so we got two components of my cognitive fitness routine. Let's bring up the big board again. It's time for component number three. Here comes the big reveal. Go on. Thinking walks. All right, here's what I mean by that. Go on, Jesse's. Amused by my. My tape. I think it's dramatic. Jesse, what do you think? I kind of like it. Oh, there we go. All right. Those who are listening don't know. You're missing a. You're missing a real. I would say. And Jesse, tell me if I'm correct me if I'm wrong here. Avatar Caliber Effects, we are deploying in this episode right now. Just. That's what I want you to imagine is actually happening on this screen. All right, let's keep going. What do I mean by a thinking walk? I want you to go for a walk several times a week. Do not bring your phone. If you have to have your phone, have it buried in a bag. Put on the ringer and put a headphone in your ear so if it rings, you'll hear it. So you're not checking it. It's actually going to be a pain to get it out. On the walk. I want you to think about something important to you. It could be professional. It could be personal. It could be a problem you need to solve. It could be something you're working through, or maybe you're brainstorming or daydreaming about something you're excited about, but a solitary target that you're turning your mind towards. The key is to get practice on this walk of turning your intention inwards and making sense of some sort of information or yourself, that there's exterior distractions around, and you're able to turn your intention internally and actually operate in an internal world of abstract thoughts. Now, in an age of constant, algorithmically optimized diversion, we're sort of losing our comfort with this type of self reflection. And I really think this is a problem. From a cognitive fitness standpoint. Self reflection is where you make sense of your life. It's where you develop your sense of self. It's where your best ideas come from. And it's very cognitively demanding because, again, we love to look at the tiger. We have a hard time turning inward. So it requires practice, and thinking walks are a great way to do it. I really think we underestimate now what we're losing when we don't spend time with our own thoughts. There's a famous book, for example. It's published back in 1948. It was called the Seven Story Mountain. It's the autobiography of Thomas Merton, who goes from being a sort of a drift academic in New York to a Trappist monk down in Kentucky. If you read this book, and I reread it recently, I have a first edition of it his transformation from this unhappy academic to a monk is all about self reflection. He dramatizes throughout this memoir his thoughts, his engagement with his thoughts, his dialogue with himself. It's all discernment, it's all exploration of what is going on inside his own head. Like, let me read you a quote from the book. This is a key scene when Merton gets this big feeling of inspiration from reading a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Hopkins is a sort of Jesuit poet and thinker, and he turns inward to try to make sense of this feeling and has a big revelation. All right, so let me read from the book here. Suddenly I couldn't bear it no longer and got into my raincoat and started down the stairs to walk to the local Catholic parish. And then everything inside me began to sing, to sing with peace. Later, while walking the late night streets after a particularly debaucherous night, a crystal clear thought emerges. I'm going to be a priest. Now, I'm adding there, there's a little bit of the quotes from the book, and some of that is my own summary of it. But basically what I'm capturing here is there's these key scenes in the book where he's reacting to this strong feeling from a poem and goes walking, thinking about it, thinks about it the next night, after a hard night of partying, introspecting, turning his attention inwards and realizing, I think I need to be a priest. That's self reflection, that's discernment. But it's not just about understanding yourself. It's also about cognitive fitness. If you can turn your mind inward and keep it on a target, not only does it make your own life better, it makes your brain stronger for almost any type of purpose. All right, so here's some practical tips. These walks can be short at first. Maybe you do like one long one each week, like on the weekend, but otherwise these could be like relatively short walks. I'm just going around the block. Just get used to that rhythm. As I mentioned before, if you absolutely have to bring your phone, put it in a place where you can't do a quick check. Right? Because your short term motivation system is always measuring the cost of various activities towards the benefit. So if the phone is in your pocket, it's saying, we could pick that up and look at it. That's very low friction to do, but we're almost certainly going to get a reward for doing that. The reward wins over the cost. Let's do it. But if the phone is in the bottom of your bag, it's like actually the cost of having to stop and open the bag and go in and get it, that might outweigh the reward of what we see on, like, TikTok. So actually, I'm not going to generate a sense of motivation to do it. So it's easier to avoid distraction if you make the distraction less available. I think the gold standard is just don't have your phone. But if you do make it less accessible, it could also help if at the end of these walks, you journal your insights. So it forces you through this exercise of, like, let me try to structure and make clear in a physical artifact what it was that I was wrestling with inside my mind. That's a feedback function that over time clarifies your internal thinking. So you need to think about, what did I figure out on this walk? And when you write it down, you're like, oh, maybe that's not as clear as I thought. And that's gonna actually help you get more cognitive fitness out of this actual exercise. All right, we're making good progress here. Let's go back up to the big board. It's time for our fourth item. The fourth component of my cognitive fitness routine. Plug in your phone. You may have heard me talk about this before, but I think it's absolutely vital, so I actually want to emphasize it. When you're at home, do not have your phone with you. Keep it plugged in. I suggest keeping it plugged in. In the kitchen, you can put on the ringer so if someone calls, you can go look for it. You can go in there to check in on messages or to look things up. If you're waiting for someone to text you about something important and you worry about missing it, tell them, hey, my phone's in the other room, so call when you're ready, and I'll hear the ring, and then I'll know to come see what's going on. The key is to spend hours each day in your house without your phone there as a constant companion. Now, this might seem weird at first, like, why am I artificially not holding onto my phone? But actually, the weird thing is always having your phone with you. I call this the constant companion model of phone usage. And it's not intrinsic to the device. This is actually an idea I've been writing about for a while now, that the original idea for a smartphone was not to be something you have on you at all times. That actually evolved later, after the advent of the Apple App Store and the discovery by the social media companies that if people keep their phone with them at all times, they can exponentially increase the amount of engagement they get. So the constant companion model of using your phone is not some deterministic inevitability of having a smartphone. It's a business model based on fracking your attention. So the weird thing is actually having the phone with you at all time, not keeping it plugged in while you're in your house. So this is one of the best ways to fight back against this. Now, why does this matter? Because it gives you lots of practice doing things without that constant short term motivation ping of pick up the phone, pick up the phone, pick up the phone. You don't realize the extent to which you're battling against your short term motivation system with every single thing you do when the phone is with you. People report when they run this technique that it feels like a weight has been lifted off of their brain or they've been given some sort of like highly potent synthetic Adderall. Because without that constant battle against your short term motivation says to pick up your phone, you focused effortlessly. You get clarity you didn't have before. So think every show you watch conversations at the table, reading a book, doing chores, like doing all these things without that temptation to pick up the phone completely changes your experience of what it can be like in the world. And that makes your mind much stronger. This is a great way to build up cognitive fitness. So here's some practical tips about it. If you want to listen to a podcast like mine during chores, use AirPods. If your house is large enough that you're going to another floor and the AirPods can't reach to where your phone is, then you can bring the phone to whatever floor you're on and plug it in somewhere there. But don't put it on your person. Train people who are used to texting you and getting rapid responses that you don't have the phone on your person when you're in your house. So if it's in the evening or the morning, they might have to call if they want to get your attention. And of course, the other advanced tip here is make the phone itself less desirable by taking off any app that makes money from your engagement. Any social app, for example. Take that off your phone and this will give you a sort of diluted simulation of the phone plugged in effect when you're away from the house and the phone might be with you. The less interesting the phone is, the less strongly your short term motivation system fights to try to get you to pick it up and you get more training and practice just keeping Your focus on whatever you happen to be doing. It's a great way to pick up cognitive fitness. I think of this as the stop smoking analogy. That's the right analogy here. Spend a lot of time each day without your phone. It's like, if you're trying to get stronger, I think you should stop smoking. That sort of background activity that over time is making everything else harder. That's how I think about this. All right, we're down to our fifth and final piece of my cognitive fitness components. Let's give the big reveal. Learn a hard skill. This is the final component of my plan. Master a skill that requires you to focus to get better, but that also gives you clear rewards. You get a clear signal that, oh, I am getting better, so I have to focus to get better, but then I get a clear reward when I do. I think athletic pursuits fall into this. Golf or tennis or pickleball or whatever it is. As you work harder on this skill, you get a clear reward of, oh, I'm getting better shots or I'm scoring more points. I think musical pursuits are obvious as well. Oh, I can play this song that's hard and it's cool and I couldn't play it before. I'm clearly getting better. Artistic crafts or pursuits, you can see the same thing. Oh, I'm better at knitting and you can see it because the sweater is more impressive. So I think this is a great way to build up skills. Now, actually, last week I had the author Brad Stolberg on the show to talk about how building a disciplined practice can make you less distractible. Right? So, for example, he uses weightlifting, powerlifting as a centering force for his own cognitive life. And so that's part of it, right? If you're learning a hard skill, it builds up a sense of discipline so you can resist distractions easier. But there's other cognitive fitness advantages here as well. One of the big ones, I think, is it helps train your long term motivation system that when we focus on something hard over time, we get really meaningful rewards. The more your long term motivation system can get involved in the game, the more of these sort of hard won, meaningful rewards that you introduce into your life, the more primacy your long term motivation system gets over the short term system. The long term system can swap it. So the short term system is pick up your phone, pick up your phone. You know what can squash that? The long term system can come in and say, no, we're going to keep practicing the guitar. Because I have learned the rewards of mastering these songs. Are great and it's much bigger than the reward of seeing something interesting on TikTok. So I can just turn down the volume on that short term motivation system and you're much easily able to keep your attention focused. So the more experiences you give your long term motivation system of successfully reaping long term rewards, the more you have the ability to modulate the influence of the short term system. And in other scenarios as well, that short term system no longer is going to have as much of a bite. The other cognitive fitness advantage of learning a hard skill is just practice focusing. It's hard to say, let me just sit down and focus just to practice it. But if I have a reason to do it, I'm trying to learn this chord and then I learn it and then it sounds better. It's easier to sustain your concentration, but that is just practice again with aiming your mind's eye, which a lot of cognitive fitness comes back to this facility with blocking out noise, modulating your short term motivation system, sustaining focus on a target of your choice. This is an excellent way to practice that on a regular basis. So we get the three benefits of this. One, what we talked about with Brad. In general, you're just more disciplined, makes you easier able to resist distractions or diversions. Two, it specifically rewires your long term motivation system to help you with that. And three, it's a great way to practice sustaining focus on a complicated target for a longer piece of time. Some practical tips here. This needs to be something that you do on a regular schedule, not just when you feel like it. It should be a more disciplined pursuit. It needs some sort of skilled component that improves with deliberate practice, but then gives you clear indications that you're getting better. That's what's going to help your long term motivation system learn. There's some sort of coaching you can do here. It helps. Any sort of feedback or coaching from another person can really help you stick with it. All right, so there you have it. I gave you five components for improving your cognitive fitness. This is like a standard exercise routine before your brain read every day, don't avoid writing, go on thinking walks, plug in your phone and learn a hard skill. This is like the cognitive equivalent of having a reasonable health and fitness routine just to stay in reasonable shape. You don't have to do these five, but you really should be thinking about your cognitive fitness, like your physical fitness and health and say, well, here is what I do, here are my rules, here are my regular activities and maybe you customize this to yourself. But what I would like you to avoid is having none, to not be thinking about that at all. Because we live in an environment now with so much digital junk food, so much incentives, digital incentives for mental inactivity, that if you're not thinking about it, you're going to end up the cognitive equivalent of being really out of shape and unhealthy. All right, so if you want to go deeper into these ideas, definitely read that New York Times piece. It'll kind of lay out the whole philosophy. There's my book Deep Work, which came out 10 years ago, lays the foundation for a lot of those ideas as well. So check that out. But there you go. Get your brain smarter.