Are you getting soft in the head?

I’m a bit worried that I am.

Soft in the sense that my mind is less sharp than it used to be. Less able to stay with a hard idea. Less patient with a long book. More tempted to reach for the phone, skim, swipe, sample, and move on.

That worries me.

A recent opinion piece in The New York Times by Cal Newport raised the concern that technology is not merely distracting us. It may actually be weakening our capacity for attention, reflection, and deep thought. That rings true to me.

And not just for teenagers.

For grown adults. For professionals. For business owners. For people like you and me who make our living by thinking, deciding, imagining, leading, and creating.

That’s no small thing.

If your work depends on judgment, insight, originality, discernment, and wisdom, then your mind is one of your primary assets. Maybe the primary asset.

And yet many of us spend our days in conditions that make good thinking nearly impossible.

We keep the phone within reach. We break concentration every few minutes. We let alerts, inboxes, feeds, and endless digital noise fragment our attention into tiny unusable pieces.

Now add AI to the mix.

I love AI as a tool. I use it. It can be immensely helpful.

But used carelessly, it becomes a crutch. A way to avoid the hard but necessary work of thinking for yourself. A way to bypass struggle. A way to skip the very mental reps that keep the brain strong.

That’s the danger.

Not that the tools exist. But that we let them do too much of the heavy lifting.

A strong mind, like a strong body, requires resistance.

It needs stretches of quiet. It needs sustained attention. It needs time to wrestle with ideas. It needs imagination. It needs boredom. It needs depth.

That means we have to become more intentional.

Some suggestions:

Get away from your phone. Better yet, get the phone away from you. Even its presence in the room can pull on your attention. Put it in another room. Leave it charging in the kitchen. Take back the space around your mind.

Use AI as a tool, not a substitute for thought. Let it help with research, organization, or routine tasks. But do your own writing. Build your own arguments. Form your own conclusions. That work matters.

Spend time in quiet reflection every day. No input. No stimulation. No scrolling. Just silence and space to think.

Develop ideas on purpose. Sit with a question longer than is comfortable. Let your imagination run. Follow threads. Daydream a little. Some of your best thinking will not come when you are consuming. It will come when you are allowing.

Journal deeply. Not a few bullet points dashed off in a hurry. Real journaling. Write until you get underneath the surface noise and into what you actually think.

Read books. Fiction and nonfiction both. Read without interruption. Read things that ask more of you. Reading is one of the great ways we strengthen attention, deepen empathy, and expand imagination.

And from time to time, get off the grid entirely.

A day. A weekend. Longer if you can swing it.

No feeds. No alerts. No digital drip of everybody else’s priorities entering your nervous system.

Just you. Your own thoughts. The natural world. A notebook. A book. A walk. A long conversation.

In a world built to scatter your attention, depth has become an act of resistance.

Protect your mind. Don’t let it get soft.

Train it.

Use it while you’ve got it.

Need help? Let’s talk. Email me: [email protected]