How to stop your brain from rotting

Have you noticed how many people are always staring at their phones, scrolling compulsively while consuming an endless stream of content?

This habit is formed by using various types of apps, with the recent addiction of short videos to all major social platforms. But is not only the format of this videos to determine how much they get consumed. What fuels this pattern is also the content of these videos, often designed to provoke strong positive or negative emotions, leaving viewers craving more stimulation and encouraging them to keep scrolling.

These apps are designed to keep us addicted. The more we’re absorbed by content tailored to our interests and emotions, the harder it becomes to stop consuming it. So what started as a search for interesting content has now became a unfruitful obsession, that can be indulged throughout the day, from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep. They even found that algorithms prefer recommending content that trigger negative emotion, because provoking anxiety and fear in people makes them craving for more. This behaviour is known as doomscrolling.

All this negativity creates a distorted view of the world in the user’s mind, where everything is wrong and many people are seen as enemies, which is harmful to a healthy mental state. More generally, consuming so much trivial content in a short time, through TikTok and similar platforms, has been linked to declines in attention, concentration, and critical thinking, especially among young people.

And it’s not just related to short videos. Frequent use of social media, gambling, and pornography has been linked to depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviours, desensitisation, and distorted perceptions of reality. Researchers have also found that heavy reliance on AI and LLMs may weaken our ability to learn, retain new concepts, and solve problems without assistance.

Many people are now struggling to think clearly because of these digital addictions. The observed decline in mental abilities has even got a name: brain rot.

It’s similar to other unhealthy habits that have become widespread in our society, like smoking or eating junk food. Nicotine and ultra-processed food can trigger spikes of dopamine in our brains, so every time we smoke or eat junk food, we reward our brains, reinforcing the habit and creating an addiction.

What can we do about it

What can we do to avoid falling into this technological trap? How can we stop our brains from rotting? And, more fundamentally, how can we improve our self-control?

As many things in life, it’s a matter of discipline.

Discipline means controlling ourself, or better controlling our own mind. It might seems crazy at first, but our brain never stops thinking. From the day that we are born until our death, our mind will constantly process thoughts, creating a certain representation of the reality we currently live it. Even when we sleep, our brains remain active. Scientists confirmed this by measuring the brain activity of sleeping people, but even without scientific evidence, we know that dreams are products of our unconscious mind.

If it’s impossible to stop our brain from thinking, what’s left for us to do is to control what we think. The entire practice of meditation is about training this behaviour. It consists of exercising the control of the mind at the point of becoming able to think about nothing. If it seems easy, sit down in silence, close your eyes, take deep breaths and try thinking about the space under your nose, before the upper lip, focusing on the physical sensation that you feel in that area. How long did you last before you started thinking about something else?

Meditators are capable of a higher level of concentration than other people. They constantly think, because remember it’s impossible to stop thinking, but during meditation practice, they focus their mind on subtle minuscule sensations, without letting random thoughts invade their mind.

Now, while meditation can be a great option for many, I understand that it’s not for everyone. Some people might prefer a simpler way to improve their self-discipline.

To introduce this, let’s start from how I got rid of some bad habits in the past. Just few years ago, I was spending too much unproductive time staring at my phone, partly because it was already considered completely normal to do so. I wanted to read more books, so to make more time for it, I decided to remove all social and streaming apps. I made my phone boring to look at. Within a few weeks, the habit of randomly picking up my phone was gone, and I had developed a reading habit that has been very rewarding ever since.

When I was in high-school, I picked up smoking. Many people do at that age, and some never stop. I started smoking cigarettes because every cool guy was supposed to smoke. In my defence, I was still in a phase where social acceptance was more important than being smart about my health. Once I became a smoker, I realised I didn’t actually like it, and I wanted to quit. So I simply stopped buying cigarettes. If I didn’t have any available, I couldn’t smoke. I couldn’t rely on asking other people for a cigarette all the time, so problem was quickly solved.

During university, I moved out and started living on my own. For the first time, I had to buy groceries and cook for myself. I was quite active, running and going to the gym every week, skiing in winter and cycling in summer. To make my training more effective, I had to generally avoid unhealthy food. The easiest way I found to keep junk food and prepackaged meals under control was simply to not buying them. If these things weren’t in the cupboard or the fridge, I would be much less tempted to eat them.

So, I learned that one of the most effective ways to break a habit is to remove access to the thing that keeps it going.

Reclaiming control

One way to prevent brain rot is to remove access to potentially harmful apps and websites. Remove distracting apps from your smartphone. Use screen restrictions or parental controls to block websites in your browser. Delete your accounts on these platforms.

On desktop, however, things are not simple as on smartphones. Social media, streaming platforms, and other distracting websites constantly resurface in search results, ads, recommendations, and links across the web. Operative systems and browsers don’t really have restriction systems integrated, so the temptation to access harmful websites often lingers just one click away.

I searched for a simple tool to solve this problem, that was easy to use and capable of hard blocking websites. Most of the programs I found were commercial products with subscriptions and remote servers, and I don’t want to bother reviewing long privacy document, where is always unclear what happens to my personal data behind the doors.

The closest solution I found it’s called SelfControl. It’s an open-source app for macOS only that hard-block websites for a limited period. I like that the blocking is irreversible. This means I can close the app or restart the operating system, but the websites will remain blocked until the timer expires. There are only two things I wish SelfControl did differently. First, I wish the blocking could be made permanent, rather than lasting for a limited time. Second, users have to manually enter every website they want to block, which can be quite tedious if you want to block entire categories of websites.

So I’ve wrote a custom tool that solved this problems. It’s called Walden. It’s a website blocker that prevent access to websites, from large lists of urls divided in categories. The user can choose between fake-news, gambling, social-media, ads/malware and porn. Once the blocking is active, it persists until stopped. It’s also irreversible, even if you restart the operating system or remove the app.

A new feature I added is the unblock delay. It’s a period of time that users configure before activating the block, so that when Walden is stopped, websites will only become accessible again after that period has passed. For example, if I set an unblock delay of three weeks, stopping Walden won’t immediately unblock the websites. Instead, they will remain blocked for another three weeks.

Walden is not your typical website blocker. It’s designed as a stronger solution for people who struggle to break free from digital addictions. Once you commit to blocking certain websites, it doesn’t give you an easy way out.

I called it Walden in honour of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a book of the same name about his experience of living in isolation in nature, away from the distractions of society, and reflecting on life in solitude. Walden also contains the earliest known use of the term “brain rot” in English, which Thoreau used to criticise society’s preference for trivial ideas over meaningful thought, comparing this intellectual decline to the potato blight affecting Europe at the time. I guess Thoreau would have agreed with our use of the term to describe today’s preference for trivial content.

While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Walden has a free-software license and it’s released open-source. For now it offers a CLI, it’s configurable with a file, and works on both MacOS and Linux.

I’m not going to explain how it works, since its hidden mechanism is what makes Walden effective, even for computer-savvy people.

Protect ourself from harmful tech

It would be ideal if we could choose or filter what we see on different platforms, but we’re not there yet, and we might not even make much progress in that direction in the future. In the meantime, we need to be able to protect our minds from harmful content.

I’ve found that completely blocking access to those apps and websites, after the initial adjustment of resisting the temptation to fall back into old habits, works well. It’s really a matter of creating an environment around us that does not give us the choice to fall back into bad habits. Better to make the decision once — like blocking addictive websites — and then stick with it, rather than keep our options open.

I think there’s plenty of room to experiment with using technology to overcome harmful habits created by other technologies. The more persuasive and addictive digital systems become, the more we will need tools to help us fight back against these trends and regain control of our minds and our lives.

Let me know if you have any feedback on Walden, or if you’ve dealt with these issues yourself and found solutions that work. As always, I’d like to hear your thoughts.