How we can avoid brain rot in 2025.

I have this terrible habit when the dogs wake me up to go out in the middle of the night. I’ll grab my phone or iPad and spend the next 45 minutes doomscrolling. Then I’ll spend the next hour staring at the ceiling wondering how things on Planet Earth got so bad.

The worst thing about this is I KNOW I’ve been sucked in by the dopamine rush of social media algorithms. You might have experienced the rage social media induces and how addictive that is. We’re being gamed, manipulated, and brainwashed, all to the detriment of our mental health. It’s so bad that “brain rot”–a condition brought on by social media addiction–was the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024.

This is Oxford’s definition of brain rot: “The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

And before you write this off as hype, remember that there have been medical studies into the condition, including Oxford Medical School, Harvard Medical School, and King’s College London. They found that social media use can short our attention spans, impair our memory functions, reduce the actual amount of grey matter in our heads, and distort our main cognitive functions.

Doomscrolling is especially bad. Michoel Moshel is a researcher at Macquarie University says that doomscrolling “takes advantage of our brain’s natural tendency to seek out new things, especially when it comes to potentially harmful or alarming information, a trait that once helped us survive.” We can get trapped for hours a day in an infinite scroll of emotional jolts.

I recommend that you read this article on the subject. And for God’s sake, put down that phone. Don’t run from your thoughts. Don’t let your brain get rewired in a bad way. Allow yourself to be bored from time to time. It’s better for you.