Three months ago, I forgot how to think.

I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop, watching my cursor blink on a blank page that had been mocking me for forty-seven minutes. My mind bounced and ricocheted off every possible cognitive surface.

I'd start a sentence, then remember I needed to answer that one email. Mid-thought, I'd open a new tab to look up a quote, then find myself watching a YouTube video about productivity. My phone would buzz, and I'd immediately give in to the dopamine pull - just a quick check - before losing the thread entirely. By the time I returned to the document, the half-formed idea was gone, leaving only the absinthe-addled ghost of what I'd been trying to say.

My desktop was strewn with seventeen browser tabs, three documents titled "Article Draft," two YouTube videos paused mid-sentence, and a ChatGPT conversation where I'd asked it to "help me brainstorm ideas about focus."

And yes, I appreciate that irony.

(If only in hindsight.)

I used to be someone who could think.

Really think. I'd read entire books in single sittings, hold complex arguments in my head and turn them over for hours. I could lose myself in ideas. But somewhere along the way, without my noticing, that person had all but disappeared.

The changes crept in through practical compromises that felt smart at the time. Checking email while writing - multitasking! Listening to podcasts while doing everything else - optimizing! Letting AI tools handle the "busy work" of thinking - efficiency! Each shortcut felt reasonable, even sophisticated. I was staying current, staying connected, staying productive.

Efficiency, as I have discovered, is the enemy of depth. And depth is where anything / everything interesting lives.

My moment of reckoning: I caught myself asking ChatGPT to summarize a book I'd already read - because I'd lost the patience to recall and synthesize my own thoughts about it. I had become a curator of other minds rather than a cultivator of my own.

I know this sounds extreme to people who haven't experienced it.

"Just put the phone down," they say. "Just focus."

But it's not that simple when your neural pathways have been rewired by years of constant switching. When boredom feels like an emergency and silence feels like death.

I knew I had to try something radical. It wasn’t enough to tweak my habits or install another app, I had to conduct a real experiment in attention. Strip away the digital noise and see what cognitive capacity remained underneath.

The plan was simple:

Go back home.

To myself, my own thoughts, and the deliberate practice of thinking.

Daily:

Weekly:

The rules were strict because the stakes were high.

I was trying to remember what it felt like to be intellectually alive.

I need to be honest about what happened next. It was brutal.

The first week felt like meditating in a construction zone. My hand cramped after two paragraphs of writing. I'd reach for my phone every few minutes, then remember the rule and feel a genuine mix of shame and anxiety. I'd start reading and find myself skimming, searching for the "good parts" instead of letting the author's argument unfold.

By week two, I was bargaining with myself. "Just a quick Threads / Farcaster check to see if anything important happened." "Maybe I can use voice-to-text instead of handwriting." "Surely one YouTube binge during my walk doesn't count."

I failed constantly. But I kept returning to the rules, and slowly, something shifted.

Week three brought the first breakthrough.

I was writing by hand about a conversation with my brother, and suddenly I understood something about our relationship that I'd never seen before; I'd sat with the complexity long enough for insight to emerge.

And the insight itself wasn't necessarily profound - just a small thing about how we communicate - but it was mine. Generated by my own mind, in my own words, without external scaffolding.

Which is when I realized what I'd been missing: the satisfaction of original thought.

Somewhere in week five, I found myself rereading the same paragraph four times. A dense, knotted bit of philosophical prose that would usually prompt me to skim, highlight, and move on.

But I didn’t.

I sat with it. Read it again. Then again. I traced the argument with a pencil, underlining every premise, rewording every sentence in the margins. It took twenty minutes to move a single paragraph forward. And - honestly - that was a kind of progress.

There’s a moment in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time where the narrator talks about how real memory returns not by force, but by accident. A taste of madeleine, a sound of a spoon against china. You don't command depth; you prepare for it, you wait, you build the capacity to receive it. These weeks were about cultivating that capacity.

Tolerance for ambiguity, boredom, and discomfort had atrophied in me. Modern life conditions us to flinch from them: which makes sitting in the ambiguity without reaching for distraction a radical act of reclamation. One Sunday I spent three hours writing by hand about a single question: "What does it mean to think originally?" I got nowhere. Every path ended in a hedge or a cliché. But that was the point. I was learning how to stay with a question even when it refused to yield.

By week seven, my days began taking on a rhythm I hadn’t intended to impose. I woke up earlier, without alarms. The urge to reach for my phone as soon as I opened my eyes was gone. Not resisted - gone. Instead of darting from stimulus to stimulus, my mind settled into longer, slower patterns.

The cognitive gains were there. My work took on a different texture: fewer recycled ideas, more synthesis. I noticed myself writing things that surprised me.

Multitasking became physically uncomfortable. One tab open. One document. One task. The idea of jumping between windows felt like short-circuiting something fragile. And in a way, it is. Attention is cumulative. Every interruption resets the clock.

Unprompted, a friend said "You seem really grounded lately." I hadn’t told her about the challenge. I hadn’t performed anything. But the underlying rhythm of my mind had changed.

By the final stretch, writing by hand was an urge I genuinely wanted to satisfy. Reading texts and giving them my undivided attention stopped being a chore.

Long stretches of silence became pleasurable. I would sit for an hour without music, screen, or task. Just thinking. Not always productively. Sometimes circling the same point for ages. But even that circling became valuable. To remember how to be alone with your own thoughts without fleeing from them…

I reread an old essay from before the challenge. It was sharp, but brittle. All scaffolding and no soul. Then I read one I’d written the week before: meandering, imperfect, occasionally contradictory, but alive. It had questions baked into it. The thinking was visible. The voice was mine.

Aristotle claimed that excellence is not an act, but a habit. I used to think that meant discipline. Now I think it means alignment. When the form of your day supports the function of your mind, when what you do with your time supports the kind of thoughts you hope to have.

Here's what I could do after 90 days that I couldn't do before:

If you’ve ever felt “dazed and confused” (in the post- digital sense of the phrase) I want to challenge you: do a 90 day reboot.

Give it your best, give it your all (if you can) and meet another version of yourself on the other side. Sharper. Smarter, hopefully. With a stronger handle on your own mind and what it’s capable of doing, divorced from the distractions and shallow mental workouts of the modern age.

No, it won’t make you a millionaire.

No, it won’t “level up your thinking and 10x your hustle.”

These are largely empty promises, no matter who is making them.

But it will get you to do one thing, and do it well;

Think.

I know what you're thinking: "This sounds extreme. I don't have time for this. My job requires me to be connected."

You're not wrong. The challenge is extreme.

But you don't need to do it perfectly. I didn't. I broke the rules regularly, especially in the first month. The point isn't perfection; it's creating enough space for your mind to remember what it can do.

Even if you only follow half the rules, you'll notice a difference. Even if you only try it for 30 days, you'll start to see how much of your thinking has been outsourced. Even if you fail completely, you'll have learned something about the depth of your dependence on external stimulation.

Start small if you need to. Pick three rules instead of all of them. But pick something, and stick with it long enough to feel the resistance. That resistance is your mind trying to return to its natural state.

Modern neuroscience backs up what contemplatives have known for centuries: your brain needs downtime to consolidate information and generate insights. The default mode network - the brain's "screensaver" - is actually where creativity and self-reflection happen. But it only activates when you're not actively consuming information.

We've created a culture that treats boredom as a moral failing and silence as wasted time. But boredom is where original thought begins. Silence is where you hear your own voice.

The challenge works because it's based on subtraction, not addition. Instead of adding another productivity system or optimization technique, you remove the barriers to thinking. You create conditions where insight can emerge naturally.

Train your mind. Cut the noise. Get sharp again.

1. Read for 1 Hour (Input Discipline) Books only. No articles, newsletters, or feeds. Choose writing that forces deep focus - philosophy, systems, history, serious fiction.

2. Write 500 Words by Hand (Output Discipline) Every day. No keyboard. No AI. No prompts. Use a journal, notebook, or index cards. Just write something real.

3. No Phone in the First or Last Hour of the Day (Boundary Discipline) Your mind opens and closes each day without external interference. Replace with journaling, reading, movement, or silence.

4. Limit News to 10 Minutes a Day (Signal Discipline) Choose one source. One window. No browsing. You're not training to be reactive - you're training to see clearly.

5. Social Media: Max 30 Minutes a Day (Attention Discipline) Use a timer. Remove shortcuts. No grazing. If you're not creating or engaging intentionally, close the app.

6. YouTube: Max 30 Minutes a Day (Consumption Discipline) No autoplay. No shorts. No background noise. Watch with purpose or not at all.

7. One Day Without Generative AI (Cognitive Reset) No ChatGPT, no Claude, no AI writing tools, no summarizers, no idea generators. The point is to make your own decisions, form your own sentences, and solve your own problems.

8. One Deep Dive Essay (Synthesis Practice) Each week, pick a thought worth chasing. Write 1,000–2,000 words by hand or in a clean doc - no AI support. Optional to publish. Required to think.

Ask yourself:

Weeks 1-2: Expect Resistance Your brain will fight these changes. You'll feel anxious, bored, and convinced you're missing something important. This is normal. The discomfort is your nervous system adjusting to a new baseline.

Weeks 3-4: First Breakthroughs You'll start noticing things you usually miss. Your writing will feel more authentic. Reading will become more engaging. Don't get cocky - you're still in the adjustment phase.

Weeks 5-8: Building Momentum This is where the real work happens. Your attention span will lengthen. Complex ideas will become more manageable. You'll start generating insights that feel genuinely yours.

Weeks 9-12: Integration The practices become natural. You'll know intuitively when you need to step back from stimulation. You'll trust your own thinking process instead of reaching for external validation.

"I don't have time to write by hand." Start with 100 words. Set a timer. The point isn't volume - it's the slowness that forces thinking.

"I need to stay informed." Ten minutes of focused news consumption tells you more than two hours of browsing. Information vs. insight.

"My job requires constant connectivity." The challenge is about creating pockets of deep work, not going off-grid. Even 30 minutes of uninterrupted thinking will change your work quality.

"I broke the rules and failed." Perfect. Now you know where your resistance is strongest. Start again tomorrow.

There are periods in your - our lives - life when something isn't broken, but it's clearly out of alignment. You keep absorbing information but never quite understand what you've learned. You keep writing, but none of it feels like yours. You keep reaching for answers, but you haven't sat with a question long enough to really want one.

That's where this challenge lives.

You don't have to unplug from the world, but you do have to start choosing what gets in. Not by performing discipline, but by creating conditions that let thinking re-emerge. Real thinking, the kind that feels like work because it is.

There's a version of your mind you haven't visited in a while. A version that's slower, sharper, and far more capable than the fragmented one most of us live with. This is an invitation to meet that version again.

You don't have to do it perfectly. You don't have to do it publicly. But if you do it earnestly, it will change the way you think, the way you focus, and the way you make sense of what you care about.

The noise will always be there. But it’s up to you, whether you'll choose signal over static, depth over distraction, thinking over reacting.

That choice, made daily, becomes who you are.