Information Diet: Secret to Improving Your Cognitive Performance
Every celebrity is an “expert” on dieting, fasting, athletics, and being skinny, and gives advice on how to keep a healthy body. They don't seem to talk about the brain. What about your mind?
I am too fat, I can’t run, get injured when I stand up too fast or sleep “wrong”, and my favourite sports include fishing, chess and sharpshooting. For those reasons, despite being proud of my quite extensive knowledge of nutrition, biochemistry, and human physical performance, I tend not to dish out advice on how to stay physically fit.
I might never make it into the world’s top 90% of athletes. However, I am really good at working and exercising my brain.
While many celebrities take care of their bodies by refusing to eat burgers with mayonnaise, so they can look well on the front cover of the Daily Mail, I have developed a set of practices to optimise the function and health of my brain, so I can avoid being featured in the aforementioned tabloid.
Benefits of High Cognitive Performance
While I might not be able to outrun a doughnut, I have worked towards developing other extremely useful and beneficial skills and abilities: cognitive performance.
My work requires alertness, clarity of thought, precision in thinking, an objective view of reality, the ability to predict outcomes of experiments or decisions, rapid problem-solving, rapid learning and assimilation of new information, management of large and complex projects, data analysis, crisis management, innovative thinking.
Each of those tasks seems to be of some relevance in many workplace settings. Each of those tasks requires significant cognitive ability and effort. And by focusing on developing cognitive, rather than only physical performance, I can do many of those tasks not only really well, but also with relative ease.
All those cognitive abilities are helpful in everyday life: from choosing the right mortgage, and deciding which media to consume, to simply enjoying creative hobbies.
Apart from „cognitive athletics” at work and at home, there are numerous other benefits of keeping a healthy mind that are at least as important as keeping a healthy body:
Enhanced memory and recall,
Ease of concentrating and focusing on any task,
Ability to rapidly fall asleep and maximise rest during sleep,
Increased productivity and efficiency of everyday tasks,
Stress management becomes easy,
Boosted creativity and innovative thinking,
Ability to rapidly learn and adapt,
Rapid recovery from setbacks,
Increased resilience.
Just like it must be painful for M. Phelps to watch me trying to climb out of a swimming pool, watching my colleagues who struggle to learn something, make a decision, or relax - deeply hurts my feelings…
I don’t run, jump, lift, kick or swim at work. I am also afraid of Mr Alzheimer. This is more than enough to prioritise training, development, and taking good care of my brain.
While I don’t neglect the importance of a healthy diet and exercise (except for cycling on public roads) on brain health, the vast majority of improvements in brain function can not be found on a plate or in the gym.
What does the brain do?
Tries to keep you alive, for as long as you can to reproduce.
Contrary to popular beliefs, your brain is not designed or optimised to accurately remember events from your life, nor it is there to “tell you” the truth about you, other people, and the world around you. It’s not the role of your brain to keep you happy or fulfilled.
Your cortex creates stories (narratives) from sensory information acquired in the past and later tries to use those inputs to shape certain behaviours (repeat or avoid) that previously resulted in the secretion of particular hormones.
Those narratives may or may not be true. They may or may not be helpful. They may or may not be desired by you, or conducive to your long-term happiness, success or satisfaction. Your brain does not care much about the truth, your happiness or fulfilment. It’s all about keeping you alive - even if you are in denial of reality, or if you feel miserable.
The better our societies become at creating a safe environment for all, the more likely our brains are to use survival-driven algorithms in maladaptive ways.
For example: Fear and anxiety (“algorithms” that allow your body to pump more blood, run faster, and punch stronger) are adaptive when you’re attacked by a
cyclistlion. They are less helpful (maladaptive) when you try to give a PowerPoint presentation at shareholders’ meetings. The fight-or-fly algorithm in both cases is activated by the same trigger - an unfamiliar situation and a perceived threat.
The more often certain information and behaviours are processed (repeated) by your brain, the more frequently they will feature in your mind's automatically generated and executed algorithms (people refer to them as “thoughts”, “learned behaviours”, “automatisms” or “scenarios”). A good example is learning to do a complex task, like driving a bike or a car. In the beginning, those activities require significant focus and processing power, but become effortless with sufficient repetition and practice.
Your brain is not designed to tell you “the truth” about you, your environment, or the world - it is merely processing past data seeking for patterns and behaviours to repeat. This makes your brain relatively easy to “hack”, as demonstrated by most social media platforms, optimised to keep you engaged and glued to a handheld screen.
How can I take care of my brain?
The most commonly given advice for brain care is to engage in regular, light physical activities (like walking), avoid poisons, and eat a balanced, Mediterranean-style diet (nuts, seeds, lean meat, omega-3-rich fish, olive oil, fibrous vegetables and fruit).
While this is true to some degree, the overall importance of food and exercise is tiny compared to the devastating impact of your brain’s worst enemy: information.
We need food to fuel our bodies, so we can survive and stay healthy. If you feed your body with too much food (or if you eat the wrong kind of food) you will end up with a sick body.
All mushrooms are edible, but some only once…
- M. D. Zatonski
The food for our brains is information.
We need information (data) to formulate thoughts and predictions, so we can survive. If you feed your brain too much information (or the wrong kind of information) you will end up with a sick mind.
Information overload
An average person today consumes more information in a week than someone in the 15th century would receive during their entire lifetime. (Jungwirth, 2002).
Only in the last century, the amount of information consumed by an average person has increased dramatically (to approximately 82 hours of continuous data consumption per week, every week). As a result, we consume almost 90x more information (in terms of bits) today than we did in 1940 and 4x more than we did less than twenty years ago.
I have heard almost every celebrity recommend some sort of a diet, or praise the (inconclusive) benefits of intermittent fasting.
De people go on “information diets” or “information fasts”?
Yes.
I do too. I try to actively limit the amount of information that I receive, and the time when I receive them, and I try to obtain information from the best available sources.
It is not much different to what many people do with food. For example, people limit the amount of food they consume in each meal (do not overeat), limit the times of day during which they eat (eat 2-3 meals a day), and try to eat quality foods (rather than junk).
Similarly, I limit the time when I can acquire or be exposed to new information:
Minimise the use of e-mail to no more than 2 sessions a day
I read the news no more than once per week and try to stick to relatively reputable sources (Associated Press, Reuters, BBC)
I try to take a quiet break from work and life (sitting in silence, without distractions) at least 2 times a day, for as long as possible.
Minimise the use of social media to 1-2 short sessions per week lasting no more than 2-3 minutes.
Take at least a month each year where I don’t read any books, or read any news at all.
Avoid “endless” news or article feeds, where the algorithms keep serving stories indefinitely. This means I very rarely read any news online; I still subscribe to printed magazines (they have finite content).
I wish I had time to spend 30 days each year being completely disconnected from the daily life (no phone, books, people) to balance the mind, but this is often difficult to do in practice due to personal circumstances.
Are there any early signs of an “overfed” brain?
Having “racing thoughts” or feeling overwhelmed are often the first warning signs.
Constant exposure to new information (from any source) can be dramatically detrimental to our brains. It does not matter whether the information comes from news sources, friends or family, social media feeds, workplaces, emails, books, or even your internal dialogue (which, by the way, not everyone has).
Your brain needs time (a lot of it!) to assimilate, process, reflect on, filter, and categorise all of the information it receives - just like your stomach needs time to break down and process the food you have eaten.
While some of the information processing can happen when you are sleeping (provided that you get enough quality sleep), reflection, filtering, assimilation and categorisation of acquired information can only happen when you are awake, and your brain is unoccupied.
In fact, many “untrained” people will struggle to process most information themselves, as they are unable to reflect, in a focused way, on events in their lives. It is even harder to do in their heads, and many people will need to first write their thoughts down, or talk them through with another person.
That’s why journalling (or writing) is one of the most powerful tools to keep a healthy brain. It requires slowing down the automatic thought processes and helps many individuals work through the events in their lives.
Writing (particularly self-authoring) has been extensively researched for its significant mental health benefits. Here is a short list of proven benefits:
Reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression
Stress reduction
Improved memory and sleep
Improved coping and resilience
Enhanced emotional regulation and greater self-awareness (but not in people who do not typically express emotions)
When is my brain unoccupied?
When you are not doing anything AND when you are not distracted (both conditions must be met).
Surprisingly, I often observe that many people are completely unable to spend even a few seconds without reaching for a distraction: a phone, a tablet, a TV, a book… Many people also seem uncomfortable even at the prospect of thinking about spending a few minutes without distractions…
The growing inability of people (in particular Gen-Z) to embrace boredom and maintain focus is a topic of growing concern. In a world saturated with digital distractions, constant connectivity, and instant gratification, many struggle to engage deeply with tasks or remain idle without seeking digital stimulation. This perpetual state of distraction is not only detrimental to their mental health — increasing feelings of anxiety, depression, and stress — but also hampers their well-being by impairing sleep quality, reducing physical activity, and limiting face-to-face interactions.
Professionally, this inability to focus can affect their productivity, creativity, and ultimately, their success in the workplace. The constant switching between tasks and the need for frequent stimulation can undermine the development of deep work skills crucial for complex problem-solving and innovation.
Attention, actively poached by social media algorithms, becomes the most valuable, and scarce resource.
Epidemic of connectedness
Just a few decades ago, when people went to enjoy their summer holidays, they remained completely out of reach from the rest of their everyday world: your boss, your family or your friends could not get a hold of you.
This was completely normal. Nothing had ever collapsed during that time: bills were still paid, and virtually all correspondence could wait. Even when something urgent has happened (like the death of a family member) people would not learn about it until after they returned home. And it was (and still is) absolutely fine.
Earlier in history, when the rulers of Britain would travel in their fancy horse carriages from one estate to another, and the French would attack, the royalty often remained completely unreachable until their journey was completed, often many weeks or months later.
Mobile phone coverage is virtually universal. Social media feeds never stop. Corporations run 24/7. So do the news outlets. Netflix’s CEO famously said that his company’s biggest competitor is sleep…
This is not only unprecedented but also not compatible with living organisms. Most living things on Earth require frequent breaks. Most animals need to sleep every couple of hours: humans spend 30% of their entire life asleep! Our bodies run in certain cycles. Circadian rhythms regulate daily processes, such as alertness, hormonal balance, body temperature, metabolism, performance, etc. Infradian rhythms last longer than a day and regulate breeding patterns or the human menstrual cycle. Circannual rhythms affect seasonal behaviours, physiology and reproduction in many species (such as bird migration, and bear hibernation) and impact on seasonal affective disorder in humans.
Yet in the world of information overload our brains no longer get any breaks. Time off is essential for healthy brain function. New ideas, self-development, working through past events, healing from trauma, developing sound judgment, learning and assimilation of new skills into existing knowledge framework, removal and update of redundant information or habits - they all require significant “time-out” for our brains.
The battle for your attention
Most global corporations today (including streaming services, social media platforms, news outlets, marketing and advertising industries) measure their “success” by something called “user engagement”. The metrics include likes, shares, comments, view time, click-through rates, and the frequency and duration of visits. More sophisticated analyses measure the depth of interaction, such as the sentiment of comments, the quality of user-generated content, and “conversion rates” for actions prompted by social media posts (e.g., signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product).
The more “users engaged”, the more successful is the business: An hour of outrage, hate, fear, anger or envy is worth much more than an hour of peace, reflection or sleep...
Why?
Social media algorithms predict user behaviours by analyzing vast amounts of data on past interactions, such as likes, shares, comments, and time spent on content. They use machine learning models to identify patterns and preferences, which helps in personalising content feeds to increase engagement. By predicting what users are most likely to engage with, platforms will show the content that keeps users in front of their screens for longer.
If outrage or envy will keep you in front of your Instagram feed for longer than showing your maths equations, the algorithm will do everything it can to keep you attached to your screen and serve you more ads:
In the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta reported an average revenue per user (ARPU) of approximately 41 USD…
If you chose to spend this time offline, Meta wouldn’t make a penny.
Checking my feeds is surely nothing bad?
The algorithms are getting much better at keeping people in front of their feeds for longer. In 2000, the concept of social media was still in its infancy, with most online social interaction taking place in chat rooms, forums, and via email. The emerging platforms (like SixDegrees, LiveJournal or Friendster) were barely able to keep their users for more than 5 minutes during each session.
The introduction of MySpace (2003) and Facebook (now Meta) a year later marks a steep increase in the platforms’ ability to keep users glued to the screens, with an average length of a session in 2020 being longer than 30 minutes. But this is not the whole story. In 2001 an average user would open or log into their social account only once per day, while in 2020 users would log to their feeds multiple times each day.
There are also multiple platforms available, each competing for your time and attention. The combined graph below (green) represents the average total time spent on social media per day from 2000 to 2020, calculated by multiplying the average session length by the number of sessions per day for each year. This shows a clear upward trend, illustrating how the cumulative time spent on social media has increased over the years. This trend reflects both the increased frequency of social media use and the lengthening of time spent per session, highlighting the growing integration of social media into daily life and its expanding role in communication, information sharing, and entertainment.
No wonder why in the last 15 years we have seen a surge in anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders, self-harm, impulsivity, disinhibition, isolation, body image issues and numerous other problems directly linked to the use of social media platforms.
Spending time with only your own thoughts is surely less exciting than a video from a TikTok “star” trying to elevate his or her sense of self-worth by chasing likes from people glued to a phone screen. But “more exciting” does not mean “more healthy” for you and for your brain.
Most people do not have sufficient knowledge to fully understand how social media algorithms work. This makes them unable to make an informed judgment on how to use those platforms. Many also assume that they can control the use of Social Media, or claim (falsely) that they are not controlled or influenced by the content they see.
I was too distracted and didn’t read this post. Anything I should know?
If you want to reduce anxiety, feel less depressed, increase your happiness and life satisfaction, and improve your sleep and relationships with others - you may want to start to take good care of your brain.
The most powerful and impactful thing you can do is to disconnect and dramatically reduce the amount of information you let into your brain every day.