How to Take Back Control of Your Brain

Winning the battle for your mind is the key to everything else you want to do

"The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character, and will…. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence." - William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890

Intro: Cognitive Control and its Loss

If you are reading this, then you're probably among the people who've lost at least some cognitive control because of the addictive digital devices you own and the content they convince you to consume. But you can get that control back. This post is about how our devices come to control our attention and behavior, and how we can regain our lost minds.

Losing cognitive control makes us less effective at work, less connected to those around us, less able to focus on what we care about but keep forgetting. That is, losing cognitive control limits our ability to love and pursue our life's work, to realize our potential (and in the worst case, to make a living). Losing cognitive control takes us further from our best selves and highest goals.

Definition: Cognitive control is the ability to aim your mental focus and align your behavior with your goals. It is sometimes called executive function, or metacognition. Lack of cognitive control means you focus on things that don't really matter to you; you think and feel in ways that take you away from yourself, loved ones and goals; you behave in ways that resemble addiction.

Indeed, this loss of cognitive control is caused by addiction. That addiction is behavioral. You're not addicted to something that enters your body through your mouth, like alcohol, or through your veins, like heroin, but through your eyes and ears. You are addicted to screens and the entertainment, content, messages and interfaces they supply: the bright colors, updates, interactions and novelty.

Through our devices, we are connected to endless streams of content, and endless interactions. These interactions and content streams are purveyed by apps and platforms (Youtube, Facebook, TikTok, X) whose sole incentive is to engage us longer, because the longer they hold our attention, the more ad dollars they earn. The mindshare they control drives their profit.

What Losing the Battle Feels Like

I'm not going to waste much more time telling you that you're too distracted or explaining how Internet platforms, social media, group chats, YouTube and so-called collaboration tools have become noisier and more addictive over time.

You get too many notifications, you reach for your phone too often, you do pseudo-productive things when you could have worked on something important. All that is true, and as a result, too many people in the modern world have been zombified to maximize the engagement metrics of Silicon Valley's consumer Internet companies.

Those companies have colonized your mind and sold their piece of mindshare at auction. If you don't believe in the problem yet, you can read the books of Cal Newport or Adam Gazzaley. They'll explain it better than me.

But maybe you know that you're suffering from adult-onset ADD. You hate your mild to moderate phone addiction. You are mourning a former version of yourself that was able to focus and create, or just connect with people around you. You think your laptop and email inbox are more like garbage fires than tools for thought. If that's you, I'm here to tell you what you can do about it.

An Anatomy of Attention

You are fighting a battle to control your attention, your mind's only currency, and you're losing. So let's discuss what attention is, because there's a little more to it than you think. (Many thanks to UCSF neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley for breaking it down so clearly in his book The Distracted Mind.)

The ability to focus on a task in order to reach a goal you've set for yourself actually involves three cognitive aspects:

• Attention

• Working memory

• Goal management

Attention is in many ways like a flashlight. Its beam can be narrow or wide. Its light can be strong or weak. Its batteries can run down and need recharging. By pointing your flashlight at something, you enhance its signal, while suppressing the signals of whatever remains in darkness. Attention lets you look at things selectively. Let's explore the analogy a little more.

- What does it mean to have a wide beam of attention? When you exercise your peripheral vision, either driving down the freeway or running across a field in a game, you’re aware of more than what's right in front of you. A broad awareness can be very useful at times, just as narrowing it can also be useful when a task requires it.

- Your ability to attend to things probably varies from moment to moment. Mine is strong in the morning and weak in the evening. Sleep restores my attention, and so does exercise. That's recharging the battery in the flashlight.

- Just as a flashlight guides you through the dark toward your goal, your attention guides your mind and work through a confusion of signals washing over your eyes. The Internet cries out for your attention like a billboard on the side of the road. Your ability to point your mind toward things that should be enhanced, and ignore or inhibit other signals (the unwelcome notification) is like keeping a flashlight on the trail. Unfortunately, many people have lost control of their attention. They're running through a dark forest pointing their flashlight at random pine trees and shrubs and just hoping they don't trip and fall.

- Our ability control the beam of our attention develops through childhood, peaks in our late twenties, and declines with age. Older adults gradually lose their ability to suppress signals that take them off task. They are weaker in the face of distraction, much like young children who are easily entranced by a shiny bauble.

Now let's talk working memory. Working memory is simply remembering, for a short time, a few things you need in order to do something now. It's the ability to write down someone's phone number a few seconds after they tell it to you, or to keep in mind the document you must find on your laptop in order to complete an application online. Working memory is like a paper grocery bag. It holds things just long enough to get them home to cook. Forgetting small things mid-task is a sign that your working memory is weaker than you need it to be. Working memory declines in the face of distraction. That is, the more billboards, baubles, noise and notifications wash over your mind, the less likely you are to remember the thing you needed to find in your files.

Goal management is the last element I'll mention. It's related to the first two, but it has to do with keeping a promise you made to yourself, and blocking and tackling as other needs, pressures and desires arise. You may say to yourself, "I have to send an email to Clyde", but when you open your email inbox, you see 20 other messages that you feel compelled to read, so you don't write to Clyde. That's bad goal management.

Bad goal management happens when we decide we'll multi-task when we’re trying to accomplish something important, or simply drop one project for another midstream. Good goal management starts with figuring out the most important thing (goal setting) and then sticking with it (goal enactment) while directing your attention away from new information that assails you, until finally you've completed the steps you needed to.

If you can direct your attention, you enjoy just enough working memory, and you can stay on task despite distractions and interruptions, you have cognitive control. Your executive function is working. Most people go through long periods every day when they can't do that. They have lost control of their own brains. They are in executive dysfunction. The goal of this article is to give you tools that will increase your attention, working memory, and goal-management capacity.

There are a lot of parts involved here. Don't get scared by the long list. Just try one at a time to see what works. The good news is that each thing that works will move your attentional flywheel, and increase your powers to try the next thing, so that by the end you may be someone who has taken control of their mind back from the Internet.

Cybersecurity, but for Your Brain

The best analogy for your mind's attention is cybersecurity. We have all heard of companies getting hacked. Their data is stolen and sold. Sometimes their system is shutdown until a ransom is paid. Companies pay for cybersecurity tools to defend themselves against hackers.

That is, with cyber, you have attackers, defenses, and something precious to be guarded: data and control of a working and necessary system.

With attention, you also have attackers, defenses and something precious to be guarded. The attackers are addictive, noisy tech products delivering to you the most sensational and stimulating content of the world. The precious thing to be guarded is your mind and time. The defenses are ... usually non-existent.

In cyber, companies pay for dozens of tools to build wall upon wall of protection, and yes, they still get ransacked. It's a game of whack-a-mole, cat and mouse, and constant escalation, with a thousand cracks to be found in the castle walls.

Your attention is like that too. But instead of safeguarding it in a castle and hiring an army to protect it, every day you go to the busiest circus in town and set your naked attention in the middle of it, surrounded by flashing billboards, carnival barkers, red badges, push notifications, pings and comments and inflammatory group chats, all of which draw you into addictive cycles of engagement when you might have been doing your life's work.

Pinocchio on Pleasure Island

"Pinocchio!" Lamp-Wick called out. "Listen to me. Come with us and we'll always be happy."

In the story of Pinocchio, a puppet carved of wood longs to become a real boy, but is lured by his false friend, Lampwick, to Pleasure Island. This is a place where boys could play, smoke, gamble and do as they pleased.

To get there, Pinocchio mounts a heavy wagon drawn by mules, one of whom weeps under the whip of the island's master. It is only later that Pinocchio discovers that the mules are actually a previous cohort of lost children; that is, the island is a place that converts young boys who seek diversion into beasts of burden who labor at the service of a cruel mule driver.

Why is Lampwick called Lampwick? The wick of a lamp is its fuse. If Lampwick had been created a century later, he might have been named after a trigger or a switch, the mechanism by which Pinocchio is turned on to the possibility of new pleasures without constraints.

For many of us, Pinocchio was our first parable of addiction, and while the addictions of those lost children do involve some substances -- candy and smokes -- they are also behavioral. They don't all require the detour of a new molecule to be eaten, drunk or smoked; experience alone can change the boys' state.

Today, the only behavioral addiction recognized as a disease by the FDA is gambling. But many of us have met people addicted to other behaviors: maybe it was sex, video games, shopping, or social media. No outside molecules are needed to get a monkey on your back, a compulsive behavior that shows you've lost control of yourself, despite the clear costs to your relationships and goals.

The argument here is that the devices we carry in our pockets and confront on our desks for many hours a day have become a new Pleasure Island, offering us infinite satisfactions and junk dopamine derived from news updates, chats and social media responses. We carry Pleasure Island in our pocket now. It's not actually an island at all any more, but an ocean that surrounds us in all directions. Just a click or a flick of the wrist away. And that makes it much harder not to visit, and it makes us much more likely to fall under the mule-driver's whip.

Confessions of a Behavioral Addict

Before I list all the things you can do to guard your attention, let me tell you a little bit about my journey. My name is Chris Nicholson and I'm an addict. What I'm addicted to is information. I can't stop consuming content online.

This is known as a behavioral addiction, in contrast to a substance addiction like alcoholism. People also get addicted to eating and to sex. Being behaviorally addicted to information is probably closer to a food addiction than anything else, because we all need to consume at least some information. But we can also consume too much. And the Internet knows this, so they put the heroin next to the tap water. That is, the information I need to consume in order to live and work is placed right next to the information I don't need, but which stimulates me. And so when I open the fridge to grab the hummus, I end up binging on cheese. Informationally speaking... And because my mental obesity and fragmented mind are intangible, they are harder to name, and the problem is harder to fix.

I realized I was addicted to Twitter a few years ago, back when it was still called Twitter. Every slack moment I had during the day, I'd find myself scrolling. It made me feel good in the moment, and then bad after a while. And if I did it frequently enough, it didn't even make me feel good in the moment any more.

This is textbook addiction: the pleasure is front-loaded and causes a debt of pain. And over time the initial pleasure wanes, so you seek more and more intense experiences to regain the early high. That sucked. But telling myself "I shouldn't open Twitter right now" did not prevent me from doing it. I was always back on the same old feeds. I realized that I had lost control of my behavior, and it was then that I learned the term behavioral addiction.

I tried to block Twitter. I put parental controls on my phone, and had a friend choose the secret password. I couldn't access Twitter from the machine that was in my pocket all day. To my frustration, I found that a lot of people shared Twitter links with me by text and email, without telling me what was through the link. I couldn't stay in conversations with people I cared about because the message was at least partially contained on a social media platform I was addicted to. I'd tell people that I had blocked Twitter and to send me screenshots. Some gracious souls did. But the people you know pull you back into the life. And this is an example of how our societies have been replatformed regardless of the desires of any specific individual. If you want to be a part of things, you have to participate in social media.

We haven't gotten to the laptop yet. There are tools to block websites on almost any browser, but there are also lots of browsers in the world. If I blocked myself on one browser, and "needed to get on Twitter", I found myself downloading another browser. As of today, I have Chrome, Safari, Brave, Opera, and Zen.

What I'm describing is the cat and mouse we play with addiction, where the tendrils of the engagement machine that has replatformed society and all our friends keeps sneaking through the cracks. And it's particularly pernicious because, unlike horrific addictions such as alcohol and heroin and meth, we actually can't go cold turkey on information any more than we can on food. We have to live with the dilemma that it's both necessary and addictive at the same time, and navigate that. And most of us are navigating it poorly and without support. There is no 12-step program for screen addiction. No BA group meeting up every Wednesday. And going cold turkey wouldn’t work anyway if your boss is sending you Twitter links.

At the risk of committing a montage fallacy, misleading readers about how hard it is, and making you stumble over unexpected difficulties, I'll just say that there were many moments of progress over the years, followed by backsliding. I got better, I got worse. I got clean, I relapsed. Now I want to tell you a few of the tools I use, and the principles that guide me in choosing tools.

Principles for Taking Back Cognitive Control

1) Take control of the your onscreen experience. That is, whatever appears on your screen is should be there because you chose it, and in the way you chose it. I will show you which tools help you control your online experience below.

2) Make addictive technologies boring. Reduce desire.

3) Make addictive technologies hard to access. Add friction.

4) Out of sight, out of mind. So do everything you can to keep the things that you want out of your mind, out of your sight. They are cues that will trigger your behavior. No cue, no behavior. The cues are visual notifications, bings, rings and vibrations. Just turn them off.

5) Dopamine is relative. That is, you feel longing for one experience relative to another. Few things are desirable in themselves. You confront a heatmap of attraction across all possible digital experiences, and you will be drawn to the place with the most heat. But you can pour water on it, which will shift the hottest spots on the heat map to something less compelling.

During the years I spent slowly burning out while a startup founder, I developed a taste for detective fiction. I was nostalgic for a world where all the puzzles get solved, the protagonist prevails in the end, and a line connects the moment you confront a mystery with the moment of resolution. I think sports fans obey a similar impulse: they are attracted to a game with known rules, where effort pays off, where victory and defeat are legible. I was deeply nostalgic for those contained worlds which are similar to the childhoods we are nostalgic for, even if they never happened. So I read genre fiction. I processed more pulp than Charles River. This is remarkably similar to the behavioral addiction Anna Lembke describes in her book Dopamine Nation. Just foraging for dopamine. When my real-life sources of reward went dry, I found virtual, imaginary ones, in fiction and online.

The makers of online experiences know that dopamine is relative. To get you to spend more time in their app, they all the tools at their disposal: sound, sight, color, movement, velocity, social connections. They hijack your senses, and usurp your attention from below.

Here indeed is addiction's hook, the thing that keeps luring you back. You are trying to do something difficult. Maybe it's difficult because it's confusing. You know you need to do something but you are not sure what. And that feeling of confusion is really uncomfortable. You're sitting at your screen. One click away is a place where you know someone has posted something new and interesting. How many people resist clicking out of their frustration and into a hit of junk dopamine? That dynamic is why you are not more productive, more creative, more able to fulfill your life's work. My goal is to give you the tools to get back on track.

Everything is Exocortex

An exocortex is "an external information processing system that augments the brain's biological high-level cognitive processes." It's fashionable now to talk about computers, phones and AI as an exocortex, and while indeed they are, the list of what makes up your exocortex is longer. It is, in fact, the rooms you work and live in (with all their audio and visual noise) and the company you keep (and the topics they choose to introduce to your life feed). Everything is exocortex.

You need to control your environment to control your brain. That doesn't mean you have to control everyone around you and change the drapes, but it does mean there are structures you can put in place in your external world that will help you focus. By doing this, your present self can ensure that your future self will keep its promises and enact your goals. In high-motivation moments, you set up guardrails, allowing your future self to borrow motivation from your present self.

Primal Screen: Tools for Screen Control

1) Parental controls - for the strong compulsions, you can make it impossible to access an app or website on your device. (iPhone, Android)

2) News Feed Eradicator - gets rid of the infinite news feeds the algorithm pushes on various social media. With NFE, you need to search for the content you want to see. It doesn't come to you. I found that by eradicating newsfeeds, I didn't need to block the apps and websites anymore, because I was no longer exposed to infinite content for zero effort. A little friction goes a long way. Eradicating newsfeeds means you have to remember each contact whose news you want, visit their page, quickly exhaust their news, and try to remember another contact. Your memory’s limits are also a useful part of friction.

3) uBlock Origin - A chrome extension. Selecting the pipette icon in the dropdown menu gives you the power to delete any element from any website. You control your UX. This works on red badges, social media networks advertising weird live group chats, every single feature they put in your nav bars that you don't care about, including how the upsell their professional versions. To put a finer point on it, after extensive UI surgery, here’s what I see on LinkedIn. No badges, notifications, noise. Just the information I came to find.

4) Color filters: Grayscale makes your phone boring. Your laptop, too. The bright colors are one way that device makers convince you to prefer digital experience over reality. It’s how they hijack your senses, but the colors are in your control.

5) Put the device where you can't see it. If necessary, in a lock box or another room.

6) Time-boxed site-blockers: There are many, but StayFocusd works for me.

7) Gazzaley created an FDA-approved video game to treat ADD. It’s called EndeavorOTC and you can play it on your cellphone.

* If you’re curious to learn how cognitive control fits into my overall approach to life, I wrote about it in “A Few Big Ideas That Made My Life Better”, and in “The Inner Game of Knowledge Work: Overcoming Your Avoidant Brain.”