Protecting Your Brain in the AI Era
Every knowledge worker has probably experienced moments when they desperately want to do manual labor instead. That’s because much knowledge work is deeply “anti-human” — it keeps us in a high-consumption state for long periods without timely feedback, leaving our brain’s reward system unsatisfied and leading to further slumps. Our decision-making ability declines, we start procrastinating, lose focus, resist moving forward, and easily get distracted by other tasks.
AI Amplifies Not Efficiency, But Decision Density
After using AI, this exhaustion has become even more pronounced. AI makes us more efficient, but also makes our brains work harder.
Recently, I’ve been using AI to drive multiple projects simultaneously. This is certainly highly efficient — each task can start quickly, and AI provides feedback in a very short time.
But the problem is that this “ability to push forward anything at any time” keeps me constantly switching between different tasks. More importantly, every time AI gives me a result, I need to make an immediate judgment: Is this solution right? Should I change it? What’s the next step? These judgments are small but extremely dense. Gradually, throughout a day, I’m not making a few important decisions, but dozens or even hundreds of micro-decisions. And these decisions are scattered across different task contexts, requiring me to constantly re-enter the flow state.
This is actually very damaging to the prefrontal cortex.
Basic Brain “Maintenance”
I recently finished reading the book Age-Proof Brain, which presents a fundamental logic: the brain is not designed for sustained high pressure and continuous consumption. The author introduces some basic methods for maintaining brain health, which can be simply summarized into several directions:
- Optimizing environment: Reducing exposure to air pollution and harmful substances
- Dietary structure: Increasing quality fats (such as omega-3), reducing sugar and processed foods
- Regular exercise: Combining aerobic, strength, and balance training
- Sleep management: Maintaining consistent routines, reducing blue light interference
- Emotion and stress: Reducing chronic stress through mindfulness and other practices
- Safety protection: Avoiding head injuries
- Cognitive stimulation: Maintaining learning, social interaction, and engagement with complex problems
- Personalized intervention: Identifying risks early through health checkups and other means
In short, we need a better living environment, healthier lifestyle habits, adequate sleep, regular exercise, continuous learning, deep thinking, and timely health checkups.
In the AI Era, We Need to Prioritize Brain “Relaxation”
The greatest pain that AI brings is the repeated task switching that leads to brain exhaustion. If I had to choose the most important adjustment, it would be reducing task switching and controlling pace. The Pomodoro Technique is an excellent approach — within one Pomodoro session, don’t switch tasks. Even with multitasking, during one Pomodoro period, only work on one of them, giving each task a complete time window.
Another approach is completing activities like exercise, meditation, or writing. The form of the task doesn’t matter; what matters is allowing yourself to complete these long-duration, focused thinking tasks or completely放空 activities during rest. An easier option is to integrate mindfulness into daily life. During my long period of pushing multiple tasks simultaneously, I’ve found my attention is now very difficult to concentrate. So I now force myself to integrate mindfulness into life — when eating, just eat; when washing up, just wash up — controlling the urge to have other thoughts pop up or wanting to continue discussing things with AI. Knowing when to stop is also very important.
AI has lowered the threshold for many things, allowing us to do more simultaneously and making feedback extremely fast. But the brain itself hasn’t become stronger because of this — it still has its own rhythm and limitations. If we don’t control this rhythm, it’s easy to unknowingly push ourselves into a state of doubled exhaustion. Finally, I wish everyone a good rest during this Qingming Festival — go out into nature, experience it, and properly relax your brain that has been “tortured” by AI.