The Mental Diet Nobody Is Tracking

While wellness movements and " ideal body types " come and go, one thing is certain: We've never had more access to information about optimizing our physical selves . We can plan diets and exercise regimens down to the best foods and movements for our cycles , our genetics, our personal physical aspirations; it's arguably one of the best times to be a human, let alone a health-conscious woman. We see evidence of this in the multitude of industries, brands, and influencers across the health and wellness space, all serving nonstop content on beauty, diet, exercise, hormonal health, weight loss… the list goes on. It doesn't feel like an outlandish observation to state that we spend huge amounts of time and attention on our bodies. But what about our minds? We think about macros and micros, we talk about Pilates and barre, we read about peptides and organics. Yet increasingly, it's hard not to wonder: Are we treating our minds with the same fervor and careful consideration with which we treat our bodies? Reading is down. Screen time is up. Viewership is rising for reality shows that are fun and addictive, yes, but hardly intellectually driven . The ecosystem of wellness information is massive because its audience is massive, and the promise driving most of it is visible physical change. Unfortunately, no such volume of industry exists for our more intellectual pursuits. It raises the question: We demonstrate huge willingness and curiosity to better our physical selves. How do we apply the same efforts to bettering our minds? But first: Why does this matter? We hear a lot about screen time, and trade heavily in discussion over its impact on relationships and cultural norms. Increasingly, there also seem to be clear ties between our relationship with individualized digital information and feelings of isolation and depression. But the way we interact with information doesn't just impact our lives in felt, observational ways. It literally alters our minds (and spoiler alert, for the worse). A 2025 article in The Washington Post includes a frightening statistic, drawn from the research of UC Irvine psychologist Gloria Mark. Making an argument for the effect of short-form, constantly shifting content on our brains, it notes that the average sustained attention people give a screen has fallen from roughly two and a half minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds in recent years. Our brains are being rewired to focus for shorter amounts of time, while ironically, engaging with more information. Nathan Heller's 2024 essay in The New Yorker , "The Battle for Attention," includes this same statistic and goes further into the consequences of reduced attention spans. He posits that attention not only enables us to be productive, but that it's a prerequisite for creativity, relationship-building, and developing memory. Attention is key in shaping our ability to relate to and understand the world. Unless we want to end up with the attention spans of goldfish and the depths of puddles, investing in our intellectual intake and our capacity to dedicate thorough attention is crucial. The good, the bad, and the guilty of your mental diet We consume more content in a given day than previous humans would have in a lifetime. We're constantly inundated with words, sounds, and visuals, to the point where it can be difficult to know the boundaries between our own thoughts, the content we seek out, and the plethora of things we absorb simply by living. Our existence in this rampant informational ecosystem brings to mind David Foster Wallace's famous speech, " This Is Water. " (If you've never read it, I highly encourage you to.) The water we're in is a constant, rushing stream of bite-sized information, but like any fish, we're so accustomed to it that we don't even grasp what we're swimming in. The average internet user now spends roughly 6 hours and 38 minutes a day on internet-connected devices, and the group logging the most hours of all is women aged 16 to 24. That's a significant chunk of one's waking hours. How many hours do you spend on your phone? Instagram? TikTok? How many shows do you put on for "background noise" while trying to focus elsewhere? How many Netflix series are you binging as a way to unwind? Do you always have headphones on wherever you go, music or a podcast playing in your ears? Where in your mental diet is time for your own thoughts, time dedicated to consuming nothing whatsoever? And then: How many hours do you spend reading fiction? How long do you spend journaling or writing each day? Where in your mental diet is time for your own thoughts, time dedicated to consuming nothing whatsoever? And, of course: What are your guilty pleasures? How regularly are you enjoying them? If Love Island is your guilty pleasure, and you not only watch it but talk about it, follow the cast members on social media, and lose time in the comment sections, it's not just an occasional midnight candy bar. It's a main course, and it comprises a huge part of your overall diet. The good news is, like with your diet and exercise regimen, you have the ultimate control over what you engage with, or at least, to what extent. What, and how often, are you reading? A recent cover story in The Atlantic hit the interwebs like a shockwave. "The Age of Reading Is Over," written by Rose Horowitch, provides a startling view into current reading habits. One doesn't need to agree with all her analyses to accept the underlying argument: that while we may be reading more words than ever, we're not reading in ways beneficial to our intellectual growth and psyche. One particularly startling thread comes via pediatrics professor John Hutton, who compares endless scrolling to a lab animal pressing a lever for a reward until pressing the lever is the only thing it wants to do. This trend continues all the way up to higher education, where even students at elite universities are unable to keep up with standard reading curricula; professors are editing down reading assignments, switching out books entirely, knowing students simply won't read certain works. According to Horowitch, the decline cuts across age, gender, and education, and even the groups that historically read the most, women and college graduates among them, have seen sharp collapses. But again, time to be honest: What are you reading? Just like all calories aren't created equal, not all literature is created equal. Read literature that's stood the test of time. Read works that challenge you. Pick one classic to span a week, a month, a quarter; whatever makes sense for your own pace and appetite. Read Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, and Austen; read Milan Kundera and contemporary writers like Zadie Smith. Read Steinbeck's East of Eden (it may appear daunting, but I've yet to meet a woman who's read it, "reader" or non-reader alike, whose soul it didn't shake). Start a book club and host thematic dinner parties; be the champion of deep analysis and engaged conversation. And if it helps, read fun things on the side: lightweight thrillers, juicy romances, sappy historical fiction. You can have your potato chips, so long as they're not replacing the main course. What are you talking about? One of the biggest parts of our mental diet is something harder to track than social media scrolls or television hours logged: It's our conversations. And like everything else about the water we're swimming in, conversations happen all the time, so much so that we don't realize how many of them we're having. Research from the University of Michigan psychologist Oscar Ybarra found that even brief, cooperative conversations produce measurable boosts to executive function, comparable to the effect of brain-training games, while conversations with a competitive edge produce no benefit at all. Not every person is an intellectual, nor does every conversation need to be deep, meaningful, or academic. But if the majority of your chatter is about other people, superficial topics, or, say, the happenings on reality television, you're not stimulating your brain. In fact, you're diluting your own ability to think. You're diluting your own ability to think. "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." The line is usually credited to Eleanor Roosevelt, but it traces back to the 19th-century English historian Henry Thomas Buckle. Whoever said it first, it's a great north star for us all. Embrace your strongest mind. Bring about thoughtful debate. Be brave enough to introduce new ideas into familiar groups of friends, host dinner parties or French-style salons focused on a particular topic or theme, and catch yourself when you veer into gossip or filler. Be the person who opens the door for more enriching conversation, and see who walks through the door with you, for those people will be pivotal in your expansion. Make no mistake, there's still room for the occasional empty-calorie candy. But like sugary, artificial foods hurt your stomach and cause discomfort, unfulfilling conversation will only create energetic and intellectual aches. Silence really is golden Though we've advanced in our understanding of how, what, and when to eat to nurture our individual bodies, an older piece of advice still rings true: Stop eating when you're full. Our bodies tell us when we're physically satiated. But what about being mentally full? When was the last time you really forced your mind to stop consuming? Given the nonstop bombardment of content across all mediums and variations, our natural state is consumption. Our phone alone keeps many of us in a perpetual state of distraction; it's impossible to walk down any American street without seeing a majority of people glued to their screens. When evaluating your informational diet, how many hours are you leaving for quiet? For nothing? The rewards are vast. An oft-cited study titled "Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind" found that people would rather experience discomfort, physical pain, even, than sit quietly without distraction. When given the choice between being left alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes or administering themselves an electric shock, 67% of the men chose the shock. The women, notably, fared far better: only a quarter of them pressed the button. Many of us are terrified of simply sitting with ourselves. And in a perhaps unanticipated twist, the constant connection to digital devices and content might actually be increasing our general sense of boredom. Boredom is on the rise, despite having seemingly endless ways to combat it. The problem is that we're not nurturing healthy boredom. There's significant research showing that boredom, specifically brought on by lack of external stimulation, leads to more creativity. Daydreaming and "idle" thought lead to new ideas, increased productivity, and more engagement with surroundings. We benefit from nothingness. By constantly allowing our brainwaves to be hijacked by outside influences, we're actually losing something. When you stop eating when you're full, you'll lose weight; but when you stop listening, scrolling, or reading just for the sake of doing something? You'll regain creativity, subtlety, and, most likely, insight into your inner self. Developing and maintaining a stronger intellectual diet takes time, energy, and dedication, but the rewards are vast. A well-tended mind will bring forth more imagination, more interesting perspectives, and a richer understanding of the world. And the best part? Whereas our bodies have constraints, our minds are endless. It's time we invest in them as such.