79 | The Link Between Screen Time, Brain Fog, and Why Your Memory Isn't What It Used to Be

Can you tell me your best friend's phone number right now without looking at your phone? Or what about your child's phone number? If I was asked that question, I might feel a little wave of panic because I'm not sure I would know it off the top of my head.

There was a time not that long ago when you might have known maybe a dozen phone numbers by heart.

You knew the route to your best friend's house without a map.

You could recite your grocery list because you had said it over in your head three times before you left the driveway.

None of that required effort back then.

It was just how your brain worked, because your brain had to work that way.

But somewhere along the line, your phone quietly took over that job.

Now, when I make that statement, you know, don't hear it in a condemning way.

It is not automatically a bad thing that we have phones or digital devices that help us in lots of different ways.

Nobody is asking you to throw away your calendar app or start carving out dates into some stone tablets.

But offloading some of our mental load is not the enemy here.

But I do want you to notice something.

Memory is not just storage the way a filing cabinet is storage.

Memory is a muscle.

And muscles that stop being used get weaker.

So when we hand every single act of remembering over to a digital device, we are not just saving ourselves a little effort, we are letting a real skill atrophy.

And I think that many of us walk around feeling foggy or scattered and we just assume something's wrong with us when really we have just stopped asking our brain to do the thing it's built to do.