On Cognitive Hygiene
Posted on May. 27, 2026 / Chapter News / Subscribe 0
Written by Carlos Prieto Jr.
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At all times of day, we are hit with a bombardment of attention seeking notifications. They come without warning and without a concern for what we are doing or what mental state we are in. Once the vibration or ding happens, we respond like Pavlov’s dogs checking our phones with the subconscious hope that whatever we see will be something enjoyable or more important than whatever we are doing at that moment. Alas, a majority of the time it’s inconsequential but it still sucks us in slowly wasting away our time one small ding at a time.
We live in an attention economy. Every app on your phone is vying for your attention in order to enter your headspace. Typically, we tend to not notice the effect of the barrage of notification after notification. Each one is an attempt to grab the focus of your attention and lure you in. Maybe we catch ourselves doom scrolling more than we like or taking out our phone the moment we feel a slight bit of boredom. The real cost might not be the time lost, but how with notification, our choice and agency over where we focus our attention is taken away and our thoughts subliminally influenced as a result.
I recently read Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, in which he mentions the term Cognitive Hygiene. Similarly in the way that Sleep Hygiene works, Cognitive Hygiene is all about protecting our mind’s interiority to maintain mental freedom. It got me thinking about how in coaching, we help guide the clients to find the answers from within without influence. Could practicing Cognitive Hygiene be a way for our clients to do the same for themselves.
One easy way to start practicing Cognitive Hygiene is to turn off your notifications. It may feel a bit uncomfortable at first. Not having your phone constantly vying for your attention, you may not know where it should go. As a society, we’ve collectively lost the ability to sit with discomfort and simply be bored.
But what we’ve lost might be a lot more than what we realize. Ask yourself or your clients, how many times has a solution or bright idea seemingly appeared out of nowhere? What were you doing during that aha moment? My guess is something where it was not forced to come out. Where nothing was being focused on in particular. Part of practicing Cognitive Hygiene is creating that space for us to examine our thoughts and emotions without influence.
As an experiment, ask yourself, what happens when you turn off your notifications, unsubscribe from all the emails that you automatically delete, don’t put on your headphones while you are walking, and experience life as it is. You may find that when you take your gaze away from a screen, a world appears as your mind opens to everything around you and inside yourself.
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