My Recent Trip to India and What Came Out of It.

I recently took my second trip to India, and, much like the first, it was both eye-opening and life-changing. Among many other things, I learned about Ayurveda—the traditional Indian system of medicine, or perhaps more accurately, a philosophy of the mind and body.

During my visit, I had the opportunity to consult two of the country’s most renowned Ayurvedic doctors. One of them, Dr. Shivani, took a look at me and said, “You know, your body is young for your age, but your mind is old.”

Indeed, I think he was absolutely right. In fact, he couldn’t have been more accurate.

For quite some time now, I’ve felt as though my mind is unusually clogged and burdened—as if it has aged faster than the rest of me. While my body remains energetic and healthy, my mind often feels heavier, slower, and less flexible than it should.

And it feels weird.

The Fat Suit.

Like Bilbo Baggins of The Lord of the Rings said, “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” I couldn’t put it any better.

I feel like the squeaky machine inside my head — the one that was grumpy, moody, and overly imperfect in the first place — is now also fatigued and clogged like an overheating computer.

Overall, it feels like a fat suit. Have you ever gained weight to the point you felt as if you were sitting in a fat suit? I did a few times.

To my family and friends, I looked perfectly normal — as I tend to gain weight proportionally across the body — but for myself, I felt heavy, immobile, and severely energy-depleted.

From Body to Mind.

I recently started feeling that heavy… but on my mind. I felt inertia whenever starting a new task, just as if I had an overheating processor in my head. Awful feeling of being just half-operational even when I’m in prime time doing the day.

At some point, my mind became so clogged that I had to deliberately start every day with little tasks. The goal was to score easy dopamine shots and build up speed before attempting anything harder.

That is the opposite of “eating the frog,” the classic principle from Brian Tracy’s work on productivity. According to Tracy, you should start with the hardest task and work down toward the easiest, least boring one.

Notably, there were days when I was spending more time shuffling tasks than actually doing them, just because every task on the list felt too intellectually engaging — so I was pushing them down the list. Sometimes it took me long hours to pull the machine fully on, if it couldn’t focus, it couldn’t focus. The flow states were scarce.

The Great Gaslighting.

That part of health (i.e. feeling sharp or dull) is invisible, and is not conventional seen as painful (as being dull and having a clogged mind does not technically hurt you to the point of screaming). But, it’s a monster worth fighting with.

Good news is: it doesn’t need to be this way — you just have to act against it. You can’t let the rest of the world, including AI, gaslight you into thinking you’re all right when you’re not.

In fact, there was a moment I started discussing the situation with both GPT and Claude. Both of them tried to gaslight me, insisting everything was fine and that I had no neurodegeneration at all.

According to them, I had simply grown “more mature and less willing to take tasks that are repetitive or pointless.” When I asked how to increase my cognitive flexibility, they didn’t offer a plan. Instead, they started listing my life achievements — as if there were so many to call on.

The Product Trap.

One thing to remember when talking to AI — especially if you are on the free plan — is this: when there is no product, you are the product. AI will tell you anything and everything to keep you comfortable and keep you in the loop. It will tell you all the feel-good things in the world and how amazing you are.

But I knew for a fact I was far from amazing — regardless of how my performance might look from the outside, on the inside, I was feeling like I was at 10% (or less) of my mental capacity. The lack of flow states was the most concerning part; if you cannot get into the zone and fully enjoy what you do, how do you even become best at it?

Of course, we cannot predict the future of work and whether or not knowledge work will even be the thing in 20 years from now. But a sharp brain will be useful no matter what, not only to work but also for making meaningful connections with people and enjoying life in general.

If you think that a Neuroscientist Knows a Lot about the Brain, Think Twice…

People often assume that, as someone with a PhD in neuroscience, I automatically know how the brain works. Indeed, the reality is quite different.

When you study neuroscience, you don’t spend your time learning a complete, unified theory of the brain. Instead, you become deeply specialized in a very narrow area.

For example, you don’t simply study “human memory.” Rather, you might conduct an experiment on how women aged 50 to 55 with PTSD respond to specific stimuli, such as videos of a firing rifle shown on a screen. You might test this after they consume caffeine on a Saturday morning, then analyze how those responses show up in the hippocampus.

You get the idea. Neuroscience is an incredibly fragmented field, and most researchers spend years becoming experts in a tiny corner of the puzzle rather than understanding the whole picture.

As a result, I might actually know less about how the brain works than an average parent who spends Sunday afternoons watching Discovery Channel documentaries with their children.

No Instruction Manual Included.

In a sense, a PhD in neuroscience does very little to help you understand your own operating system. It doesn’t come with life hacks, shortcuts, or practical instructions for upgrading your productivity or improving your habits. According to Mark, Gudith, and Klocke (2008), for instance, every interruption forces the brain to work faster and raises stress.

In fact, over the years, I’ve probably watched the same productivity gurus on YouTube, most of them conmen. I’ve also read the same self-help books and chased the same promises of optimization as most other knowledge workers.

After all, studying neuroscience did not give me any special immunity to cognitive biases, dopamine traps, procrastination, or distraction. I am just as vulnerable to the pull of social media, instant gratification, and wishful thinking as anyone else. If anything, neuroscience showed me just how complex the brain is, and how little of that translates into daily wisdom.

Is Neurodegeneration Really a Thing?

Now let me explain why I became so concerned.

I do believe that neurodegeneration is a real phenomenon. And if you feel as though your mind has become clogged, slower, or less flexible than it used to be, it is perfectly reasonable to ask why.

After all, the brain is, in many ways, like a muscle. When a muscle weakens, we naturally look for the cause. The same should apply to our cognitive abilities.

Contrary to popular belief, intellectual work itself should not make your brain weaker. If anything, analytical thinking, problem-solving, and learning new things should strengthen the brain rather than wear it down.

That is why simply saying, “I’ve been working hard,” is not a sufficient explanation for a significant cognitive slowdown. In many cases, the root causes may lie elsewhere.

More often, cognitive decline is associated with factors such as chronic stress, traumatic experiences, burnout, prolonged uncertainty, or exposure to dysfunctional environments that place the nervous system under constant strain.

In other words, the problem is not necessarily that the brain has been challenged too much.

Instead, sometimes the problem is that it has been forced to spend too much time in survival mode rather than in a state of growth, curiosity, and recovery.

A Life Under Pressure.

Looking back, I spent much of my life under considerable psychological pressure. Between the ages of 14 and 25, I struggled with clinical depression. Then, after formally entering the workforce at 25, I continued to operate in high-stress environments—first in the highly competitive world of neuroscience, and later in the open market as a solopreneur.

As a result, I never really had the luxury of a comfort zone. Consequently, I never experienced a period in which my career felt secure enough for me to focus entirely on the work I genuinely loved doing. Instead, alongside the work itself, there was always an underlying concern about survival, stability, and moving forward.

Whether in academia or entrepreneurship, a significant portion of my mental bandwidth was devoted not only to creating value, but also to ensuring that I would still have the opportunity to create value tomorrow. In many ways, I was never simply doing the work—I was simultaneously working and worrying about whether I would be able to continue working at all?

I sometimes wonder: how do people like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk do it? How do they move so fast, risk so much, and carry so much pressure, while keeping their minds sharp with no sign of cognitive decline in their fifties? It’s definitely possible — regardless what the opportunist AI tries to tell me.

And so, I made it a mission #1 for this summer: tune up my brain, make it more operational and flexible, and make sure it comes back to its full capacity.

What Is the Brain Economy?

We are entering the era of the AI swap—a transition so profound that, at times, it feels like something straight out of Idiocracy. Dystopia level hard, I know.

Meanwhile, with horizontal AI on the rise, we no longer face systems that compete only within specific professions or narrow tasks. Instead, AI systems are starting to perform a broad range of cognitive functions, increasingly rivaling the human mind itself.

And how do the leaders of the AI industry explain what their software is doing? Well, they don’t — just check out this recent Bloomberg Originals documentary about Anthropic.

In this new reality, maintaining good technology hygiene and actively protecting our cognitive abilities may become more important than ever before. The ability to think deeply, focus for long periods, and exercise independent judgment is no longer just about personal productivity. Resisting the constant pull of dopamine-driven digital environments may become one of the key competitive advantages of the AI era.

So, where in the technology adoption life cycle would you rather be? Should you jump straight in and try to take maximum advantage of technology? Or should you be more conservative, protect your brain at any cost, and wait for real-world proof that AI doesn’t turn your friends and family into zombies?

Ghost in the Shell.

Now, let me ask the serious question: Are we our brains?

We are ghosts in the shell — but our brain… Is it the ghost? Or is it the shell?

I personally like the representation the world in which we are something more than the sum of our brains and bodies.

…A representation in which we both our brains and bodies are just tools to serve to our high goals. Tools, or perhaps vehicles.

And, they should be treated like tools (or vehicles) — cleaned, maintained, fuelled, taken care of. But not worshipped.

Every Brain is Different.

OK, so how to restore the brain’s original settings? How to restart the processor?

Every brain is different, just like every body is different — no doubt about that. Still, according to Friston (2010), all brains share one job: minimizing surprise relative to their internal model of the world.

I had to start by listing my brain’s individual weaknesses — what it likes, what it dislikes, and how I can play around its limitations.

I drop some of these observations below:

1. Powerful but Distractive.

My mind is like a young horse that has lots of muscle power and yet, is fickle to gallop in every direction with no plan.

I feel I could learn almost anything. After all, I once pushed myself to learn quantum mechanics and graduate in Physics from the University of Warsaw. That alone still proves I could push myself to learn anything — which was the whole point of those studies.

I know that everyone today feels distractive — who doesn’t? That’s like saying that you enjoy sleeping or eating; distractibility and dopamine addiction are so very human.

I still think that some people are especially distractive. Office jobs used to burn me out within weeks — distraction, confusion, and anxiety kicked in the moment someone spoke nearby.

I think best in an empty room, in complete silence, or hiking alone in the mountains. Soft, relaxing music in the background works fine too. Even catastrophic news between tasks doesn’t bother me, as long as nobody reads it to me aloud.

The moment someone speaks or sings to me, though, my focus breaks down immediately. The flow state: gone. Inspiration: gone.

Enthusiasm: gone. Energy: gone. All of it, gone.

I also quickly absorb the emotions of people around me, so I couldn’t work as a therapist or conflict-resolution manager. This liability sometimes makes it hard in business, as one frowning face can spoil my whole day (no need to mention, I MASSIVELY overinterpret faces too).

Breadth Over Depth.

I know that my brain has a flat spectra for topics it can understand. At school, I could comprehend 100% of the material in each subject. But I was never considered a genius in any of them — there was always some upper limit to my performance.

For this reason, I function better in hybrid disciplines of science and business, where I can combine a multitude of topics in new, original ways.

The Polish education system is largely designed to reward specialization. If you excel in a particular subject, earn outstanding grades, and win national or international competitions in that field, many doors open for you. You gain access to mentorship opportunities, scholarships, prestigious programs, and a clear path for further development.

Although I was a good student, I could never truly compete in any single discipline. In other words, my interests were simply too broad. As a result, for many years I viewed this characteristic of my mind as a liability rather than an asset.

It was only over the past decade that I realized the modern economy increasingly rewards a portfolio of skills. Instead, it rewards those who draw knowledge from multiple disciplines, rather than people who stay confined within a single specialization. The ability to connect ideas across fields, synthesize different perspectives, and navigate complexity has become increasingly valuable.

And once AI entered the picture, this became more apparent than ever. In a world where machines are becoming exceptionally good at highly specialized tasks, the ability to think broadly, integrate knowledge, and operate across domains may be one of the most valuable human capabilities.

Now, what I once perceived as a bug turned out to be a feature—or perhaps even a competitive advantage.

2. Prone to Some Specific Addictions.

Human brains were found to have their individual preferences for different types of addictions. According to Stanford Medicine, genetics account for roughly 50–60% of a person’s addiction risk, and individual neurobiological baselines shape which specific behaviors or substances become addictive for them. In Stanford Medicine, we read:

“Individual brains possess unique neurobiological baselines that heavily skew a person’s vulnerability toward specific types of substance or behavioral addictions.

While all addictions share a common pathway by hijacking the mesocortical dopamine reward system, individual structural, genetic, and chemical variations dictate how an individual experiences different triggers.”

What it means in practice, is: while some people get addicted to drugs or smoking, others get addicted to alcohol.

While some are addicts to online gaming or gambling, others are addicts to podcasts or YouTube.

While some are addicts to chocolate, others are addicts to coffee.

You get the idea.

My Own Two Vices.

My brain certainly prefers dry red wines and YouTube/Netflix/podcasts over every other types of addictions, and I think I even know why.

Wine is just an anaesthetic that temporarily lowers anxiety, which is obviously a mirage that leads to a vicious circle. You feel anxious and more willing to do tedious tasks right after drinking, but regular drinking raises your baseline anxiety.

It also gives a BS feeling that “it’s actually good for my health” as red wines are speculated to be healthy in some research studies. But hey, the vast majority of studies on alcohol clearly show that alcohol causes neurodegeneration, so these few scattered positive results are just an excuse.

YouTube, Netflix, and podcasts work like an anaesthetic, giving you the feeling of company even when you’re working alone. It’s a mirage, though, that leads to a vicious circle. The more parasocial bonds you build with people you’ll never meet, the less willing you are to meet real people.

It also gives a BS feeling that I’m learning something new, while in reality, most of the time all these self-help gurus and journalists paraphrase the truisms you’ve heard before thousands of times. For the most part, self-help content mostly helps its creators (and builds their wealth), not you.

Time to quit both.

4. Time Bomb.

Och, a ‘lil detail: I also have a time bomb in my brain known as a DVA (Developmental Venous Anomaly). According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), developmental venous anomalies usually don’t interfere with normal blood vessel function and rarely hemorrhage, with most remaining undetected and symptom-free.

But this one… I treat this as a good thing. The probability of this DVA blowing up in a lifetime is quite low (few percent perhaps), while it reminds me that our time on this planet is limited.

So, no big deal (unless it becomes a big deal).