I never realised how much I loved my brain until I started to dig deeper into the research on AI-induced brain rot.
We've been sold this idea that our competitive edge as leaders comes from doing more and doing it faster, but what if speed and the behaviour it drives actually delivers degradation of the very resource you depend upon as a leader?
The emerging research on AI-induced brain rot provides a timely red flag on how the unintentional use of AI can impact your brain and your business.
It's a simple way of describing cognitive offloading, which is what happens when you regularly hand over your thinking work to technology. As humans, our brains are always looking for ways to reduce pain and discomfort, which means we have a bias toward finding quicker ways to do things, even if long-term that can be detrimental to our health, happiness, and impact. So, when AI comes along, and we're told to get on board and do it quickly or be left behind, many of us nod and get on with it.
However, when we start to go to AI for everything, we effectively start to shrink the capability of our brains. Your brain works like a muscle. When you start reducing the time you invest in using it to solve tough problems on your own, your mental muscle can atrophy. If we stop practising the hard thinking that builds wisdom and sound judgement, our minds become weaker and less able to handle the hard stuff.
Critical Thinking Deficit: A 2025 mixed-methods study found that high dependency on AI tools correlates with 17.3% lower scores in critical thinking compared to low-usage peers.
Digital Amnesia: Using AI for summarisation results in 22% fewer concepts being retained in long-term memory. Researchers suggest that relying on discovery tools bypasses the essential processes of retrieval and error correction required for expertise.
Brain Fry: Beyond long-term atrophy, intensive oversight of AI agents causes acute mental fatigue. Monitoring AI outputs to ensure they aren't "slop" requires 14% more mental effort and leads to a 39% increase in major errors.
When your work demands AI usage, the opportunity lies in moving from speed to intentionality to protect your brain and your edge.
Before you open AI, spend five minutes with a pen and paper. The evidence suggests that handwriting activates a far wider network of brain regions than typing, spanning motor, sensory, and memory systems. The slowness is the mechanism; it forces your brain to actually process rather than just produce. What you write will surprise you. What you remember will surprise you more.
The hard thinking is the point, not a problem to be designed out. Research confirms that people build "cognitive endurance" through challenging tasks done in shorter bursts, and that bypassing this struggle through AI is actively eroding the foundations of expertise. Design at least one stretch of unassisted thinking into your day. Even 15 minutes of working through something difficult without reaching for AI is an act of cognitive preservation.
Researchers are calling this "metacognitive laziness" when the convenience of AI causes us to stop evaluating the quality of our own judgement because an answer has already arrived. The fix is simple: before you accept AI output, write one sentence capturing what you actually think. This single habit is what keeps you as the author of your judgement rather than a reader of the machine's.
This is the one that matters most for leaders and gets talked about least. "Resilience atrophy" is the gradual erosion of a person's capacity to push through mental difficulty, caused by habitual reliance on AI to resolve it. The ability to stay present with discomfort, hold complexity, and resist the urge to resolve uncertainty is a valuable skill. It’s the infrastructure of sound judgement. When you are tempted to ask AI to make the hard call, sit with it first.
The research on brain rot is still early, and the conversation in most organisations has barely started. But the leaders I work with are already feeling it, a creeping sense that their thinking is thinner than it used to be, that decisions feel less considered, that complexity feels harder to hold. Something is shifting. Most people just do not have the language for it yet.
You do now.
AI is not going away, but the way most of us are currently using it, reflexively, habitually, without intention, is costing us the capabilities that make leadership matter: sound judgement, the capacity to stay with complexity, the wisdom that only comes from having done the hard thinking yourself.
None of the practices above requires you to reject AI. They require something more demanding: the willingness to bring intentionality to the forefront of how you use it so that you stay in the driver's seat of your own mind.
If this is resonating, it's probably because you're already feeling it in your own leadership or in the leaders around you. My leadership programs and keynotes make visible what the pace of AI-accelerated change is hiding so that leaders and their teams can redefine and embody what high performance looks like in the new world. If that lands for you let’s chat. Email me via hello@hackinghappy.co
