Really enjoyed this article by Joan Westenberg, about how she recovered her ability to think for herself.
“Week three brought the first breakthrough.
I was writing by hand about a conversation with my brother, and suddenly I understood something about our relationship that I’d never seen before; I’d sat with the complexity long enough for insight to emerge.
And the insight itself wasn’t necessarily profound - just a small thing about how we communicate - but it was mine. Generated by my own mind, in my own words, without external scaffolding.
Which is when I realized what I’d been missing: the satisfaction of original thought.”
Westenberg describes exactly what she did to be able to hear her own voice again, and to think for herself again. She made several changes, but part of her solution was to write some things by hand to practice thinking and reflecting.
It seems her strategies were a success.
“Here’s what I could do after 90 days that I couldn’t do before:
I could read difficult books. Before the challenge, I bounced off anything that didn’t immediately grab me. After, I pushed through the initial friction of books like “Guns, Germs and Steel” and found genuine insights on the other side. The key was accepting that the difficulty was part of the process, not a bug to be fixed.
I could write without flinching. My handwritten morning pages started as scattered complaints and observations. But by month two, I was working through real problems on paper - career decisions, relationship dynamics, creative projects. The handwriting forced me to slow down and think before I wrote, rather than typing my way to a point.
I could sit with problems. I used to reach for my phone or open a new tab the moment I hit intellectual resistance. Now I could stay with difficult questions long enough to find non-obvious answers. This led to my best work - essays that started as half-formed hunches and grew into something coherent through sustained attention.
I could think in my own voice. This was the biggest change. Before, my thoughts felt like remixes of things I’d read or heard. After 90 days of writing without AI assistance, I began to recognize my own intellectual fingerprint - the way I naturally connect ideas, the questions that genuinely interest me, the arguments that feel true in my bones.”
Westenberg, J. (2025) I Spent 90 Days Rebuilding My Brain. Here’s What I Learned., Westenberg. Available at: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/i-spent-90-days-rebuilding-my-brain-here-s-what-i-learned-b7844d4127c5d542 (Accessed: 18 July 2025).