I recently came across Cal Newport's phrase digital Doritos, and it snapped something into focus for me.

Most people still think of attention as a productivity problem. A discipline problem. A Why can't I just focus? problem.

Maybe that's too small. Maybe attention belongs in the same bucket as sleep, food, and exercise. Not because it sounds profound, but because it has downstream effects on the quality of your life.

attention is health

We already understand that if you eat garbage all day, your body will eventually tell you. Your energy drops. Your mood shifts. Your baseline changes.

Information works the same way. What you repeatedly expose your mind to shapes your patience, your nervous system, and your ability to stay with a thought long enough for it to become insight.

If your media diet is mostly TikTok, Instagram, outrage bait, algorithmic sludge, and fragmented hot takes, you're not just "staying informed." You're training your attention to live on sugar.

normal isn't healthy

This is the part I keep coming back to: widespread behavior gets mistaken for healthy behavior all the time.

There were entire eras where smoking was normal. Where exercise wasn't woven into ordinary life. Where highly processed food was just called food. Normalization has never been a reliable signal of health.

We're doing the same thing now with attention. Because everyone is grazing on hyper-palatable content all day, we act as if that's just the price of modern life.

It isn't. It's just the current default.

And defaults can change surprisingly fast once people learn to see clearly.

when the snack becomes the diet

A digital Dorito isn't evil. That's what makes the metaphor useful.

I don't think the answer is to become puritanical and never touch entertainment, memes, or short-form content again. I'll eat actual Doritos every now and again too. The problem is when the snack becomes the diet.

When your informational intake is mostly engineered stimulation, a few things start to happen:

1. Your threshold for boredom collapses.
2. Your mind starts craving novelty over depth.
3. You lose the ability to tell what is nourishing from what is merely intense.

That's not just a focus problem. It's a life problem.

Relationships suffer. Reading suffers. Thinking suffers. Work suffers. Your ability to be with yourself suffers.

feed it on purpose

The useful shift here is conceptual before it's behavioral.

Once you stop treating all information as neutral, you can start making cleaner choices. A book is not the same as a feed. A long conversation is not the same as clips. A thoughtful essay is not the same as algorithmically refined stimulation designed to keep you agitated and scrolling.

Maybe the right question isn't How do I become more disciplined?

Maybe it's What am I feeding my attention every day?

Because once you see junk information as junk, you stop negotiating with it so much. You don't need to panic. You don't need to become a monk. You just need to stop pretending that normalized consumption is the same thing as nourishment.

What you consume is shaping your attention every day, whether you notice it or not.

With that awareness, don't let an algorithm train your mind for you. Take your attention back.