What we already knew but forgot
Sunday is a day of rest. Nobody invented that ten years ago. It’s been there for centuries, embedded in almost every culture and tradition in the world. Resting one day a week wasn’t a suggestion. It was a rule. And it made sense: the body and mind need to stop in order to function well.
What has changed is what we need to rest from.
For decades, rest meant stepping away from physical work. Then came the digital age and the conversation shifted to social media. Many people already do Sundays without Instagram, without Twitter, without LinkedIn. They disconnect from the noise and reconnect with the physical world. And it works.
Now there’s a new layer on top of all that. And I think it deserves the same conversation.
What’s happening to our minds
In my previous piece on AInxiety I mentioned something I was looking into. Here it is.
An MIT study published in 2025 put 54 people with electrodes on their heads while they used ChatGPT to write. The results were uncomfortable: 47% less neural connectivity during the task, and 83% couldn’t recall a single sentence from the text they had just produced. But the most striking finding wasn’t that. It was that when the tool was taken away at the end, the brain didn’t recover. The disconnection patterns persisted.
The researchers called it “cognitive debt.” The same logic as technical debt in software: every shortcut today accumulates interest you pay tomorrow in the form of reduced ability to think independently.
The problem isn’t that AI makes you less intelligent overnight. It’s that your brain optimizes for the environment you give it. If you stop exercising the harder parts of thinking, those parts stop being sharp. Without noticing. Without anyone warning you.
The problem nobody is naming
There’s something I wrote recently in my piece on AI talking to AI that keeps coming back to me: we’re using AI even to communicate with each other. To write messages, to reply to emails, to formulate ideas we would have worked out on our own before.
And that has a consequence I find quite serious: if we systematically delegate thinking, what’s left? I’m not talking about mechanical tasks. I’m talking about the part of the work that requires connecting ideas, making decisions, building your own judgment. That can’t be outsourced without a cost.
We’re not going to become idiots overnight. But we can gradually lose cognitive muscle, without noticing, while still feeling very productive.
A modest proposal
I don’t have a definitive solution. But I do have a simple idea that I think is worth considering.
If social media-free Sundays work to reduce digital noise, maybe AI-free Sundays can work for something similar but deeper: recovering the habit of thinking on our own. Writing without an assistant. Solving problems without suggestions. Looking things up the old-fashioned way, with Google or even an encyclopedia, reading different sources instead of taking the quick shortcut of asking AI. Getting a little bored. Letting the brain do the work without a safety net.
Not as a rejection of technology. As training. Like the athlete who alternates high-intensity days with recovery days, knowing that without recovery, performance drops.
Rest has always been part of the system. What changes is what we need to rest from.
Maybe in 2026, resting also means turning off the assistant one day a week. And seeing what happens when you have to think for yourself.