I haven't written a sentence from scratch in 3 months. ChatGPT wrote everything. This scared me.
Three weeks ago I sat in front of my laptop for 4 minutes trying to write a two-line reply to a colleague.
A message I would have written in 30 seconds a year ago.
I've been using ChatGPT daily for about 14 months. At some point I stopped noticing how much I was delegating. Emails, summaries, decisions, even how to phrase a simple "no" to a meeting invite.
When I couldn't write that email, I started wondering if something had actually changed — not just my habits, but my brain.
Then I found a 2025 MIT Media Lab study where 54 students wore EEG headsets while writing with and without ChatGPT. The group that used AI showed the lowest neural activation in critical thinking areas, lower memory retention, and weaker brain connectivity. The part that stayed with me: even after they stopped using the AI, the effects persisted. The researchers called it "cognitive debt."
That phrase hit differently when I thought about my 4 minutes staring at a blank page.
I'm not quitting AI. But I started tracking my daily usage this week. The number on day one was embarrassing.
Has anyone else had a moment like this? And did tracking actually change anything for you?