I’m sick this weekend, battling a cold, and just a day before I felt the most sick, I was ravenous. I ate four meals, smaller ones, but more than I would normally consume, and I was starting to slow down in my energy levels. This is normal, as the body mounts an immune response (a metabolically expensive process), and focuses more on energy. Your appetite increases so your body can defend itself, and your body slows down so you conserve energy. Your body shifts from productivity to repair.

The following day, my body gave up, forcing me to take a day off of work. I had trouble sleeping the night before, and ended up dozing off into light naps.

Now, day three of my cold, and I have bursts of energy, but mostly feel like sitting or taking naps, and baking pita bread.

This has got me thinking: when a body is sick, it focuses on slowing down and nourishing itself. I wonder then, of a mind that is also sick with overstimulation and overconsumption. What happens to it?

I think that, it too, slows down and focuses on nourishing itself. I say this because I have noticed that the past few months, I’ve been returning to classics in my reading, craving depth and thought I hadn’t engaged with in a while. I’m seeking more to read to better understand the human condition, to learn, to “return to my roots” in a literary capacity. And, I’ve been focusing on slowing down.

Even in my writing, I am choosing not to push myself, my plots, or my timelines into something they don’t organically grow into. Last year, in 2025, I wrote almost six manuscripts (one I got about 80% of the way through before the new year came around). This year, I am working on editing them, focusing more on building on what I’ve already sown. And though I initially had plans to write at least two, maybe three, manuscripts this year, I have accepted that I may end up writing only one, and have begun to think that I may not write any at all.

This slowing down, both deliberate and organic, comes from shedding old skins last year. I moved on from some decisions I’d made earlier in life, even just years prior, and though I mourn them, I feel lighter without them, more like myself, and less like a shape I was trying to force myself into. That is, I feel more like I am wearing a skin I naturally fit into, rather than stretching out one that no longer fits me.

What I think is happening to my brain is a response to chronic overstimulation, a shift from productivity to repair, a sort of cognitive conservation. This makes sense, as when the brain sustains cognitive overload, i.e. “has too many tabs open,” working memory and decision-making reduce. It’s a sort of “sickness” that your brain decides it has to mount an immune response to, and so it shifts gears into restorative modes.

It’s why my brain has chosen classic literature or more “serious” works to read; it wants something that forces me to slow down because writing pace is slower, compels me to digest what I am reading, which forces me further to slow down. It’s a return to what is familiar and comfortable, and provides a stability as I often recognize what path a plot will take. It also reduces my task-switching: it’s difficult to “switch to another tab” when I’m digesting a thoughtful paragraph. This reading depth leads to sustained attention, which is further less stimulating since I’m focusing on one task, and one task alone.

And I’m seeing it elsewhere, too, not just in my reading. When I was younger, I could sit still, in silence, and enjoy it. The last few years, I have needed stimulation: an audiobook, a podcast, music, a YouTube video. Now, it’s almost as if I can’t stand the noise and stimulation, and instead want stillness and silence.

I’m not alone in this. I wrote in an earlier post “at least for a segment of our society, we desire simplicity and a reclamation of our human intelligence. It feels more like a quiet revolution, an unwinding of what our modern technology has wrought, reverting to less integrated and more simplified routines.“

What I mean to say with all this is as our minds and bodies desire healing from a society that is overwrought in pace, consumerism, and disconnection, I think our minds will begin responding in the same ways our bodies do when sick: by slowing down, digging deeper into our shared wisdom, and doing the things that nourish us. When a biological or psychological system is under strain, it moves to conserve, by simplifying and focusing on core functions.

And I think our society is shifting into conservation.

By: Rania Hanna