How to use AI without losing critical thinking skills

You have been using AI to write your emails. To summarize articles. To help you decide what to cook for dinner. Maybe to finish your sentences when you can’t quite find the words.

And on the surface, it all feels fine.

Why wouldn’t you use the most powerful tool ever built for thinking?

Here’s why.

Your brain is a muscle, and muscles that stop working start disappearing.

I’m not here to tell you to swear off AI forever. That’s not realistic, and frankly, it’s not the point. I use AI too.

We are sleepwalking into one of the most significant cognitive shifts in human history.

And most people are doing it one convenient shortcut at a time, without stopping to ask what it’s costing them.

The good news? Your brain is remarkably adaptable. It can be reclaimed. Here are 10 practical ways to keep it sharp. Let’s dive in.

---

1. Write something by hand every single day

This one sounds almost embarrassingly low-tech. And that’s exactly why it works.

A review of 30 brain imaging studies, led by researchers, found that handwriting activates a far broader network of brain regions than typing does. Engaging areas tied to memory, sensory processing, and motor coordination simultaneously.

Typing is efficient. Handwriting is a cognitive exercise.

You don’t need to write a novel. Just pick up a pen and make your brain do the work.

2. Solve problems before you ask AI

Here’s a habit that will quietly transform your thinking.

Before you open an AI chatbot, give yourself 5 minutes to work through the problem yourself.

Researchers found that people who spent just 10 minutes using AI to help them solve math or reading problems performed noticeably worse on the same types of problems afterward (without AI). This provides causative evidence that relying on AI reduces persistence and impairs unaided performance.

Read that again: causative evidence. Not a correlation. A cause.

The researchers also found that people who received AI assistance gave up on challenging problems more quickly. The convenience was literally training them to quit.

Just 5 minutes of your own thinking. Then, if you need it, use the tool. 

But you’ll be surprised how often those 5 minutes are enough (and how much sharper your thinking gets over time).

3. Read deeply (not just quickly)

Skimming headlines. Scanning bullet points. Speed-reading summaries. We have all become champion surface readers.

But this is fundamentally changing our brains. 

“Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought. When we skim, we literally, physiologically, don’t have time to think. Or feel.” — Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist and literacy researcher at UCLA

Pick up a book. An actual book, or a long-form article you read start to finish with no other tabs open. Your brain will feel the difference almost immediately. It’s like stretching a muscle that’s been sitting too long.

Your attention span is a skill. Protect it like one.

4. Move your body to feed your brain

Aerobic exercise triggers the production of a molecule called Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), sometimes called “Miracle-Gro” for the brain.

Researchers have found that moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, performed 30–40 minutes, three to four times per week, optimally stimulates BDNF production and hippocampal neurogenesis — the literal growth of new brain cells.

Harvard Health puts it plainly.

Just as physical exercise strengthens muscles, mental and physical challenges keep the brain sharp. 

Neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to form new connections and adapt, depends directly on how much you challenge it.

AI makes your mind lazier, while exercise makes it more alive.

Those two forces are in direct competition right now.

5. Have real conversations with real people

This sounds obvious. But think about how many conversations you have replaced with an AI chatbot in the last year.

• Asked ChatGPT for advice instead of calling a friend.
• Typed a question to an AI instead of working through it with a colleague.
• Summarize your feelings to a bot instead of sitting down with someone who actually knows you.

Every real human conversation is a cognitive workout that your AI cannot replicate. 

Researchers have found that more frequent, positive social interactions were associated with better cognitive performance on the same day and over the following two days.

• Put the device down.
• Call someone. 
• Go to lunch. 

Be inefficient with your time in the most human way possible.

6. Learn something that makes you feel a little uncomfortable

Discomfort is not the enemy of learning. Discomfort is learning.

Researchers have found that people who were instructed to embrace feelings of awkwardness and struggle as signs of learning persisted longer on difficult tasks, engaged more deeply, and were more open to challenging new material.

People who ran from discomfort did the opposite.

AI removes almost all cognitive discomfort. It answers before you’ve had a chance even to feel the question. And in doing so, it robs you of the exact friction that makes your brain grow stronger.

Pick something you genuinely don’t know. A language. An instrument. A skill that makes you feel like a beginner again. The stupidity you feel is your neurons building new roads.

The discomfort is the point. Lean into it.

7. Don’t let AI write your first draft

If you let AI write your first draft every time, you will lose the ability to write your own.

MIT Media Lab researchers divided 54 students into three groups over four months — one group wrote essays using only ChatGPT, another used traditional search, and a third used only their own brains.

The findings were stark: ChatGPT users showed lower neural activity in memory, attention, and executive function areas. They couldn’t accurately quote from their own essays afterward. Their sense of authorship over their own writing eroded.

They literally started to lose ownership of their own thoughts.

Use AI to edit. Use it to refine. But sit down first and write the messy, imperfect first draft yourself.

That struggle is where your thinking lives.

8. Memorize things on purpose

We used to memorize phone numbers. Poems. Driving directions. The words to songs.

We have outsourced almost all of that now to our phones, to our apps, to AI, and our memories are weaker for it.

This phenomenon has a name: the Google Effect.

IE University’s Center for Health and Well-Being describes how the ease of accessing instant solutions has led to cognitive offloading — shifting memory and problem-solving tasks to technology — and how AI takes this a step further by allowing users to bypass the deep thinking traditional problem-solving requires.

So …

• Memorize a poem this week. 
• Learn someone’s phone number. 
• Recall your day without writing it down first. 

Your hippocampus, or the brain’s memory center, is begging for a workout.

9. Sit with boredom

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal, 17th-century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher

This is the hardest one. And possibly the most important.

The moment you feel bored, stuck, or uncertain, the reflex is to reach for your phone, open an app, or ask AI. That reflex is making you cognitively fragile.

Research has found a direct negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical-thinking ability.

Boredom, it turns out, is not a problem to solve. It’s a mental state that historically led to creativity, reflection, and independent thought. When you let AI fill every silence, you permanently silence those processes.

10. Use AI as a sparring partner, not a ghost writer

AI is an extraordinary thinking partner when you use it to sharpen your thinking, not replace it.

Instead of:

“Write me an email about X.” 

Try:

“I’ve drafted this email — what’s weak about my argument?” 

Instead of:

“Summarize this article for me.” 

Try:

“I think the main point is Y — am I missing something?” 

This is the version of AI use that keeps your brain engaged. 

• You are the thinker. 
• You are the author. 
• You are the decision-maker. 

AI becomes the mirror that sharpens your reflection, not the voice that speaks for you.

Lifelong learning and mentally engaging activities support brain health by promoting neuroplasticity and strengthening neural connections. The keyword is you doing the engaging. The brain that grows is the brain that works.

Your mind is the one asset AI can’t replicate (unless you let it).

---

Bringing it all together

AI is one of the most powerful cognitive tools ever invented. It is also one of the most efficient ways to hollow out the very capabilities that make you irreplaceable slowly.

• Your judgment.
• Your creativity.
• Your ability to reason through difficulty.
• Your distinctly human voice.

We are living through a moment that has no historical parallel. The temptation to outsource thinking is convincing.

Your brain built civilizations before there were computers. It composed symphonies, designed cathedrals, and wrote the books that changed the world.

Don’t outsource that. Not now. Not ever.

The most powerful intelligence on this planet still lives between your ears. Keep it sharp.

---

Join my email newsletter for a free eBook and more helpful insights.