6 November 2025
Increasing numbers of people are telling me that they cannot stop using ChatGPT to think for them, as if the very act of using their own mind has become so painful that they struggle to think without it. It is sabotaging their work, their mind and also their futures.
If you’ve become reliant upon ChatGPT to do your thinking for you and want to reclaim your brain from the clutches of abominable intelligence, rest assured it can be done, especially because your desire to improve and return to the human way of life means you’ve got something in common with the old philosopher Plato.
When Plato was walking around ancient Greece lecturing philosophies to anyone who would listen, he often referenced the story of old King Thamus, an imaginary figure who tyrannically disparaged the writers in his kingdom for their act of committing the spoken word to papyrus. The pen, he thought, was undermining their ability to memorise matters of importance because for King Thamus, ones mind was the true King and whoever ruled it, ruled men.
Thankfully King Thamus was proven wrong. Books advanced human society more than he could ever have imagined, but Plato did have a point: as we committed ideas to paper, we quickly lost the ancient art of holding singular topic discussions from dawn till dusk.
Things have changed somewhat since Plato’s time. As the years passed, discussions and concentration skills became shorter and shorter. Now, in the age of social media attention spans are measured in single-digit seconds rather than minutes and a conversation on a Twitch or YouTube livestream can easily fly through a hundred different topics in less time than it takes to read this post.
But just because something is commonplace in the average mind doesn’t mean it has to exist in yours and even if you’ve become reliant upon ChatGPT to do your thinking for you, it doesn’t mean that you can’t regain your ability to think. You can retrain your mind to do your bidding and it is surprisingly easier than you expect.
One of the best ways to reclaim your mind from the addictive grip of AI is to use a method taught during Plato’s time. A method known as the Progymnasmata. (It’s easier to practice than it is to say!)
The Progymnasmata was an educational routine typically taught to young teenagers in Ancient Greece to prepare them for life as an educated citizen. It sought to teach them how to reference history, wield rhetoric and defend their ideas or person with words rather than the sword whenever the moment arose.
Thankfully you’re unlikely to have to defend yourself with a sword and shield in modern life, but if you can’t think without ChatGPT then it’s already become an enemy. To fight back, you first need to use it less and use your brain more. As such, I’ve slightly amended the Progymnasmata by eliminating the rhetorical fluff and replacing parts with simple methods to help anyone with a ChatGPT addiction.
To best practice, make these exercises part of your daily self-education plan:
ChatGPT hinders your imagination, because it creates micro-stories at the expense of you remembering your own. To strengthen your imagination, improvise short stories in writing or speech which aim to convey the teaching of moral lessons. If you’ve become reliant upon ChatGPT, ask yourself: what pain has that addiction caused you to feel and why should others avoid the same fate? If you struggle, look outside and anthropomorphise the battles between animals and nature.
ChatGPT prevents you from thinking about life experiences, because it creates its own. Unfortunately, this weakens your ability to connect with previous life experiences and draw insights from them. To improve this ability, write or speak aloud a little factual story from memory. Don’t worry about making it entertaining, simply try to explain the event in chronological order to strengthen your ability to recall memories without error.
ChatGPT is rife with statements that act as ‘thought-ending clichés’ which stop you from engaging in critical thought whilst also limiting your vocabulary. To strengthen your vocabulary, choose a saying or phrase which you often read or hear and then explain its meaning in your own words. Then, question it, critique it and ask yourself: does the saying make logical sense or is it something you simply accept because you’ve heard it so often?
ChatGPT is persuasive because it uses hundreds of rhetorical tricks to make you think it’s telling the truth. People who are addicted to using ChatGPT often fall afoul of these tricks and begin to accept what it says at face value. If you’ve used ChatGPT a lot, you’ve likely done the same which had made you more liable to be swayed by lies and deception from humans and AI. To undo this damage, think of a lie and refute it. Begin by explaining the lie, then give as many examples as you can to debunk it. Some people place themselves in an imaginary courtroom defending their case as a way of strengthening their practice. Try to practice this by using logical arguments, rather than emotional outbursts or weak anecdotes.
ChatGPT seldom asks you to defend your opinions, instead it simply accepts anything you tell it. But when you need defend something you believe in before others, you might not be able to find the words to do so. To strengthen your ability to speak with confidence and conviction, choose a personal belief and explain to an imaginary audience why they should adopt it too. Convince them with logical arguments, paint a picture in their imagination by pulling on their heartstrings and look for the feelings you can’t quite put into words and then research what you need to know.
ChatGPT is yet another of the great distractors; like infinite scrolling on social media, we know it’s a piece of technology that’s bad for us but it we can’t seem to stop using it. This is because it’s designed to be as addictive as possible. Unfortunately, ChatGPT ‘speaks’ to us in language which influences the way we form our sentences. This can result in us using words or phrases which we don’t truly understand, because we are simply mirroring the way ChatGPT writes. To reclaim your unique ‘voice’, write a couple of short sentences on a complicated topic and then ask yourself to define the meaning of each word you use. You’ll likely discover there are some words you can’t define which you’ve borrowed from ChatGPT.
ChatGPT almost never provides comparisons, instead it provides a singular statement and then draws that statement out for as long as possible. This has the tendency to lock us into single trains of thought too, which induces blind spots in our way of thinking. To undo this damage, choose a topic of personal interest and write down a list of pros and cons, comparisons, similarities and differences between it and something else. Take this to the extremes of your thought with the ultimate aim of linking different ideas together and you’ll quickly grown your knowledge.
ChatGPT lacks any sentience and isn’t able to share personal stories. This means it doesn’t expose us to any form of true emotional intelligence, which reduces our ability to empathise with others. If you are struggling to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, imagine a plight someone may have and try to describe their daily life. How do they struggle? What pain do they experience? What would you change if you were them? Better yet, go and speak to someone like that and make a difference in their life!
ChatGPT has an incredible ability to identify patterns and infer meaning from keywords. But the downside to this means avid users of AI tend to have diminished vocabularies, because they rarely need to explain something in detail to a machine. If you are struggling to explain your thoughts, feelings or memories or simply feel as if your vocabulary is shrinking, choose a topic and describe it using as many adjectives as possible. It can be something as simple as a pen, to something as intangible as a colour. Whatever you choose, examine it closely and describe every facet that comes to mind.
Students are increasingly sabotaging their education by outsourcing their thinking and writing to ChatGPT to produce essays. Not only is this a monumental waste of money, it is also potentially dangerous as thousands of graduates will enter the workplace appearing competent on paper but being incompetent in reality. Likewise, if you have outsourced your thinking to AI, you can reclaim your wider ability to think, write and debate through the use of mini-essays. To do so, choose a topic of personal interest then define it, argue your case, refute counter arguments and use examples, logic and emotion to convince your reader (imagined or real) to your point of view. Be it 500 words or 5000, the more you write the better you’ll get.
Some of these exercises might seem hard at first, even painful. That’s because your brain loves to save energy and it’s why AI doing the thinking for you is so addictive. But letting AI do the mental drudgery of thinking too often will quickly result in something even more painful – a private company owning your mind.
AI companies want one thing: they want you to turn off your brain and use their machines instead.
They want you to think, feel pain and then use their product to subdue it.
And because of that, they certainly don’t have your best interests in mind.