Hannah Busby was beginning to feel like her day job as a creative content strategist was draining her energy – and when she came home, feeling burned out, she spent evenings locked in an endless doomscroll, which certainly did not help.
Then, she tried something less intimidating than, say, an hours-long craft project or an expensive class: One hour, each day, with a sequence of timed activities. She and others call it brain stacking – which meshes together several ideas about habit formation. For her, it looked like one page’s worth of journaling, 15 minutes of Sudoku and 30 minutes of reading.
She is part of an online trend, ironically, to get offline and do enriching, low-effort activities.
“Everything that I do within my brain stack is designed to reclaim some of the parts of my brain that I effectively lost to burnout, overwork and stress,” said Busby, 34, who lives in London.
Nine months of brain stacking later, Busby feels more in control of her time than ever, and her evenings leave her feeling much more clearheaded and refreshed. She has grown an audience on social media by sharing time-lapse videos of her brain stacking activities, with many of her viewers putting their own spin on it with activities that suit their personal interests.
Sophia Szu, 30, who lives in New York, slipped into a bout of brain rot after graduating from business school in August. During the monthslong job search that followed, she fell into a habit of spending hours in bed glued to her phone.
“After a long time scrolling on social media and seeing other people’s thoughts, I felt that I had lost my inner voice, and my life was missing structure,” she said. “The thought of a morning routine where I drag myself out of bed to go on a 5-mile walk or something was kind of daunting. So I thought about the things that I actually like to do.”
Now Szu does a 40-minute brain stacking session each morning: journaling, drawing in a sketchbook, a brief meditation and reading a book. Eventually, Szu landed a role at a tech startup.
Hundreds of TikTok and Instagram videos show people setting the mood for brain stacking by lighting a candle, then piling actual stacks of activities – spiral notebooks on top of murder mystery-themed logic and math-based puzzle books, atop customised journals, novels and e-readers into a neat pyramid. They unpack speciality pens and pencils from colourful zippered pouches or select them from ornate glass jars. Each item lands on top of the other with a thud that rattles the camera.
Brain stacking is part of a growing number of methods people are using for a digital detox. There is some modest research in psychology and neuroscience behind why some of these behaviours could work. Experts have long said that doing small, manageable tasks can make forming good habits more achievable, and that things like sharing goals on social media or stacking habits with things already in your routine may offer a boost.
And the kinds of activities people are highlighting in the trend also have some evidence behind them. An abundance of research shows that writing in a journal – and expressive writing in general – can improve cognitive function as well as memory. Reading books has long been shown to improve memory and concentration, as well as lessen the physical markers of stress.
Kostadin Kushlev, a psychologist who studies the effects of doomscrolling at Georgetown University, said that he sees the variety of activities central to brain stacking as a helpful tool for forming a habit. The timing, he said, doesn’t matter so much.
“Having frictionless access to a variety of activities is what I find most promising about this,” he said. “Not, like, 15 minutes of this, 15 minutes of that.”
Having a dedicated space for these activities can also be helpful, said Sharlen Moore, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University.
“Consistency is key,” she said. “The way the brain works, we create a lot of associations with our environment, and most of these associations are sensory. Keeping all of these cues, the visuals, the sound or smell, as similar as possible, you’re likely to build a habit faster.”
Busby, for instance, lights a scented candle at the start of her brain stacking sessions. Amanda Sneed, 28, who many credit with helping popularise the trend, films her videos from her public library in Valparaiso, Indiana.
“My dad taught me Sudoku in elementary school, and I’ve been keeping journals since I could write, so it was already part of my routine,” she said. “It just wasn’t filmed and optimised all at once.”
Her stack often includes her bedazzled, leather-bound journal and some knitting and crochet exercises.
Sneed does worry that people might be overcomplicating the idea of brain stacking.
“It really should just be whatever makes you happy, whatever you already have around the house,” she said. “Pick up the hobby that you bought all the supplies for six months ago,” she said, adding, “Try to rediscover the joy that you have for that thing.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
