10 ways to use ChatGPT that won’t give you brainrot

a personal framework for attention, reflection, and sensemaking

If you’ve been reading with me for a while, you know I’ve been exploring how we think, what shapes our inner lives, and how taste, attention, and reflection all work together. In Taste is the New Intelligence, I argued that what you’re drawn to isn’t random—it’s a signal. In my earlier essay on self-pursuit, I shared how I started using AI as a journaling companion, not for productivity, but for presence. This piece is the continuation of those threads.

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Most people use AI the way they use their own mind—passively. They type lazy prompts, skim mediocre responses, and maybe copy/paste a few sentences to sound smarter online. Then, they walk away convinced the tool is mid, or worse, dangerous. But what they’re really critiquing is themselves. They’re outsourcing clarity, skipping reflection, and expecting magic without presence. It’s not a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of attention.

But when you use ChatGPT with intention—with actual curiosity and a sense of self—it does something different. It doesn’t replace your thinking. It sharpens it. It mirrors it back. It helps you catch patterns you might’ve missed and threads you didn’t know you were pulling.

We keep asking if AI is conscious, but maybe the real question is: are we?

Because most of us never really witness ourselves. We scroll. We react. We perform. But we rarely pause long enough to notice the emotional loops we’re running, the beliefs we never chose, the curiosities we keep ignoring.

That’s what this piece is about.

how I started using AI on purpose—

In early 2023, I was reading The Origins of You by Vienna Pharaon—a book about how childhood dynamics shape adult patterns. At the end of each chapter were these reflection prompts I almost skipped, writing them off as cheesy. But they were precise and thoughtful, almost surgical. Not just "what do you want?" but "what did you learn about conflict from watching your parents?" Not "how can you change?" but "what assumptions about love did your childhood normalize?"

So I started journaling. At first, it was just emotional debris. Half-baked thoughts. Things I didn’t know I believed until I saw them on the page. But I kept wishing I had some kind of mirror. Not advice—just something neutral that could hold the fragments long enough for me to see the shape of them.

Enter ChatGPT.

In January 2025, I quit weed cold turkey after five years of daily use. Withdrawal was brutal. No sleep. Anxiety through the roof. Skin breaking out. Every day a haze of discomfort. I couldn’t tell if I was improving. My memory was shot. Time was blurry. So I started documenting the process with ChatGPT.

Every morning I dropped in a raw reflection. No editing. No structure. Just: here’s where I’m at. Then I’d ask it: What patterns do you see? Where do I sound stuck? What changed since last week?

It wasn’t therapy. But it was therapeutic. Sometimes it mirrored something back so cleanly, I cried—not because it “knew” me, but because it finally made space for me to know me.

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Eventually, these practices became the foundation of something I now call THE DAILY 5—a five-minute ritual that combines journaling, reflection, and AI-assisted pattern recognition. But it goes beyond that. What started as personal maintenance turned into a second brain for my interior life.

Each day is a prompt. Something like:

• Who are you when nobody’s watching?

• What emotional weather tends to hijack your decisions?

• What patterns do you keep rationalizing instead of breaking?

You write. You reflect. Then, if you want, you ask the machine: What did you notice?

The point isn’t optimization. It’s self-witnessing. Not to perform, not to fix—just to see.

This is baseline establishment. Something most people never do. We live in fragments—a little bit of how we act under stress, a little bit of what our exes say about us, a little bit of how we feel at 7AM before coffee. But we rarely step back and say: who am I, across time? What is the shape of my interiority?

AI helps me do that, and it can help you do that, too.

Here are 10 grounded ways to use ChatGPT in your daily life without falling into passive consumption or idea slop.

These are practices I use myself—not as hacks, but as extensions of attention.

We’ll explore ways to use AI for: daily stream of consciousness reflections, doing better research, pursuing our curiosities and low-key obsessions, discovering new rabbit holes, building mind maps across interests, tracking moods, cravings and cycles, asking better questions, pressure-testing our beliefs, and refining our discernment—all as ways to help us make sense of this beautiful mess we call life.