In the two short weeks after the Lunar New Year holiday, my life fell apart again.
Work needed catching up. Social invitations started stacking. Everyday errands waited in line. My sleep schedule collapsed, and my attention got chopped into pieces by an endless to-do list.
That was when a friend recommended Bryan Johnson's 8 Steps to Reclaim Your Life.
Bryan lays out eight steps for getting life back on track. Most of them come down to a few basic principles:
- Keep a steady sleep schedule
- Exercise regularly
- Eat simple, clean food
- Cut sources that pull your attention away
- Leave time for real interaction with people
After watching it, I started adjusting my life around those action items.
Each change looked trivial on its own. Taken together, they really did help my life settle again, and my thinking got clearer.
The brain's context
While reflecting on this, one thought kept coming back: hadn't I already known all of this?
Sleep well. Exercise. Spend less time on your phone. Focus on what you are doing. None of this is new. So why does it take hearing it again from an "expert" for us to take it seriously? And why does life slowly fall into chaos every so often, until we end up back at the same starting point?
Maybe the problem was never that we do not know what to do. Maybe the brain's context just gets polluted very easily.
In LLM's term, a context window is the amount of information a language model can "see" at once. Anything outside that window might as well not exist for the model.
Research also shows that a longer context window does not automatically mean better performance. When a conversation fills up with irrelevant information, conflicting instructions, or outdated middle conclusions, the model has a harder time telling what matters. The noise gets in the way, and it struggles to focus on the parts that actually count.
The human brain works a lot like that.
If you replay an ordinary day, it is not hard to see why the context in our heads gets murky so easily.
Modern life is packed with information, and most of it arrives in fragments: notifications, tab switching, algorithmic feeds.
We rarely stay in the same context for long.
Life looks constantly busy, but we rarely enter a clear and focused state. We handle everything at a shallow level.
Habits that restore context
A lot of what we call "good habits" share one thing in common: they help us clean up the context in our heads.
Yoga and meditation clear mental noise. Working out resets the body and emotions. Walking gives thinking a temporary break from an information-heavy environment.
I have been journaling for a long time, writing down what I did each day and how I felt. Looking back at that data, I noticed a pattern: when life starts getting messy, habits disappear in a particular order.
Yoga and reading go first, because they feel "least urgent." Then the gym gets squeezed out by unexpected work. Then my sleep schedule loosens. I stay up late, lean on caffeine the next day, and slide into a vicious cycle.
Each step looks like a reasonable trade-off. What is actually happening is that context collapses layer by layer, and my thoughts get more and more confused.
When I started rebuilding my routine around Bryan's suggestions, sleeping well, exercising regularly, cutting information noise, and deliberately leaving myself some uninterrupted mental space, my mind got clearer and my emotions improved a lot.
In my previous article, I wrote about those few days during the Lunar New Year holiday when I deliberately paused social life, work, and travel. I gave myself long stretches of uninterrupted time and focused on only one or two things each day. Looking back, those days felt happy and productive not because I suddenly became more disciplined, but because my context was finally clean.
I knew what mattered in the moment, and I knew how to move toward it step by step.
The daily game
In earlier articles, I compared life to a game. The main chips we get to bet in this game are time and attention.
Every day, we place those chips on different tables: work, learning, health, entertainment, and relationships.
Those bets are rarely deliberate. The context of the moment decides for us.
Most people's days look like this: 100 chips, spread across 100 different things.
Each bet is tiny, but each one comes with an instant dopamine hit. Reply to an email. Scroll a few Reels. Knock out a small task. It feels like you are always "doing something," but from an expected-value perspective, these scattered little bets rarely produce a real return.
Why?
Because a lot of the things that actually change a life have a tipping point: building expertise, finishing a piece of work, forming a habit. If you never reach that threshold, the effort might as well be zero. Heating water to 99°C still does not make it boil.
You think you are balancing. What you are really doing is making sure you lose at every table. Concentrating your chips is what gives you a shot at a breakthrough, and after the breakthrough, the return is often nonlinear.
Only when context is clear can we make the calculated bet with the best expected value.
Protecting your context
If context decides where we bet our time and attention each day, then playing this game well means consciously protecting that context.
Treat the brain's context like an organ that needs care, not something every piece of information and every task is free to occupy.
We brush our teeth and take showers every day. Context needs regular maintenance too.
Clear the noise. Limit the number of tasks. Put your context back in order. Then time and attention have a better chance of staying with what actually matters.
When I use AI tools, aside from plan mode (/plan), the two commands I rely on most are /clear and /compact.
Their job is simple: clear the conversation or compress the context, so the next round of thinking can start clean.
Good output often comes from cleaner context, not more prompts.
The same is true for people.
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