What if the biggest threat to your retirement isn’t your portfolio but the fact that your brain has quietly stopped doing its own thinking? In this episode, Rachael Van Pelt, PhD unpacks cognitive outsourcing: the growing habit of letting devices, apps, and AI handle the mental tasks that keep your brain sharp. Drawing on landmark research, Rachael reveals how the Google Effect is restructuring your memory, how internet and AI searches inflate your illusion of knowledge, and how habitual GPS use is literally shrinking the part of your brain most vulnerable to Alzheimer’s. She shares the story of Diane and Mark, a couple who had every spreadsheet and calculator output they needed and still couldn’t pull the trigger. The missing piece wasn’t more data. It was practiced self-trust. Rachael introduces a Cognitive Fitness Framework (outsource your inputs, but never outsource your judgment) and explains why the difficulty of doing your own thinking is the point.
What if the biggest threat to your retirement isn’t your portfolio but the fact that your brain has quietly stopped doing its own thinking? In this episode, Rachael Van Pelt, PhD unpacks cognitive outsourcing: the growing habit of letting devices, apps, and AI handle the mental tasks that keep your brain sharp. Drawing on landmark research, Rachael reveals how the Google Effect is restructuring your memory, how internet and AI searches inflate your illusion of knowledge, and how habitual GPS use is literally shrinking the part of your brain most vulnerable to Alzheimer’s. She shares the story of Diane and Mark, a couple who had every spreadsheet and calculator output they needed and still couldn’t pull the trigger. The missing piece wasn’t more data. It was practiced self-trust. Rachael introduces a Cognitive Fitness Framework (outsource your inputs, but never outsource your judgment) and explains why the difficulty of doing your own thinking is the point.
👉 Try her free virtual coaching tool Rightsizing Decision Coach at coach.rightsizeretirement.com to find out where your home is quietly working against your body, brain, bank, or base.
Chapters
00:00 The Pop Quiz: Three Questions That Reveal How Much Thinking You’ve Outsourced
01:41 What Is Cognitive Outsourcing — And Why It’s Not the Same as Doom-Scrolling
03:20 The Science: Google Effect, Illusion of Knowledge & GPS-Driven Brain Atrophy
07:46 Why Cognitive Outsourcing Gets More Dangerous in Your Go-Strong Years
10:10 Case Study: Diane & Mark — All the Data, None of the Confidence
11:43 The Cognitive Fitness Framework: Outsource Inputs, Never Outsource Judgment
Hey, hey, welcome back to Next Act Ninjas, the go-to podcast for mastering your lifestyle longevity. I'm your host, Rachael Van Pelt. And today we're going to talk about a topic that on the surface might sound like it belongs in a tech podcast. But I want you to stick with me here because by the end of today's episode, I think you're going to see a connection between your smartphone or computer, your decision-making ability, and whether you spend your Go-Strong years with agency versus in crisis.
I'm going to ask you three questions right now. Pop quiz. Without reaching for your phone, without Googling it, just off the top of your head, what is your home's current assessed value, roughly, within say $20,000? Second question, what's your monthly cash flow after accounting for fixed expenses? Not your income, your actual remaining disposable cash. Third question, how many minutes does it take you to drive from your front door to the nearest urgent care? That's it.
If you nailed all three of those questions, congrats. But if you hesitated on even just one, and I think most of us would, I want you to notice why you hesitated. Because here's the thing, for most of us, the reason isn't that we can't know those numbers, it's that we've stopped bothering to. We've outsourced them to Zillow, to Mint, to Google Maps. And that feels totally fine until you realize that these three questions are the exact same cognitive muscles you'll need when it's time to make the biggest financial and lifestyle decision of your Next Act.
Now in the past, I talked about how doom-scrolling is accelerating aging through its effect on cortisol and sleep disruption. That episode was about stress and attention disruption and how just the sheer volume of stimulation that's bombarding your brain can overwhelm those neurotransmitters. But today is about something different, something sneakier. Today we're talking about cognitive outsourcing, which is an entirely different beast. Because even if you've completely quit doom-scrolling, you may still be hurting your brain every single day without realizing it.
Cognitive outsourcing is when you delegate a mental task to your device or to an algorithm. It's when we rely on our devices to remember something, to calculate something, evaluate options, navigate somewhere instead of doing it ourselves.
And listen, I'm not going to tell you that that's bad. I'm not anti-tech. My entire career in science was powered by tech. This podcast uses technology. I even created a virtual coaching tool that you can access to figure out exactly where you're at in this rightsizing journey. You can find that at rightsizeretirement.com or through the link in the show notes. I designed it to give you a starting point for honest self-evaluation.
But the key word here is "starting point". That coaching tool is not meant to do all the heavy lifting for you. It's meant to get you going on the cognitive work needed to create your best Next Act. You can't outsource the real work. It's going to cost you if you do. It will cost you in ways that you may not expect either. In fact, there are a few studies that I think that you'll find interesting when it comes to cognitive outsourcing.
The first study was done by a research team at Columbia University. They published their results in the journal Science around 2011, and it's fundamentally changed how we understand memory in the internet age. What they found was that
when people expect to have future access to information, when they believe that they can just look it up later, they have significantly lower rates of remembering the information itself. they called it "The Google Effect" meaning that the internet has become an external storage system for our brains. Your brain treats that outsourcing the same way it would if you just had a spouse or a colleague who always "handled that stuff". Yyour brain literally restructures itself to simply store where to look for the than just to store the information itself.
Just think about what that means for any major life decision that you're facing. you outsource your financial numbers to an app or an AI chat, your brain isn't just being efficient. It's reorganizing what it considers important, what's worth remembering. And over time, you just stop carrying those numbers and those decisions in your head at all. So when somebody asks, "can you afford to move?", you don't feel the answer in your gut. You have to go look at your spreadsheet or run the numbers again. That disconnect between you and your financial reality, it's not trivial. It has a major impact on whether you stay stuck or whether you move forward.
Another study that was done related to this came out of Yale. And these findings were even more troubling. They found that the simple act of searching the internet inflates belief in our own knowledge. People who Googled answers to questions rated themselves as more knowledgeable about unrelated topics than people who didn't search. It's crazy. Just the act of searching, even when the search doesn't turn up useful results, can make people think that they know more than they actually do. And I get it. I'm guilty of this. We all are. The scientists called this an "illusion of knowledge". We actually confuse access to information with possession of understanding.
And here's why it's so dangerous. When you ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Grok to run through all those pros and cons of selling your home, or you plug numbers into a retirement calculator, you walk away feeling like you made the decision. You have the data, right? But you didn't make the decision, the tool did. You just read the output. Your brain doesn't know the difference. More importantly, you don't fully feel the decision viscerally.
Another study was about navigation. In 2020, a study published in Scientific Reports looked at the relationship between our habitual GPS use and spatial memory. What they found was really interesting. They found that the more someone relied on GPS, the faster their spatial memory declined over time. Moreover, they found that GPS use predicted memory decline, not the other way around, meaning that people didn't use GPS more because they had a bad sense of direction, using GPS made their spatial memory worse.
Why is that important? Because the part of the brain that was affected, the hippocampus, doesn't just handle navigation, it also handles episodic memory and our creation of mental maps. And what's worse, it's the part of the brain that's affected in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment. Now normally spatial navigation would give your hippocampus a workout, but when you let GPS do the navigating, it's like letting that part of your brain sit on the couch. And your brain just atrophies like an unused muscle. Use it or lose it, right?
Now, when I challenge you on these podcasts to evaluate a potential neighborhood, its walkability, its proximity to services, how it feels to move through space, you're exercising those spatial cognition skills. You're combating the degradation that happens with that habitual GPS use. You're asking your hippocampus to form cognitive maps It's a great way to keep working that part of your brain.
And this is critical for those of us in our Go-Strong years because the negative implications of cognitive outsourcing gets much more serious as we get older. When a young adult outsources their thinking to a device, the stakes are They have time to recover from a bad decision. They're not making decisions that will fundamentally impact their peak quality of life, but you are. You're headed into what might be the single most consequential financial and lifestyle decision of your life. And you're headed into it with a brain that has been quietly training itself to defer.
Just think about all of the cognitive skills that a sound rightsizing decision is actually going to require of you. First you need working memory. That's because you have to hold multiple variables in your head simultaneously. Variables like home equity, monthly costs, health trajectory, proximity to family. That is serious mental stimulation. Second, you need spatial reasoning when you're walking a neighborhood and assessing whether it's going to work for you in 10 years, not just today. Third, you need to be able to make independent evaluations in the context of uncertainty because you're constantly weighing option where there's no single right answer and the data is inherently incomplete. Last, you're going to need confidence in your own judgment.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what gets eroded when we've spent a decade letting tools or AI algorithms make decisions for us. is the lost confidence. It doesn't show up as I'm not smart enough to make decisions. It shows up as analysis paralysis. It sounds like "I just need a little more information before I can decide". Or "let me run one more scenario in the calculator" or "I'm going to wait until the market's more stable" all of which are ways of saying I don't trust my own evaluation, I'm just going to stay put.
And staying put, as we've discussed many times on this podcast, is not a neutral decision. Staying put can have major financial repercussions. Things like deferred maintenance, trapped equity, increasing mismatch between your home and your health needs. The clock is ticking. Those Go-Strong years, that window of opportunity is shrinking every year. Every year you spend waiting for a tool to give you certainty is a year you could have been building the life that actually fits your Next Act.
I'm going to tell you about a client that I had previously, named Diane. She's 62, recently retired, smart, organized, data-driven. Her husband Mark about to retire himself. They have a four-bedroom house in the suburbs, about $400,000 in equity, and their financial planner confirmed that rightsizing would help their retirement strategy.
Diane did everything we talk about here on this podcast. She used a retirement calculator to model different scenarios. She pulled Zillow estimates for the target neighborhood she was looking at. She used ChatGPT to compare the living expenses in their desired location against current home. She ran a pros-and-cons list in a spreadsheet. She even used an AI tool to generate a timeline then she just did nothing.
When we talked about why a little bit later, she said something that I hear a lot. She said, "I think we have it all figured out, our next steps. We just don't feel ready." When I dug into what that meant, it became clear to me that she and Mark weren't afraid of the move itself. They'd, of course, moved several times in their marriage. It was just that they couldn't "feel" the numbers. They could gather all the information. They could crunch the data, formulate a strategy, but they couldn't carry that feeling beyond the computer. They hadn't done the internal work of weighing the numbers against their values. They'd outsourced so much of the evaluation that when it came time for the part where you sit with the uncertainty and say, "this is the right move for us", they had no mental muscle for it.
Unfortunately, I see this more and more. The tools at our disposal are incredibly useful, but they are rarely enough to make an empowered decision. And what's worse, they can make us mentally lazy if they replace the cognitive practice that we need to build our confidence. And that gap between having the answer and trusting your gut, trusting your own judgment, that's the gap where analysis paralysis sets in. That's where status quo gets its power, not from logic, but from the absence of practiced self-trust.
Now, please don't think I'm telling you to throw your phone in a lake and go back to paper maps. I'm certainly not suggesting that. I use these tools myself. I find them incredibly useful, but I've come to believe something else as well. And it's this...outsourcing inputs is smart, outsourcing judgment is dangerous. There is a fine line between using a tool to gather information and using a tool to think for you. And most of us have crossed that line without noticing.
So here's a framework. I want you to think about your cognitive life the same way you think about physical fitness. You wouldn't have someone else to do your pushups for you, would you? No matter how good they are at those pushups, it doesn't build your strength. Same principle here.
For navigation, use Google Maps to get to a new neighborhood, but once you arrive, put the phone away. Walk the neighborhood yourself. Notice what's within walking distance. Pay attention to how the streets connect, where the grocery store is, that sort of thing. Form your own cognitive map before you read reviews.
For financial decisions, use a retirement calculator to get your baseline numbers, but then, sit down with a piece of paper and do a rough back-of-the-napkin version yourself. Think about what your equity is, your monthly expenses, your cash flow. When you do the math, even if it's imperfect, you feel the numbers differently than if you're just looking at a spreadsheet, You feel the numbers in a way that no app can replicate. That feeling is your working memory, integrating financial reality. It's a skill and it will atrophy without practice.
For health decisions, use ChatGPT to translate your doctor's report into plain language. I absolutely recommend that. But then I want you to sit with the implications yourself. Don't immediately Google WebMD or ask AI, "what should I do about this?" Instead, ask yourself, "What does this mean for my daily life? What changes would I be willing to make?" Let your own brain do the first-pass evaluation before you start outsourcing to WebMD.
For housing decisions, use every tool available to you to gather data. But when it comes time to weigh whether this home fits your Next Act, do it the old-fashioned way. Sit on your porch, walk the block, picture yourself at 70, at 75, at 80. Can you get to the doctor? Can you see your grandkids? Does the layout work if one of you needs a walker?
That's future-self visualization, and no algorithm can do that for you. That's your brain doing what it was built to do, simulating possibilities, weighing emotional and practical factors simultaneously, imagining a life you haven't lived yet. That is real intelligence.
And I want to leave you with one more piece of science because I think it connects everything. We know from the longevity literature that cognitive decline accelerates in your Go-Slower years. Your hippocampus naturally shrinks. Working memory capacity decreases. Executive function, that's your ability to plan, evaluate, and decide under uncertainty, that just gets harder. These declines happen to all of us, even the healthiest of us.
But here's what the research on neuroplasticity also tells us. The brains that decline least are the ones that stay active. The London taxi drivers who spent years building mental maps have measurably larger hippocampi than the general population. People who routinely challenge themselves with novel cognitive tasks grow new white matter connections well into their 70s and 80s.
The hormesis principle, or the "Goldilocks zone" that I've talked about in past episodes, where mild stress makes you stronger, that applies here too. It applies to your brain just as much as your muscles. So the question isn't just, "Are you outsourcing too much thinking to your device?" The question is, "Are you outsourcing the very cognitive exercises that would protect your brain as you age?"
Because if navigation builds your hippocampal volume and mental math builds working memory and independent evaluation builds executive function, then every time you let a tool do those things for you, you're not just being efficient. You're skipping the workout your brain needs most. And you're not really feeling the answers in a way that helps you take confident action. What's worse, you're doing it at exactly the moment in life when the stakes are highest and you need every bit of judgment to make decisions that will determine the quality of the rest of your life.
Again, I'm not anti-tech. I highly recommend you go play with the virtual coaching tool that I built at rightsizedretirement.com. It's a fun way to warm up your brain. future without any prompts. Notice how it feels. It might feel mentally hard, but that's the point. That difficulty is your brain doing reps. Even better, hop on a call and I'll walk you through the exercises real time. A bit like a personal trainer.
That's it. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Next Act Ninjas. If this episode hit home for you, please share it with someone you love. And don't forget to try that free tool at coach.rightsizeretirement.com.
Until next time, my friends, live well, love more, age less.