Love Island Made Me Do It
On brain rot, getting older, and why dual task training matters
Don’t trust anyone who says they don’t enjoy Love Island. Hot people, ridiculous games, specific lingo, daily episodes: this show feels like a mindless confection and I won’t hear a word against it. The UK host’s name is Maya Jama - fun is literally baked into the pronunciation of the name. On weeknights in the summer, I make myself my club soda, Crystal Light, and magnesium mocktail in my peach-coloured Stanley, cozy myself on the couch, and watch people who don’t know what Brexit is try to find love.
That doesn’t mean watching Love Island is a wholly positive experience. The daily episodes slowly start to take a toll on my brain. By August, I usually have some sort of body dysmorphia (should I get lip filler?), and I can actually feel my brain turning to mush. I am never more stupid than I am in August after watching approximately 65 episodes of Love Island in 12 weeks. And, it’s funny, because as someone who is approaching 40, most of the time I am excited to get older. But as I sit there night after night, my brain circling around phrases such as, “can I pull you for a chat?” or “that’s muggy,” and the ever famous,” I’ve got a text!” my pre-summer brain surfaces just long enough to suggest this can’t possibly be good for me.
No one selling you a fitness program is going to open with this: cognitive decline begins long before you’d notice it. A study out of the University of Virginia found that certain cognitive functions, including how fast we process information and how well we hold things in working memory, start a slow, quiet decline in healthy adults in their late 20s and early 30s. More recent brain imaging research, looking at data from nearly 20,000 people, found signs of the same thing happening in the 40s. Not 70. Not 80. The 40s. We have developed a strange habit of treating aging, especially for women, as a disease to be managed. It isn’t. That being said, it is something worth paying attention to.
The brain, like muscle, responds to the demands you place on it. When you don’t place many, it quietly begins the process of requiring less of itself. There’s a term for the age-related loss of muscle tissue: sarcopenia. We don’t have an equally tidy word for the cognitive version, but the principle is the same. Use it or lose it, taken to its most literal conclusion.
Which brings us to dual task training, a framework for doing exactly that. At its simplest, dual task training means performing a cognitive and a physical task simultaneously: walking while counting backward, balancing on one leg while reciting a list, carrying an object while navigating an obstacle. It sounds almost embarrassingly low-tech. That’s the point. Daily life is an unrelenting series of dual tasks. You’ve never, not once, walked down a flight of stairs with your full, undivided attention. You’ve talked on the phone while carrying groceries, navigated a busy parking lot while thinking about dinner, turned to answer someone mid-stride on uneven ground. Falls don’t happen when people are standing still and concentrating. They happen when attention is divided. Dual task training is rehearsal for the world as it actually exists.
The research behind it is compelling. Studies covering thousands of participants show meaningful improvements in global cognition, executive function, working memory, gait, and balance through consistent dual task protocols. Importantly, the benefits aren’t reserved for people who are already in decline. Cognitively healthy older adults show measurable gains. The argument for starting early is the same argument a financial advisor makes every time someone asks when they should have started investing. The honest answer is years ago. The useful answer is now.
So what can you do to start incorporating dual-task training into your routine? Here are some suggestions. Some of these are motor-cognitive, some of motor-motor, all are useful.
Stand on one leg to put your socks on in the morning, while naming all of the capitals of each province from East to West.
If you are working with a trainer, or have access to an agility ladder, make your way through the agility ladder doing a foot coordination drill while counting backwards from 100 by 7s.
Stand on one leg while naming all the different types of cat breeds you know.
Walk backwards in a tight-rope fashion while swinging a 5lbs dumbbell in one arm.
Stand on one leg, moving your head from side-to-side.
Walk around obstacles holding a tray full of objects.
These seem deliberately simple. That’s the point. And let me be the first to say that counting down from 100 by 7 is hard even when it’s the only thing you’re doing.
Here is what I want to be clear about: you have more agency here than the internet would have you believe. The rhetoric around aging, especially for women, has become its own kind of noise, and most of it is trying to sell you something. What the research actually suggests is quieter and more interesting than that. A positive outlook on aging correlates directly with how well you age. Your phone sitting face-down on do not disturb in the same room as you is enough to measurably reduce your working memory. Sleep matters. Stress management matters. The inputs are boring and the returns are enormous. You are not in a race against your biology. You are in a conversation with it.
By September, Love Island wraps up, love conquers all, and I resurface from my summer stupor with a vague sense that I should probably read a book. The body dysmorphia fades. The lingo fades slower; I’ll be muttering “he’s grafting” well into October. But what stays, every year, is the reminder that the brain needs tending the same way the body does. Not because getting older is something to dread or outrun, but because the alternative to paying attention is just drifting. The contestants on Love Island are, bless them, very young. They have the luxury of not thinking about any of this yet. We don’t, and honestly, I think that’s the better deal. There is something clarifying about knowing what you’re working with and choosing to work with it anyway. Walk while you count. Balance while you think. Show up for your brain the way you show up for everything else. Maya Jama would want that for you.