Define “brainrot?” Are you talking in an individual, culturally, as a media genre? It’s a vague term and your idea of it may not match the commenters’ here.

You can improve your attention span. It just takes putting effort into it.

Some things that will help:

1. Stop watching short-form content. Ban yourself from Instagram, Tiktok, and Shorts/Reels on any site.
2. Drop off social media as much as possible - check it once a day, for a max of 15 minutes.
3. Start reading a book for at least 1 hour at least 3 times a week.
4. Read at least one non-fiction book for every 3 fiction books you read.
5. Pick up a hobby that requires dedicated focus and practice. Spend your free time doing that instead of doomscrolling.
6. Spend 30 minutes a week in a quiet space, meditating.

No, it's just the modern equivalent of flipping through the TV channels and never staying on anything.

What I found was good framing is that algorithms push good and shitty content on you because that was shown to hijack your neural pathways like a Skinner Box experiments. If it was only good stuff every time, then you'd watch what you feel like then stop. Because it mixes it up with a random chance of something good coming up, you get addicted to the scrolling in the hopes to find the good video in a pile of shit. The mice did the same, when food came out all the time they'd only push button for food enough to be full, when it was random they spammed the button and ate way more than they needed to.

If you want to watch a 10m video on it, or just the method to slowly recognize and kick the habit if you couldn't stop cold turkey.

The essence of it is, set a timer for 5 minutes, scroll, then when the timer goes off, stop, put the phone down, ask yourself if you enjoyed your time doing it or not, if there's anything else you'd rather get up and do. If you feel it was worth it to calm down or you got something out of it and actually want to keep going, set another 5 minute timer and do it again. Just the pause to consciously slow down and ask yourself that will help you limit your scrolling time, and as you brainstorm other ways to spend your time you may find you need to be scrolling less.

My personal method is to try to seek out what I want instead of having an algorithm determine what information I want to seek, and frequently question why something is being recommended to me.

Long term attention is a muscle you have to exercise. Turn your phone off and watch a movie, read a book, play a game, listen to an album, listen to an audiobook, watch a video essay, put together a model kit, draw or paint something. Focus on only paying attention to the thing you're doing. Meditate for ten minutes in silence. Get coffee with a friend and turn your phone off while they're talking. Delete shortform apps from your phone. Find a hobby that gets you in a flowstate and spend an hour or more on it. Your attention span will come back, but you have to put the work in.

Your question is very vague so I'm just gonna leave some words here that might touch on it.

Rather than just focusing on the media or content I'd worry strongly about peoples ability to tolerate boredom. As an older person I grew up without the means of filling every dull moment with a screen.

I look after children regularly and I focus strongly on their perception of boredom. Rather than giving them a screen when they fail to find something to do we sit together in silence. I explain that being bored doesn't hurt or doesn't make us sad or angry. I also explain that it helps to charge our mind so that doing things we like is more fun once we get to it.

I expect an explosion in mental health problems in future generations just because of the lack of time people give themselves to sit with their thoughts (without it being forced upon them).

The type of media, specifically short form content is just exasperating these issues but the onus is on parents and guardians to teach how to deal with it.

Maybe I've missed your point but thanks for letting me ramble.

Simply put, reading.
Reading has a powerful effect on the brain. It trains it to maintain focus and coherency in thought. It trains the imagination to allow more complex visualization. It trains it to hold more information in working memory. It can be used to add cognitive tools that allow for more advanced/nuanced forms of thinking. It's a superpower we forgot because someone found a way to take photographs. Go read something. I'm going to go read right now.

Yes, read books, watch documentaries.

Somehow, the boomers and Xers survived TV. Somehow, Millennials survived the internet, social media, and cellphones. GenZ will overcome chatbots; the kids are alright.

AI brainrot, that can be fixed, by not using it.

Is the crux of this question that you're trying to increase your attention span?

Others have given good recommendations of long-form content to try, I'd also go as far as encouraging you to see how long you can go without a specific form of short-form content.

For example if you're a daily TikTok user, are you able to go one week without both using TikTok or replacing it with another, similar form of media?

This is a practice I apply to most things I enjoy. Periodically I'll take a break for a designated amount of time and evaluate whether my relationship with this thing is healthy.

Human brains are pretty quick to adapt. If one day all that short form brain rot content ceases to exist, I’m sure people will be able to recover in a couple months. The attention and energy will just be redirected to something else, hopefully better and more enriching.

Start by deleting social media from your phone, make it so it's really inconvenient to get in there.
If you can't afford to close your accounts then log out of the web brower's websites and change the password to something randomly generated that you only have on your computer so you can only log in there when needed. You can still access the chats using something like Beeper.

Find things to replace the doomscrolling with. Short simple games that actually help your brain like Tetris, Sudoku, and/or word games - I've been really enjoying Blossom Word Search, it's really calming and satisfying.

Get books that are about topics you care about or enjoy, doesn't matter how good they are or if they provide any actual value.. reading books will help you regain your attention span and reading comprehension skills while keeping you away from screens. You can set tiny goals like reading two pages without getting distracted and then grow it to 5, a chapter, and so on. Put your phone on do not disturb while you read or leave it in another room. Visit your local library, they're free!

Physical excercise will do wonders for your brain too. I personally love rope climbing in a gym and recently started doing parkour too. It's a fun way of excercising and building community. Find a sport that calls to you and start by doing it one time a week, even if you suck, we all start somewhere. It's much easier if you join other people already doing it, look for local groups that practice it. You don't have to step foot in a regular boring gym.

Anything you do start with small achievable goals and then build them up as that becomes easier. If you get distracted or start going back into old habits it's ok, just stop and get back to it as you catch yourself. Eventually it'll become easier.

Oh and do not use LLMs to get answers. Use a search engine like Duck Duck Go with AI turned off. Researching skills are super important and LLMs can really liquify your brain, they take away your creativity and critical thinking skills.

yes. I heard from somewhere a good advice which is to get bored and that being bored it tootally okay. I wouldn't outright drop all social media and such but instead decrease usage overtime. get bored and try to so other things that get you enjoyment. it will probably be less enjoyable than for example scrolling tiktok but it gets better. with more activities comes more enjoyment and specifically DIFFERENT types of enjoyment.

on individual level sure. on society level i think we're already pretty fucked.

I'm not sure exactly what brainrot refers to. I assume it means a loss of cognitive ability due to lack of mental exercise. If that's what it is, it can be modified, yes.

We have years of data showing that stimulating your brain is necessary. One example would be doing Sudoku puzzles, another would be playing the memory game (you have a bunch of items in a box, you uncover the box for a short time, then attempt to remember as many things as possible after it's been covered up again).

When they say the brain is like a muscle and needs exercise, it sounds cliche but it's absolutely correct.

No. Mostly because the majority of people don’t care to fix it in themselves. The majority of people do not want to think much.

Muscle atrophy can be fixed with slow consistent effort. The brain in many ways acts similar to a muscle. Brain rot is simply having offloaded too much thinking capacity, you need to build it back up. Not easy though

What exactly is brain rot? And why do you want to fix it?

No, brain rot can't be stopped anymore than drinking could by Prohibition.

The problem is when we allow brainrot people to take over our institutions because we have no standards. when alcoholics drive drunk we throw them in jail.

Nope. We’re fucked.