Healthmaxxing is just optimising the basics, taken seriously. Here is the short list that moves the needle - and the long list that does not. Read →
Brainmaxxing: healthmaxxing for your attention, not just your body
Healthmaxxing has a blind spot. We will optimise resting heart rate, grip strength and VO2 max to two decimal places, then spend the recovered, well-fed day scrolling. The same energy, pointed at attention instead of the body, is what we are calling brainmaxxing - and it turns out the levers are quieter than the supplement aisle suggests.
The healthmaxxing instinct is a good one: measure something that matters, train it deliberately, and watch the number move. The problem is which number. Almost all of the gear, the rings and bands and scales, points at the body. Your attention - the thing that decides whether a day was any good - gets no dashboard at all. Brainmaxxing is just the suggestion that the mind deserves the same seriousness.
Why the brain gets skipped
The body is easy to measure and easy to sell to. Heart rate has a sensor; focus does not. So the wellness market optimises what it can instrument and quietly drops what it cannot. Attention is also uncomfortable to look at squarely, because the main thing degrading it is usually the same phone you would use to track it. It is far more pleasant to add a green smoothie than to admit the morning vanished into a feed.
The result is a strange asymmetry. People who can recite their HRV trend for the last month often have no idea how many focused hours they had this week. The body gets a coach. The brain gets willpower and hope.
The three levers that train attention
You do not need ten interventions. The real list is short, and two of the three are things you already track for your body - they just happen to do most of their work on the mind.
- Protect deep work. Attention is trained the way a muscle is: by being used under load, without interruption. A protected block of focused work is the actual rep. Everything else is warm-up.
- Sleep. The single largest input to next-day attention, and the one healthmaxxers already obsess over - usually for recovery, rarely framed as the cognitive lever it is.
- Recovery. Movement, daylight and genuine off-time. The brain does not run flat out indefinitely; the gaps are not laziness, they are part of the training.
The weights above are illustrative, drawn to make a point about priorities, not measured figures.
Reps, not hacks
The supplement-and-gadget framing of healthmaxxing leans on hacks: the one trick, the stack, the device that does the work for you. Attention does not respond to that. It responds to reps. You get better at focusing by focusing, repeatedly, in conditions where bailing out is not an option - the same reason a heavy set only counts if you do not rack the bar early.
This is the entire idea behind Soren’s lock-in. It is an OS-level Screen Time block with no pause, no skip and no early exit. Once a focus rep starts, the easy escape is closed, so the only way through is the work itself. It is deliberately unglamorous. A rep is not a hack; it is the thing the hacks are pretending to replace.
One number instead of ten dashboards
The other failure mode of healthmaxxing is the dashboard sprawl: a dozen metrics, each with its own app, none of them adding up to a decision. Brainmaxxing is better served by one honest number you look at. Soren is the worked example here - it folds the three levers into a single daily 0-100 Soren Score, computed entirely on your iPhone.
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A daily brain score focus, sleep and movement, in one number
- Focus. Deep work, anchored by the lock-in, counted as the rep it is.
- Sleep. Auto-detected from iPhone motion, written to Apple Health, with no watch or ring required. Stages are modelled estimates, not lab readings.
- Physical. HealthKit movement, the recovery lever already on your phone.
A score is a mirror, not a verdict. Soren’s number is a reflection of how your attention day went, and it is explicitly not a diagnosis of focus, brain fog or anything clinical. The job of one number is modest: to be looked at, and to make tomorrow’s reps a little more deliberate than today’s.
Where to point the energy
If you already healthmaxx, you have done the hard part: you believe a number, trained on purpose, can change a behaviour. Brainmaxxing just asks you to aim some of that at the thing the rings cannot see. Protect a block of focus. Defend your sleep as a cognitive input, not only a recovery one. Take the recovery seriously. Then let one clear score tell you, calmly, how it went.
Soren is iOS 17+, on the App Store. It keeps everything on the device - no account, no servers, no analytics - which is a fair trade if the dimension you most want to train is the one you would least like to hand to a server.
Scores and weightings in this piece are illustrative and for explanation only. Soren gives honest estimates and reflections of your day, not a medical assessment or diagnosis. iOS 17+, on the App Store, as of June 2026.
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