Eliza Saif's 3 favorite reads in 2026

• 2025
• 2026

Your brain is 300,000 years old. Your smartphone is 17. Something had to break.

You wake up and check your phone before you've decided if you're okay. You scroll for forty minutes and feel worse than when you started. You have 1,400 followers and somehow still feel completely alone. You're exhausted by a day that asked almost nothing of your body, can't focus for longer than forty-seven seconds, and lie awake at night wondering why nothing feels satisfying anymore.

This isn't a character flaw. It's neuroscience.

Touch Grass is the book that explains — using real, peer-reviewed research — exactly what chronic overstimulation is doing to your brain, your nervous system, your attention, your relationships, and your body. Not with vague wellness advice. Not with a 30-day challenge. With actual biology.

What you'll discover:

Why your dopamine system has been quietly recalibrated to find real life boring — and what it takes to get it back
The neuroscience of why social rejection and a left-on-read text activate the same brain regions as physical pain
How infinite scroll exploits the same psychological mechanism as a slot machine — and why willpower was never going to be enough
What Attention Restoration Theory says about why a twenty-minute walk outperforms an hour of trying to focus
The default mode network — the brain state you only access when you're doing nothing — and why eliminating boredom might be the most expensive thing your generation ever did
Why you can have 1,400 followers and still feel like nobody actually knows you exist
What the research actually says works — no detoxes, no deleting everything, just the behavioral science of sustainable change
Drawing on over 200 peer-reviewed studies across neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, and behavioral science, Touch Grass makes the case that the exhaustion, anxiety, loneliness, and inability to focus so many people are experiencing right now are not personal failures. They are the predictable, documented result of running ancient hardware on software that updates faster than we can read the patch notes.

Written by a student — not a neuroscientist with a lab and a TED talk, but someone who got genuinely, embarrassingly obsessed with neuropsychology and spent months reading the research so you don't have to — Touch Grass is what happens when you take the internet's laziest insult and run it through two hundred citations.

It turns out "touch grass" was never an insult. It was always a prescription. This book explains why.

Perfect for readers of:
Stolen Focus by Johann Hari · Atomic Habits by James Clear · Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker · The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt · Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke · The Idiot Brain by Dr. Dean Burnett
and more!