Move over, “You are what you eat.” - by Meghan Fitzgerald

Move over, “You are what you eat.”

There’s a new phrase in town...

Mar 24, 2026

You are what you eat --> you are what you attend to.

The phrase, “You are what you eat” peaked in popularity when I was a kid during the nutrition boom of the ‘80s. Today, even though our relationship to our food system is as complicated as ever, I propose a new, far more timely phrase:

“You are what you attend to.”

Great with kids

I’ve found this phrase is a helpful prompt for sparking conversation about attention with kids. You may need to help kids understand what it means to “attend to” something. But, once you do, kids really get it.

Almost immediately, they start to think about ways that kids and adults give their attention away to things that they may not want to, like their phones, apps (especially infinite scroll platforms like Tik Tok), games, or even to compulsory activities they don’t really enjoy (especially at school).

I’ve also found that this simple phrase can inspire kids to identify all kinds of things that feel great to attend to. Or, the things they wish people (including themselves) paid more attention to. Want to be inspired? Scroll down for highlights from an ever growing list of such things generated by a10d kids around the country.

Timeless for adults, too

This phrase is having a pretty big moment in this era of the attention economy. And, though built for our age of phones, feeds, and algorithmic distraction, the concept is not new at all. This idea has been evolving for centuries and across cultural traditions. It’s a strong signal of something’s universal meaning when artists, philosophers, scientists, and other thought leaders continually repackage an idea for their contemporary context.

I hope exploring how this notion has evolved over time, across cultures and through different lenses can help us adults to feel that universality and both stretch and sharpen the core truth: our attention is the architect of who we become.

The neuroscience

Though I often worry that we too strongly emphasize the measurable and “provable,” I deeply appreciate when new understandings about how the brain works mesh with age-old wisdom. This powerful combination can breathe new life into old ideas, spark curiosity even in skeptics, and inspire us to continue learning on the shoulders of giants.

Modern research has shown us how attention doesn’t just reflect who we are—it rewires our brains. Neural circuits strengthen or wither based on where our attention goes. In other words: we build our brains by how we use them. That’s some fairly strong support for Epictetus’s urge to wake up each day and ask yourself, “What is it that I have to care for today?”

As long as we can resist the temptation to reduce our definition of attention to “time on task,” the discoveries of neuroscience blend beautifully with the wise observations of the ancients.

Buddhist traditions

Around the 5th century BCE, in Buddhist teachings attributed to Gautama Buddha, attention (sati) was the foundation of the Eightfold Path–the Buddha’s practical framework for ending suffering and living well. “What we think, we become” was a poetic and keen observation of how humans think and behave. Our minds and, in turn, our actions are shaped, moment by moment, by what we notice and cling to.

Hindu & Yoga traditions

Around the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE, one-pointed attention, Ekāgratā (Sanskrit: एकाग्रता) is emphasized in the Bhagavad Gita, and later elaborated in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. When the mind dwells on a single thing, distractions fall away and the mind unifies with that object. Today, yogic practices like the one in my community continue in this tradition, focusing on breath, body and movement to train attention so it moves from distraction toward calm, clarity, compassion, and self-realization. In a sense, how we attend is how we evolve ourselves.

The Stoics of Greece & Rome

In the early centuries CE, in Stoic Greece and Rome, philosophers like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius taught that freedom begins with noticing your “impressions”—the thoughts and urges that flood the mind. You become wise (the ultimate goal) by choosing which of those impressions to attend to and which to release.

Jewish & Christian monastic traditions

Early monastic writers in ~4th to 8th centuries CE exalted a quality of nepsis or watchful attentiveness. This often repeated idea suggested how our inner life could be shaped by what we notice, repeat, and dwell upon. Attention was held as a spiritual practice with the call to attend to what is life-giving or virtuous and try to diminish what is destructive.

Indigenous North American traditions

For millennia, Native People’s traditions have focused on honoring the things and people with which we are in relationship. For example, The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address (also called the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen or “Words Before All Else”) encourages us to attend to the natural world with gratitude. Attend to water, plants, winds, creatures, other people, because what we honor becomes part of who we are. We are all in a relationship. Lakota and Ojibwe teachings echo this through the idea that “care grows where our care goes.”

Modern western takes

Flash forward to around 1890, when American psychologist William James, wrote “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” For James, what we notice becomes our experience, and our experience becomes our life.

A generation later, French philosopher Simone Weil reframed attention as something deeply relational. She famously called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” arguing that what we attend to—whether another person, an idea, or the world around us—reveals and shapes our humanity. It also connects us to one another. Attention isn’t just cognitive; it is interpersonal and ethical. And, if you’ve ever felt truly attended to by another person, you understand what Weil was driving at.

By the mid-20th century, psychologists showed how selective attention guides what we remember, how we decide, and how we regulate emotion. Our inner world turns out to be a map drawn by what we notice and take in as well as what we filter out.

Then came the media theorists. As television and advertising grew, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman argued that our “information diets” shape us as deeply as our food diets. More recently, in Superbloom, the technology writer Nicholas Carr put it plainly: “What we choose to attend to is what we become.”

A radical invitation

No matter how you think about it, at its core, “You are what you attend to,” is a radical invitation: if attention shapes identity, then reclaiming our attention is one of the most powerful acts of becoming that we could offer to our kids.