Not all fiction is found in books. Some of it is on supplement labels.

What do you consume on a daily basis? 

Always scrolling. Always reachable by email, or text. A podcast or music in your ears. Netflix pulled up at any opportunity you get to unwind. Going to the bathroom with your phone. There is almost never a moment alone with your thoughts - and for a lot of people, the idea of that might even be uncomfortable.

We have become relentless consumers of stimulation. Not because we're lazy or mindless, but because it's frictionless. The next thing is always already there, and choosing nothing requires an active effort that choosing something doesn't. So we keep consuming - content, noise, input - without ever really asking what we're taking in, or what we're not giving ourselves room for.

Spontaneous thought: the mind wandering, daydreaming, quietly drifting - isn't wasted brain activity, it supports memory consolidation, creativity, and mental wellbeing. But it requires one thing we're increasingly unwilling to give it: space and time.

I've started to notice this in my own life. Getting to the end of a day and not being able to account for the time I'd spent scrolling. Unable to recall a single thing I'd actually watched or read, yet somehow an hour had gone. I find myself searching for something that's always been there, but I had just stopped making room for.

Time away from a screen. Things that felt more human, more crafted - things that opened something up rather than filled time. I started reading fiction again. Not to be productive, or performative. Not to learn something I could use. Just to let my imagination go somewhere. To unwind in a way that actually felt like rest.

It turns out there's a reason that feels so different to scrolling, but I'll come back to that. Because there's another kind of ‘fiction’ consumption I want to talk about. 

We are, often completely uncritically, putting things into our bodies based on very little science. A recommendation from someone online. An ingredient name we recognise. A label that says ‘supports cognitive function’ in confident, unverifiable terms.

I came to Numin as a neuroscientist and a former athlete. I understand research design. I know how to read a trial. As an athlete, I spent years looking for a legitimate edge - something that would make a measurable difference to the outputs that actually mattered. My sport required mental sharpness, quick and confident decision-making under pressure. What struck me about the clinical trial was that it measured exactly that.

It is so vanishingly rare for a supplement brand to have actually conducted their own clinical trial and gathered data on their formula as a whole. What they typically do instead is piggyback on the existing science of individual ingredients, find four compounds with some research behind them, put them in a capsule, and assume the formula works because the components might. Ingredient-level evidence doesn't automatically translate to formula-level efficacy. Interactions matter. Dosing in combination matters. The specific outcome you're targeting matters. 

What made Numin different, and why I was paying attention before I ever began working there, was the specificity. Not 'we support cognitive performance' or 'we promote neurological function.' Those words are broad enough to mean almost anything. Numin's focus was decision fatigue. One proposed mechanism, specific and measurable. And then they tested it, before even coming to market, in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial. A design devoid of bias, that collected both subjective and objective measures - on their entire formula.

So, back to fiction.

There's a reason picking up a novel feels so categorically different to an hour of scrolling, and it's not just aesthetic preference. Spontaneous thought and imagination activate the brain's default mode network - the same network that constant stimulation suppresses. Reading fiction, letting your mind wander into a story someone else constructed, giving your imagination room to move  aren't indulgences. They're genuinely restorative in a way that passive content consumption isn't. 

The same principle applies to what you put in your body. More input is not always better. More ingredients, more products, more things consumed on the basis of vague promises.

What are you consuming?

Do you actually know what it's doing?

Is it …fiction?