To the MAXX

By The MotherMind Doctor

The concerning trend around all corners of the internet involves ‘maxxing’ and started with maximising your status in gaming.

Then it was picked up and extrapolated to popular use with obsessional intent on specific aspects of your life like your appearance with ‘looksmaxxing’ for your face, and your body with ‘gymmaxxing’.It can even be referred to for health pursuits like sleep, ‘sleepmaxxing’, and diet…yes maxxing; going so far as strategies such as ‘heightmaxxing’.

The concerning part of all this maximising is the intense focus on an idealised form of what people ‘should’ aspire to.

There is a flipside to the maxxing paradigm, in the push back on optimising and working smart and ‘friction-free living’ with …. ‘frictionmaxxing’.

Let’s start with what friction-free living actually is: the saturation of our lives with technology to do the work for you such as AI generated emails, reports, research; automated scheduling; delivery apps; streaming entertainment and one-click purchases. The aim is to save time on the mundane tasks to allow for higher-level productivity or leisure. However, as we saw with the development of workslop, that doesn’t have a natural conclusion.

The counter culture to this perspective is to maximise the friction and go ‘analogue’ – not completely, but to build tolerance to discomfort by resisting technology-driven convenience.

This latest trend is ‘friction-maxxing’, a term created by columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton in a January 2026 essay for The Cut (a golf magazine in NZ). It spread to the Financial Times, reporting on the reintroduction of friction into workplace settings such as face-to-face meetings, reading complete documents rather than AI summaries and writing notes yourself.

The analogy of a controlling parent was made to the extent that if you don’t learn how to do it yourself, how can you manage life on your own? That is, how do you learn or maintain the ability to think critically? It even extends to the concept of emotional intelligence by being able to tolerate discomfort which requires skills such as self-awareness as well as self-management.

This is not always true in the workplace, depending on the type of work you do, or the amount of technology you use at work. But it is a general trend in our daily lives that we can detox from by choice. It is useful to think of things that can be done without the aid of technology or AI, like journaling.

Journaling can be a reflective time of the day to build in the natural pause that is often missing from our days. It means turning of the latest streaming series an episode early so you can do this in soft yellow light, to help your natural circadian rhythm kick into gear.

It means writing in a notebook without the bright light and slowing down to write with a pen to get all the racing thoughts out of your head and onto the page.

This way you help yourself with good sleep hygiene and help to re-focus your mind to the task of relaxing.

Let me know if this is something you feel will help or has helped you.

#MentalHealth #FrictionMaxxing #Wellbeing #Psychiatry #DigitalWellbeing