I actually got a lot of benefit out of seriously cutting back my reading a couple of years ago. I found that rather than coming up with my own arguments and usi

I actually got a lot of benefit out of seriously cutting back my reading a couple of years ago. I found that rather than coming up with my own arguments and using examples from what I'd read to support them, I was just citing arguments from various books I'd read. It wasn't that I'd lost the capacity for original thought, but my mental habits had changed from trying to come up with something on my own to purely synthesizing and citing material I'd read elsewhere. Some more extreme but shorter versions of this that I've tried include putting myself in an environment with no words for a few days, and spending a day blindfolded.