The recurring theme in the foundation project I’m working on is evolutionary mismatch.
This is how our bodies and behaviors are designed for different environments than we live in today. Because evolution is slow, we don’t have time to adapt to the new instincts that protect us from novel dangers.
Exercise is an example. Life has been laborious in most history, so it is purely for physical exercise. The sedentary life that causes our health problems today comes from the essentially correct attitude in most of our history: don’t move if you don’t need it; it’s best to save your energy.
The other is diet. For most of the history, hunger was more likely to be dangerous than obesity. Overeating, if possible, let’s add some fat to the body in the previous possible era of leanness. Just, in our modern rich food world, we can consistent Overeat.
More importantly, modern super processed junk food acts as a super thrill. That is, food without food in our ancestors’ environment combined with the fat, simple carbohydrates and diverse flavors and textures that junk food has. So when available, it may be a proper tip for overeating honey, ripe fruit or wild game that has entered a more powerful drive to enjoy too much junk food that is always rich.
For the vast majority of us, modernity has solved hunger but has given us a new problem of self-control – trying to eat a healthy diet in a world full of junk food.
Pay attention to junk food
Although evolutionary mismatch is widely accepted in explaining our inadequate exercise and nutritional dilemma, it is becoming increasingly clear that it also explains many of our attention-consuming behaviors.
At work, Gloria Mark’s research shows that we experience disruptions about every three minutes and five seconds, half of which are self-inspiring distractions. After an interruption, the task of resuming interrupted can take up to 25 minutes. This shows repetitive attention-Quick descends into different tasks, but rarely maintains the focus required for creative achievement.
Our personal lives are not effective. Now we carry devices with unlimited, bite-sized content, and their algorithms are designed to maximize the motivation for our new information. No wonder Americans report reading less books – people who can sit down the whole book when YouTube videos feel too long?
Note that junk food assumes that these new forms of digital media and work environments are another superstar. They exaggerate these traits that would encourage us to focus in the ancestral environment, while also divorcing these signals from the actual value used to provide reliably.
For example, our brains aim to pay attention to gossip. Knowing that what happens in a person’s tribe can be a matter of life or exile. But now we have celebrity gossip, which gives us information about people we will never interact with and is disproportionate to the status and problems of our own friends and family.
Again, we tend to pay attention to potential threats. Therefore, online media surfaces have caused anger examples that trigger our original threat or fear responses altogether, even if the objective risk is small, few examples.
Can you pay attention to your diet healthier?
Given our mismatched drives, what if we want to live a better life?
One answer is a pessimistic approach: there is nothing we can do. We are just forced to eat too much, exercise too little, and focus our limited amount on pursuits that don’t matter to us.
Of course, there is reason to be afraid of pessimistic conclusions. Despite decades of health advice, few people actually follow these guidelines.1 This will be more correct when you use objective metrics like heart rate monitors instead of self-report measures.2
At the very least, we may be able to reject the overly optimistic conclusion that simply realizing this problem is enough to solve it through reason and some willpower. Self-control, while necessary, can never be a permanent solution to the mismatched drive problem, and you will end up exhausted.
However, I think there is a middle ground between Yangot and Easy. We may not be able to rely on willpower to consistently resist our mismatched drives, but we can take steps to redesign part of the environment to support the life we want to live.
For me, that means getting off the car, switching to curated consumption of most online media I want to consume (rather than algorithm feeds), eliminating distracting apps from my phone, and replacing them with Kindle and other long material content I want to consume.
The end result is much better than maintaining good habits, rather than simply admonishing yourself to waste hours of your day or get angry at the latest social media dust.
Focus on new life meetings
I worked with Cal Newport to build a three-month course with a focus on Life of Life, a tool designed to facilitate this transition to a more intentional attentional life. We want to teach not only thoughts and facts, but we also want to help people create new environments of attention so that they can overcome the problem of willpower to maintain behavioral change. Every month of the course, students will guide challenges in work, life or thought, both of which can enhance the skills to focus and develop the environment that supports it.
If you feel that the modern world is too busy, chaotic, stressed or distracted to do meaningful work, I strongly recommend that we join our next session, which will be open for registration on Monday, July 21st.
footnote
- And, no, the problem is not that health advice is actually bad. Although specific recommendations may be changed when new science is discovered, the statistics are clear and although few follow these recommendations, those who do have better health conditions.
- For example, in one study, more than 60% of people reported themselves that they met recommended exercise guidelines, but when tracking with Heartrate monitors, the amount dropped to 10%.
