Dr. Jenny Powers' Secret to Unlocking Your Body's Full Potential - Wellness Musketeers Podcast

And it's because we don't live in the present moment. We are not aware of the cues our bodies give us. We are not aware of the things that are going on around us.

Welcome to the Wellness Musketeers Podcast, your guide to navigating the world of health, wellness, and the art of living. I'm your host, Dave Bliss, a journalist and podcaster based in Washington, D.C., joined by my co-host, Kettle Vining, an economist with 35 years of experience, including 24 years with the IMF and currently an adjunct lecturer in economics and politics at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence. In a world inundated with wellness advice, we aim to provide actionable strategies to help you thrive. Today we are delighted to welcome Jenny Powers, a PhD scientist, mom, writer, and athlete from Colorado. Dr. Powers holds a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a PhD in immunology from the University of Colorado. After leaving academia to raise her two kids and pursue a writing career, she co-authored the book On the Origin of Being with Luke Comer. The book, this book delves into how evolution by natural selection can inform and enhance our modern lives. Luke Comer, although not joining us today, conceptualized the project and has a rich background in studying human biological and cultural evolution. This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in understanding how aligning with our evolutionary design can improve health and wellbeing. Jenny Powers, PhD, will share fascinating insights from her book on the origin of being, revealing how our ancestors' lifestyles can guide us to better sleep, nutrition, and overall wellness in today's fast-paced world. Before we begin, please remember to subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. And if you're there, please also leave us a review. 5 stars do amazing things for the podcast. And with that, here's our conversation with Jenny Powers.

Hello, Dr. Powers. I hope I can call you Jenny.

Oh, of course. Please do.

I read your book with great interest. It does go through quite interesting things about the evolutionary mismatch and something called biohacking. Can you tell us a little bit about how you actually came about to actually spending a lot of time dealing with this and actually writing a whole book about it?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I, um, I really appreciate it. So my whole life I was kind of an overachiever and a perfectionist. So I, you know, had high grades in school and I was a basketball player and, but my worth was always wrapped up in my achievement. Then I went to grad school. I had 70-hour work weeks. I, I was burnt out. I was depressed and I thought I was the person. I thought it was a personal failing of mine. I never really realized that it might have been something like our culture of work in this country that is causing me to feel these things. And I always wanted to be a writer, but again, wrapped up in my achievement is my worth. A PhD scientist, you know, is like a big achievement, whereas a writer might not, you know, be a good thing. Then around the same time in the early 2000s, climate change began to show up in scientific journals and news, and I was feeling this agonizing like distress, solastalgia is called, why people weren't caring about our environment. But at the same time, I was going through all this stuff. I was too depressed to do anything about it, and I felt more of a failure. So I started a spiritual path and began to heal. And when my kids were born, I actually did quit academia and start being a writer. And I met Luke. I was looking for writing jobs to do, and I met Luke. And he described his vision for this book, this vision that he'd had for many, many years as he was researching nutrition and other things. And he was telling me all the ways that we aren't living in accord with our biology, with our evolved nature. And he started listing them off: sleep, nutrition, work, nature, you know, child rearing, social groups. And 'cause this is actually the first book of a 3-part series. Then it soon became glaringly obvious to me when I was talking to him that my two biggest pain points at, at that time in my life were work and the relationship with nature. And it just blew my mind and it totally opened up this new world of, well, maybe I'm not doing it wrong. Maybe our society's doing it wrong because we're not living how we used to live. And so that's how I became connected with the project and I researched and wrote it. According to Luke's foundation and vision.

What will the other two books in the series be?

So this book focuses on kind of more of our basic needs, our sleep, nutrition, work, relationship with nature. And then you kind of look at it as like a triangle, kind of like Maslow's triangle of needs, hierarchy of needs. The next book will be more social groups, like social needs. So social groups, child rearing, the sexes, relationships. And then at the top of the pyramid will be more cultural needs, like how we evolved rituals and religion and the arts and ceremonies and things like that. So each book kind of builds on each, on each other, and hopefully will give a total of 10 things that people can start addressing in their own lives that might actually help them have better well-being.

Interesting. So the top is a little bit the spiritual part.

Yes, definitely.

Okay. Yeah. But let's not dive a little into what this is telling us, because I'm sure that a lot of the listeners are interested in knowing, you know, how they might want to adjust their life on the base of this book. There is a lot of talking about, you know, let's start maybe with diet, but relates to other things as well. But you know, about the paleo diet, which is kind of raising up a similar story as what you are telling, is basically far back we ate a certain way, our genome has not changed enough for us to deal with the rest. But how does this differ from a lot of what we read about the paleo diet around?

Can we maybe go back a little bit just to explain like what is an evolutionary mismatch and, and biohacking? I think that's sort of a big theme of what we're gonna be discussing here. Now that will tie into the, the dietary parts.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a great question. So environmental mismatch is the environment that we live in today is so radically different than the one that we evolved in. And our world, especially over the last 100 years, is changing so rapidly that we have not, unlike in other times in history, we haven't, it's happened so fast, we haven't had the time to evolve and adapt to this modern world. So I like to say we're kind of running hunter-gatherer software in a world that looks nothing like our hunter-gatherers' world. And so when we were hunter-gatherers and we lived in accord with our evolutionary design, we had physical and mental health. But when you're in discord, when you have this mismatch between what your genes and what your body and mind need and the environment around you, we experience pathology. So these are like the diseases of modernity, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity. These are all diseases that didn't really affect our ancestors the way they affect us now, because I think it's a huge lifestyle change in our lifestyle now is there's just this huge gap between what we need and what we're actually doing.

So when it comes to, for instance, diet, does it mean that we should eat like a caveman and cavewoman?

Well, actually, the paleo diet is a little bit of a misnomer because there is no one optimal paleo diet. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate wildly different macronutrient ratios and a variety of plants and animals in different ratios depending on what they could acquire in what season in their environment. So if you think about the Inuit, they ate— 95% of their food came from animals and only 5% came from plants. But on the other extreme, in the desert, the Ju/hoansi in the Kalahari Desert, they had 65% plants and only 35% animals. And yet both groups adapted to survive in those environments. And think about, if you think about where hunter-gatherers used to live before they were pushed to the extremes, I mean, think of all of the fertile land in between these two areas and all of the different things that the, our environment would provide us to eat. And so I think the Paleodiet's kind of a misnomer, but there are things that are very similar to all of our ancestors that did have to do with diet.

What would you say those things are?

Well, I think no matter where we lived, we always ate the whole food. We ate the skin, the pulp, the seeds of, of plants. When we ate animals, we ate the connective tissue and the organs and not just the muscle meat. Nothing was— nutrients were not stripped from it. Fiber was not stripped from it. The way that it is in our modern world. So I think no matter where we lived, the one thing we did was we just— we didn't just pick and choose like, oh, I'm only going to eat the sugar out of that plant, and I'm only going to eat the flour out of that plant, and I'm only going to eat the oil out of that plant. We actually ate the entire plant and got all the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and everything else that we needed along with it.

And so even, even if it's a meat-based diet, it's still the same kind of considerations?

Yeah. Well, so people that Inuit and people who live more meat-based. So what's interesting is that the human body is very adaptive. And so we have the ability to any nutrient that we don't get in our diet, that's not one of the essential nutrients. There are these essential nutrients that our body can't make that we have to get in our diet. So aside from those things, our body can make conversions. So we can turn fat into carbohydrates, we can turn proteins into carbohydrates, but it also, there has to be a little bit of care taken because when we are doing a lot of conversions, it costs a lot of energy and we get byproducts that might build up in our system and might cause us to, you know, be pretty sick. So there are ways for us to live in a variety of places because our body can convert them. But we need to make sure that, well, I think ideally if we can get in our diet all the things that we need and we don't need to do any conversions, then A, it'll save energy and it'll help our bodies not have any kind of side products that might not be wanted.

So then about the whole period in between the caveman or cavewoman and now, this is the agricultural revolution. You know, so then a lot of things we eat now, including bread, milk, eat or drink milk products, are things, and legumes more generally, beans, are things that were cultivated during the agricultural revolution and constitute a large part of today's diet. Should we cut out all that?

No. Well, I think So for instance, with milk, there is actually, humans have adapted to, to eating dairy. Some humans, or I don't know, I don't know the percentage, but the persistence of the lactase gene that breaks down lactose, you know, by the time a lot of, you know, most animals when they pass their childhood, their gene kind of gets downregulated, meaning the expression of the gene is kind of turned way down. And so that's why some people have trouble digesting milk. But in a lot of people, their lactase gene doesn't ever get dialed down. So we still have the enzyme to digest lactose. Lactose. Yeah. So I think it's gonna vary from person to person because someone might eat lactose, might drink milk and have really severe cramping and gas and things like that, but other people won't. So to me, I feel like dairy needs, it needs to be a personal decision based on your personal physiology. As for legumes, well, I think that the legumes are a great source of fiber and a very sustainable plant-based protein. And a lot of the reason people don't want them is because there's lots of lectins in them. So legumes like lentils and peas and chickpeas and soybeans and beans and peanuts, even things like raw potatoes. If all of those things are eaten raw, it has lectin in them and it will cause digestion problems. However, it's very easily— the, the solution is, is very easy. Once you cook these things for 5 to 10 minutes, the lectin gets denatured and it doesn't have the same effect. So it's not going to affect your diet. So no, I feel like the way that we can process beans makes it safe for us to eat. And again, it might be a personal thing. Some people might be a lot more sensitive to maybe the smaller amounts that it might still be left over. But this is what I think is so important to people to know that there's not one diet, there's not a carnivore diet, there's not, you know, vegan diet. There's not one diet that's gonna fit everybody. Ah. So you need to take into account what makes you feel good and what doesn't. Like if, if being a carnivore makes you feel awful, then add some plants to your food. You know, if you're a vegan and you are lacking protein in your diet, you might need to add some animal products. Just to help boost your energy and your ability to build muscle.

Oh, is a differentiator sort of that, you know, nowadays we have a lot of ingredients in food that don't grow in nature and can't be easily pronounced.

And that, that's exactly it.

And that is something that our ancestors didn't have homogenized corn oil in their, right, right. Whatever it might be.

Your, and yeah. Could you tell me? So I, I think all the people who follow these diets, they might argue over what we should eat, but what they don't argue over is what we shouldn't eat. Right? We ate whole foods. We didn't eat nutrients that were stripped or food that was stripped of nutrients and stripped of fiber. We didn't ever, like in our entire evolutionary history, we were never exposed to raw refined sugar except for honey, maybe occasionally. But the abundance of just sugar, we went from 4 pounds of sugar, eating 4 pounds of sugar a year to over 150 pounds of sugar a year in like 2, 300 years. The flour, processed flour, ultra-processed oils, vegetable oils. And then like you said, the fake foods, artificial colors, artificial flavors, trans fats, all of these things. We didn't encounter any of these when we were evolving. So our bodies don't know how to handle them.

So how has your consideration of nutrition changed from, when you were a basketball player at college and to now as a master's athlete and as a parent?

Yeah, well, it was the '90s and we were 18 to 22-year-olds and we didn't think of nutrition as part of our training. It wasn't, I mean, this is 30 years ago, you know, we, we did weight training and we sort of had some, you know, healthy foods versus dorm foods, but it wasn't ever taught to us in the way that this is how you need to fuel your body. You need to eat these foods so you recover faster. It was never, never taught like that. We were also under a lot of pressure and there was a lot of body standards and actually there were a lot of eating disorders on our team. So the mental health aspect of that wasn't really talked about either. So happy to see that athletes nowadays, you know, like Simone Biles, they're really starting to address the mental health aspect, not just the nutrition and, you know, working out and things like that. You know, so now that I'm older, you know, I've had 2 kids, I'm going through perimenopause, you know, I'm learning so much about what we should and shouldn't eat. I've cut processed foods and I'm eating a lot of more whole foods and it's been truly life-changing for me. I don't have cravings, I don't have acid reflux anymore. I've lost weight without cutting calories. Uh, I have better mental health. I also feel like I have inflammation. I said I have eczema and I have osteoarthritis because I've had 7 knee surgeries. I feel like those things are better. I feel like my overall, like, inflammation levels, because of the foods that I choose to eat, I'm really helping my body kind of just calm down. Yeah.

Interesting. Maybe you can talk a little bit about sleep. This is another big chapter of your book. And one of the, again, the way I'm thinking about that is that, you know, there's no electricity. Therefore, I will sleep, go to bed earlier. And there's also stories about during the Middle Ages, people spent 3 or 4 hours in the middle of the night doing all kinds of things. Apparently, A Midsummer Night's Dream was during the middle of the night. But you are kind of saying there was a lot of sleep patterns that existed then. And some of these characterizations are a little bit too I mean, a little bit wrong.

Yeah, that's a good question. So I feel like people look back in history and kind of have all these misconceptions about sleep, like you just said. And if people think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors are like, oh, they went to bed when the sun went down and they woke up when the sun came up and they got 12 hours of sleep a night and they were well rested. And, and that's simply not the case. The hunter-gatherers, they were able that survived into modern times, were able to be studied and tracked. And, and even with the influence of the outside world, all of the groups studied have very, had very similar sleeping patterns. They slept for maybe 7 hours to 8 or 9 hours depending on the, the time of year. But the one thing that they had every morning, they woke up at the same time every morning. They got bright sunlight in the morning and all throughout the day. And then when the sun went down, The only light they had was firelight. So because this is important, because sunlight is one of the best ways to entrain our circadian rhythms. These are the rhythms that tell our bodies, you know, when to make certain hormones at different times of day so we can wake up, so we can fall asleep. You know, when are we gonna digest? When are we gonna repair? So all of these hormones that help our bodies function and repair are under the control of these circadian rhythms. And so what these indigenous and, you know, hunter-gatherer groups found, or what they found about them, is that they're so entrained with their natural environment that their bodies are always synced up with the cycle of day and night in the earth. And nowadays we live a twilight existence because when we wake up, most of us don't go outside. We have, you know, this is the peak of sunlight the hunter-gatherers were getting. We kind of hang out down here. You know, all throughout the day we have light, we have light, we have light. And when the light cuts off for hunter-gatherers, we still have the same level of light all throughout the day, all throughout the night, up until the moment we've tried to shut our eyes to go to sleep.

Oh, Dr. Huberman, he talks about how one of the things that's important for setting your midrise, so to speak, for the day is to get a few minutes of sunlight before you start your day.

Mm-hmm. And that's exactly why he says that. It's because we evolved in to respond to the cues that the earth gave us. And it, this evolution to respond and have circadian rhythms went back to the very like first cells of life. They needed to know when they needed to come up and do photosynthesis, and they needed to know when was it okay to undergo cell division and cell cycle because they didn't wanna do that during the day because the sun could cause UV damage and cause mutations, but they needed the sun to undergo photosynthesis. So even the very early cells of life had these mechanisms that entrained them or synced them to the natural light and dark of the day and night.

So, I mean, maybe go back to my story. My story is that, you know, I retired. I have then started napping. There's one issue there. Of course, my naps might have been a little long. And second, I also have experimented a little bit with light. So by actually having a mask, I found that that is worth like 3 sleeping pills. What? Yeah. I mean, it's very, very powerful and actually it's a little bit too powerful for the morning because then the body wants to kind of start feeling the light probably. But, you know, and again, I can regulate it better, but in the evening, even though outside my bedroom, there's a little bit of a light. It's not much. It's a streetlight, but that's enough. It really mattered.

Yeah. That's amazing.

And you show how powerful that light is.

Yeah. Well, after I researched this book, I started, this is one of the things that I, that completely changed. I would get up every morning and take the dogs for a walk in the morning. All right. And get lots of sunlight. And I would try to get outside as many— as much as I can. I'd eat lunch outside, you know, just to get as, as much bright light as I can. And then at 4 o'clock, all of my devices turn to that night shift, red shift, that gets rid of the blue light because we are exquisitely trained— our, um, brains are, um, the circadian rhythms are entrained by blue light. Interestingly, because that is the wavelength of light that can penetrate the ocean. So it could have been any wavelength of light, but it's blue light because of the beginnings of life. And so I, I turn everything up. I have blue-blocking glasses. I'm sure you guys have seen these very fashionable things that clip on for the evening.

Every evening you walk around like that?

So, well, for, for when I don't have— if I'm not on a device that's turned down, it's blue light and redshift. Yeah, I can use this. So you're not, you know, we don't want to trick our bodies into thinking that it's not time for bed yet. You know, for every, you know, half hour before bed that you have blue light, it postpones melatonin production for at least an hour.

So what happens if you put that on when you watch TV? It will— you actually notice it because there is this thing about when I— you wear different Google ski masks. Ski is not— yeah, ski.

Yeah.

Goggles and colors, your brain kind of adjusts to it and recreates the same colors.

It's interesting. Yeah, I think the same, it's the same thing. Your eyes do adjust, but if I'm on my computer at 4 o'clock when it shifts, it's like, whoa, you know, it's really obvious. But like a minute later, I can't tell the difference between if it's on or off.

So like, yeah, that's kind of, it's interesting how the brain kind of adjusts that.

Yeah, we have talked to like, uh, different psychologists in the past and they talked about sleep hygiene. You know, the idea— I hadn't thought so much about the blue light at that hour of the day starting at 4, but you know, that to power off your devices and to avoid stimulation and to, you know, change how you consume caffeine, you know, or things like that. So, and that your bedroom should be where you sleep and maybe do one or two other things, but for the most part, it's not your recreating.

And what's the second?

Leave it to your imagination. But, but that, but what do you, is this all sort of sleep hygiene?

Yeah. Well, yeah, this is sleep hygiene. I mean, that's, people say, you know, don't look at screens before you go to bed. It's because of this evolutionary response that we have to blue light. But other things like one of the sleep hygiene recommendations is to like have your room set at a temperature like 68 degrees or lower. Dude, because another signal to our bodies is falling temperature. We are in our temperature controlled homes. We don't get full sunlight. We get like a, a minimum of, we get light, but it's a very fraction of what sunlight is. And we don't feel any changes in the temperature either. We are temperature controlled. So again, turning down the thermostat is actually an evolutionary thing because our bodies are tuned to the rhythms of, you know, getting cold, colder in the evening. It helps us relax, it helps us fall asleep. And so, and of course caffeine just messes with everything very late in the day. And alcohol too. Alcohol too.

Are your kids receptive to these kind of things?

So we're working on them. I think it's hard when— and then I'm going to say this for all of the things— it is really hard to make these lifestyle changes when you live in a society that doesn't support them per se. So I think, you know, once they get a little older, you know, we've put lots of things in place. You know, their devices all go to redshift. They don't have screens an hour before bed. We're eating more and more whole foods. So like hopefully these habits will stick and hopefully by the time they're my age, there'll be more support around them. More people choosing to live this way, more resources, more, more just support.

So one thing about alcohol and sleeping, so one thing I thought, you know, okay, you drink alcohol, you fall asleep, fine, but then you wake up and that's the only problem. But apparently there's another problem. And it's an interesting problem is that even a couple of drinks can affect you. So you reduce your REM sleep early part of the night and increase it later part. Therefore, you remember it better and they're a little more kind of vivid. They're maybe a little more traumatic. I don't know if it's always true, but it's kind of an interesting thing because I haven't noticed any reduction in REM sleep from drink, from alcohol. But that might just be a bias by the fact that you remember the things that happen early in the morning. With other stimulants like weed, I think it's less studied, but it's a similar thing that they think that it reduces REM sleep. And REM sleep, I do think is, but I understand, very important for your mental, what actually happened during the night. Because sleeping, as I've said earlier, is a pleasure. Fun. But because you go through things that you might not even remember, but they, they happen to you.

Right. The thing that you said about the importance of REM sleep. So humans have the most REM sleep of any primate. And we also have the shortest, I mean, other primates do fall asleep when the sun goes down and do wake up when the sun comes up. They do get these long hours at night. Humans actually evolved to have the shortest amount of sleep. Sleep window of all primates because, well, A, we were able to go to deeper sleep because of our intelligence, because of our social groups. We were able to be more protected from predation. We were able to be more protected from predators, like, because of fire, because of sentinels, because of all these other things. But what's important too is that we needed more time our social structures and our intelligence, there was just so, we needed more time to pass on knowledge. We needed more time to figure out how to live with each other. We needed more time to innovate. And so that there's a hypothesis that that is another reason why our sleep cycle shortened and why our REM sleep is so deep because we needed more time to do things. And then we needed our sleep to become such that it gets our memories get recorded, our bodies and brains recover properly. And so, yeah, go ahead.

One thing that's been interesting to me is like I use a Fitbit or an Apple Watch is when I look at my sleep analysis, how little of my sleep is REM sleep. I don't know if how much of that is just, is that something I need to worry about or just in general, even if it's, it what that means or how important it is. But at the same time, how little of your sleep, relatively speaking, is comprised of deep REM sleep?

Yeah, well, so I think because our REM sleep is so deep, we usually get our longest REM sleep, like kind of first thing in once we fall asleep. And then our REM sleep cycles get a little shorter and shorter and shorter until we wake up. I don't know the exact, like, length of time that, like, the ideal length of time that someone needs REM sleep in order to feel good. I'm not sure how accurate some of those trackers are in terms of, of REM sleep. If you were really, you know, someone was really worried about it, I would go get a sleep study done where they put all these things on your head and they can really measure that. Because I don't necessarily trust 100%, like, oh, oh my gosh, I got such a horrible night's sleep last night. It sometimes generates a little bit of anxiety when there shouldn't be any.

Yeah.

Just by knowing that.

You don't want to have anything, something else to lose sleep over because you're worried about how they're sleeping.

Exactly. Exactly.

But it's kind of interesting actually. So REM sleep is still, as you say, is important for us humans, but apparently there are piece associated with post-traumatic stress disorder where actually they are kind of working on the REM kind of the eye movements part of it. And kind of recreating a little bit of what is happening during the REM sleep. So I don't know much about it, but I know that there is a therapy like that. But I wouldn't worry too much today. It might be inaccurate. I think you probably have much more REM sleep than that.

But the question is, how do you feel? Do you feel like you get a good night's sleep?

Sometimes. I mean, it's, you know, I guess not universally every night. And I think I do notice if I have caffeine or something later in the day, like I think my body's okay after about noon. You don't need to be drinking any caffeine.

Me too.

The half time is 6 hours. So I think something like that. You can correct me. But so if you drink at noon, you might still be okay. But if you drink at 4, you're probably not okay.

Yeah. It'll keep you up. That was me yesterday, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Doing things that did cave people didn't have, they didn't have coffee. Coffee is a cultural revolution, if not later.

Right.

I think that the few words that I've heard you shouldn't use in diet or relationships are always and never.

Well, that's so true.

But, you're always gonna have that afternoon when you need something at 3 in the afternoon or a donut.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, and I also, peop— the people who are listening, you know, a lot of this stuff, we don't wanna be so rigid with our lifestyle changes that we fall off the wagon so easily. Like, yeah. Allowing myself, um, I, I knew I was gonna have trouble sleeping, but I needed that cup of coffee. It was a social cup of coffee and it was worth it to me.

Yeah.

You know, eating, you know, totally restricting yourself, never letting you eat, have any processed food or any treat at all. That's like the first thing you do if you want to not follow that diet anymore.

Yeah.

Because you'll just, you'll just crave it more and more. So a lot of these things are, you know, diet, 80% whole foods and, and give yourself 15, 20% to not have these, you know, rigid food controls.

I, I get.

And that's with everything.

So I, I was thinking that that kind of relates to the whole studies about habits. So habits is something we use not to have to make decisions all the time. And in a way, for instance, if you all the time are being kind of in front of you, you make the decision, should I eat a donut or not today? Or croissant, whatever is, is, is your evil, your poison, then it's gonna wear you down. I mean, one thing might wear you down and the only solution there is, yeah, okay. Don't put anything in front of me. No, I mean, you cannot really choose that, but you can create habits that allows you not to make those choices. I mean, like, that's a little bit of where you can create good habits that allows you to follow a little bit of a healthier path.

Because I know I've done some personal training with people, and, you know, like, I think the first thing is you always never kind of thing, and then you're good for a couple of days and then you have some family or obligation, you have a donut and your whole life is ruined and then you have this guilt and you can go off your intentions from there.

Yeah. So I guess you're going to maybe talk about in the next book, food is social too. I mean, there's a lot of things linked with that donut that somebody offers you. Somebody offer you a donut, saying no to that is hard and it has cost. It doesn't mean that you should necessarily accept it, but it means that, you know, it's not that easy to disavow from or to kind of disengage from all of these connections. And neither should we completely.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, and that talks about what we were talking about before. You know, how do you live this life in the world we live in? There has to be some flexibility. And I think, Kendall, you were saying at the beginning not to be down on ourselves.

Yeah.

When we're not doing these things. I, I think people who actually want to change and, and have these high lofty ideals are much harder on themselves than anyone else because, yeah, you know, they're like, oh, I ate a donut, now I have to go run 3 miles. You know, when actually, you know, you just ate a donut, just don't eat, eat one tomorrow or make, make a different choice.

Yeah.

You know, Don't walk by the common room on your way to the bathroom because there's always donuts sitting there. You know, walk the other way.

Sorry. One thing I always thought was kind of interesting was some writing I've done like this. Every holiday season, most every magazine has something about holiday weight gain, you know, and maybe your Christmas dinner or your Thanksgiving dinner is 2, 3, 4,000 calories, but you don't eat generally that many calories in a meal or in a day other than those days. But I've, I've met a lot of people and they feel like they gotta punish themselves or this feeling of guilt or like you said, yeah, I'll eat like that every day.

It, it is tricky I think because reality is that we, as you explained very well, we are social beings. We are best sleep better together in groups actually. I think that's in your book as well. We eat together. That is something we do less, at least in this country. I've been actually quite shocked culturally by how people don't eat together. This is only from Europe to here. Because I think that, and I might be wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong, it's something every society since the beginning have been doing. And this is the first time we are not eating together. It's an important social thing.

It is. Well, and it also goes back to how we used to have food. We used to share food.

Yeah.

That's how we would all come, you know, everyone would come together as a group and what did you get today? What did you get today? And they'd share it. And like you said, you were astute in thinking that this is something we address in the later books. Yes. I mean, food is a huge thing that people use, the cultures use to celebrate. Not only just to be together every night, but, but to celebrate the, you know, what nature gives— gave them, celebrate life, celebrate all kinds of things. And food's a central part of that. So I agree that we need to keep a lot of those things in our lives.

You mentioned that modern work is out of sync with our evolutionary design. Can you talk about how adopting an in-the-present-moment mindset can enhance our work-rest balance, and what should we understand from that overall thought?

Yeah, well, I think, so being in the present moment, this is something that I think is a thread that kind of goes through the whole book. And it's because we don't live in the present moment. We are not aware of the cues our bodies give us. We are not aware of the things that are going on around us. And we used to be in an immediate return economy, and that means We're hungry, we'd go get it, we'd eat it. We get our return immediately. We're tired, we go to bed. You know, we actually have this concept of time that's more circular instead of linear. But when the agricultural revolution came, we now changed into a delayed return economy. Plant the seeds now, harvest 6 months later. Do the work now, collect the paycheck at the end of the month. So time became very linear. And we became very future-oriented. And so we became so future-oriented, or, and some people are very past-oriented. They can't let things go that happened, or they have so much anxiety of things that haven't happened yet or may never happen. Being able to be present and in the moment was really helpful for lowering your stress. I mean, that's such an easy thing. Well, mindfulness is such a popular practice because it lowers your stress. And if you lower your stress, you can decouple what you're working on from the future. Like, okay, if you're so stressed about this deadline that you can't even write, you can't even get started, then of course you're, it's gonna be a struggle until the deadline. But if you can decouple yourself from the future and be like, okay, what do I have to do now? What is the most important task that I do now? That will be very helpful in your work by focusing on the task at hand. So you're not overwhelmed looking at the entire list of things to do. You're just in the present doing what you have to do right now. Does that make sense?

Yeah. I mean, like it's, I've been reading a lot about stoicism also. And one of the things I can't remember was Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. He talks about how I feared most things that often never occurred. But you know, if you can, like you said, to live in the moment and Kell, was there something related to work that you were thinking as well?

Yeah, so as you say in your book, or write in your book, the— Prince Keynes, when he wrote, I think just after the war, Second World War, he kind of talked about if what he thought is going to be the future of work. And he basically predicted that we are going to spend a lot of time in leisure. Because productivity was increasing, and given maybe a productivity increase of 1 or 2, even, even 1% per year, our time should allow us to do that. Now, we have had the productivity at least 30 years after the war, but then maybe you've been falling down a little bit, but it's still been kind of every year on average a productivity increase. Yet we just work more, and that's a puzzle. And it was also picked up by Graber about his very pointy-cold book, Bullshit Jobs. His idea is really that a lot of jobs are there just to kind of doing nothing, really. And so what we are actually measuring as productivity increase might not be correct, but also that we are kind of so used to working that maybe We don't even have the imagination to take leisure seriously. Maybe you have some comments on that and how we can solve it.

Yeah. Well, I think our culture, it's not necessarily a unique American culture, but I think the American culture is spreading. But we have this individualistic, I can do things by myself, kind of a little bit of a meritocracy. The people who are successful are the people who work hard. So we have this mindset that the people who work hard, the people who are successful, the people who make a lot of money have the most worth. And so we are— it trickles down that, okay, well, now we have to work for work's sake. We don't work to meet our needs. We work for status. You know, we work to pay our bills, but we also work to buy things that we think that we need, you know? And so I feel like we're getting on this, this treadmill of work for work's sake, when really, if we can simplify our lives, we will, you know, not buy as much stuff, not need as much stuff, be able to work less because we don't need as much money. We don't need that status. If we can disassociate our worth as human beings, if we can disassociate from what we do rather than who we are, I think that'll help our mindset to realize that work for the work and sake of work, we're just spinning our wheels and burning ourselves out. And you're like, for what? You know, are we spending more time with our family? No, we're spending less time with our family. Are we enjoying being alive? Are we going on vacations? Are we, you know, getting together with friends and drinking coffee, you know, too late in the day? So you can't sleep. No, we're not doing those things. In fact, people have leave that they don't take. They don't even take lunch breaks. They eat at their desk because they're afraid of this perception that they're not worthy or they aren't working as hard as somebody else. And so I really feel like— and this needs— this is something that kind of comes from the top down. The US is the only country that doesn't have any mandated leave. As a government, there's no mandated leave required for employers to give their employees. And you, you contrast that with European countries. And I mean, it's amazing. And I think Europeans actually take their breaks, they take their vacations, they're away for like a month at a time, you know, and it's mandated. I mean, it's not mandated, but they— it's required for people to have those kinds of time off.

Yeah, some of this problem is not only American, but some of these issues you mentioned are only American. For instance, the lunch break, that is not an issue in Europe. The vacation is taken, it's also mandated that the company give it to you. And if you don't take it, that's actually— the company has to give you that vacation. And it's at least a month and it can be taken in one go. I do think it helps a lot. It's one of the problems that a lot of economists are pointing to, to be kind of that economies are not doing as well in Europe, etc., etc. But I still kind of personally, I think it's the better system. I see the country where you see a stick, you said the exporting of this way of working to the world. You see that a lot in England because England, they do have some restrictions on, I mean, basically regulations about vacation, but it's not as much as in the rest of Europe. But I just read recently about American law companies coming in and taking over there in Britain. And you could just imagine what kind of work hours they are imposing. That's completely unseen. Amongst lawyers in Britain, and they also work hard. But, you know, the American lawyers come in and they work around the clock, absolutely to their death, nearly. And, you know, this is the competition that is happening in certain sectors, in the financial sector and in law in particular. But the bigger issue still is, in a way, the work and why we don't find— there's a puzzle why we don't find time, more time for leisure, if you want. But even leisure is kind of opposed to work. So maybe it's the way we're thinking about work.

Yeah. Well, if we bring this back to our ancestors, I talk about this in the book. So Keynes, when he was talking about productivity, he envisioned a world where you, where we would only work about 15 hours a week and then have leisure to do time. And people think that you know, the life of a hunter-gatherer was hard work all the time. It was brutal. And there were times when it was, but studies of our ancestors or hunter-gatherers who survived into modern times, they work at getting food so much less. They have actually met Keynes's prediction and they had no technology and nothing to make them more efficient. They were just the way that they saw that they integrated their life. And when they were working, they were telling stories, they were building things, they were dancing, they were, you know, celebrating. They were just living their lives. And so we have not evolved to work 80-hour work weeks. We have not evolved to sit in these chairs and look at a screen for 8 hours a day without any breaks. And so we talk a lot about how we used to work and how we work now and trying to bring some of the things that back into it. Because again, this is a culture, this is a system that we are working within. We are not getting support. There are some companies who are going to make— oh, the 4-hour— they know that— not the 4-hour, the 4-day work week. And they are finding that they're more productive and their employees are happier and they have less turnover. Um, but this is definitely something that people— you can't just say, oh, I'm not going to work on Fridays. We have to work within the system. Then it's a system that kind of needs to change. And like you said, the mindset needs to change.

There's another thing as well, is that, you know, my personal story is that I retired, but my work was— I mean, we worked hard in periods, but it's not like the 90-hour work week. It's also— but I think this is true for everyone— it did provide a lot of social network. So when I retired, I lost all the social network. I go into slump, okay? And that kind of— but with my blood pressure, for This is good. No, you take naps. But I was like a little bit too tired and maybe also depressed. And now thanks to this podcast, amongst other things, I mean, I'm kind of recouping, recovering some of that kind of activity. Also the network, I, you know, I'm kind of establishing that. But one of the issues obviously is also that despite the poison that maybe work is. It's the social network for most people.

Yeah. Well, that is something that we recommend trying to bring some of what our ancestors did into the workday because they always went out in groups. They gathered in groups, they hunted in groups, they laughed, they joked, they were together. And so I think I work from home and I've felt the same thing, Kettle, where I've, I really miss social interactions with my coworkers. So it's something that we have to logically, you know, make a decision, make a different decision. Okay, I'm gonna go to lunch with my friend. I'm not gonna work through lunch sitting here at my desk all by myself. So these are things that we just have to, we can change our behavior. The, the great thing about human beings is that we don't need our genes to evolve to change our behavior. We can use our intelligence and we can use our creativity and we can decide to change our behavior. And that's the good news. We just have to do it.

But it's kind of interesting. So what happened a little bit with the work from home thing is that these groups that kind of exist or existed in workplace are a little bit kind of suffering from that, and that's bad. But on the other hand, it allows you to have more time with the family, which is good. But those that don't have a family, maybe it's not so good. And loneliness, of course, is a big issue.

Oh yeah.

So, you know, you're a little bit damned if you do and damned if you don't here. I mean, it's in a way we are a little bit of in a, in a bind.

Well, I also think it's always a work in progress. You know, individual people have in different needs. So somebody who doesn't have a family, they need to find a social network that's outside of work. So it's an individualized thing. And I think again, we need to have people who are deciding to live a different way. Are going against the current. And so it's hard right now to find these other ways to be. And we need— more people need to start swimming against the current so the rest of society and corporations will be like, oh, we can help them somehow, rather than just go with the flow.

It's— yeah, that was one thing. Edel was working with one of the IMF, with the International Monetary Fund, was working to find ways to introduce mindfulness or to consider different— I mean, the whole thing, like, the whole world had to change without question, you know, once the pandemic started. And most people, the day before the pandemic started, wouldn't have considered working from home as an option. Then all of a sudden, it's, it's what you have to do. So how has the disconnection from nature affected our, our mental and physical health? And touched on some of this a little bit earlier, but And what kinds of things should we do or could we do to reclaim a more engaged relationship with nature and the outdoors?

Yeah, well, I like to say that we're the only species on Earth that doesn't live in our natural habitat because we did not evolve. We are the