Consequences of our Environment Changing Faster than Our Survival Instincts

So the first problem with our guidance system is that our environment has changed faster than our programmed instincts have. This is what evolution is. I love the quote by Charles Darwin, who's well known as the expert in the field of evolution. It is not the strongest at survive, or even the most intelligent, but the ones that are most responsive to change in their environment. I added the change in their environment piece because that's obviously what he meant. Now, these old instinctual programs, if they're allowed to run untethered and unconsciously, can lead us to poor decision making and therefore, at a minimum, to a lesser fulfilled life and likely a premature death, as we'll see. We must adapt or literally die. We need to shine a light in these bugs in our programming so we can adapt. Okay, so we are programmed for survival, which is great, but we need to be aware of how that programming applies to to the environment we currently find ourselves in. Right? Our minds are running these survival programs that don't make sense for most of us in the current environment. For instance, we're programmed for food shortages, even though that's not really the case anymore, at least for most of us. We're still programmed for, and to be clear, that means having the desire to eat copious amounts of sugar, really sugar, whenever we can find it. We're programmed this way to get as many calories as we can, to get as heavy as we can. Because we were in danger of becoming extinct many times during our evolutionary path due to lack of food. This all changed. We gained control of our food supply due to the agricultural revolution in 8500 BC. So starvation for the greater population is no longer the case. But the motivational system for our brains programming still has not evolved to adapt yet to this change in environment. So we must be conscious of it and override these urges for now. Right. We need to create new wiring. We're also programmed to feel a lot of fear almost constantly. And for good reason. Why? Predators. We were constantly being stalked and eaten a lot over the course of human history, but not anymore. We were dinner. It's estimated that over 6% of our ancient ancestors were actually eaten by big predators. But our wiring still is in place for that. And that's why our sympathetic nervous system, our fight or flight response, continually goes off. We're constantly feeling fear even when there's no real physical danger. Fear F E A R False evidence appearing real right here again. The only thing we can do is be conscious of this wiring and override these urges for now. We need to create new wiring the second bug in the system is related to the first. For the last billions of years of the evolution of life, our brains were programmed for an immediate reward, or in other words, an instant gratification environment, as they should have been since that was the environment up until a very short time ago. Relatively speaking, the immediate return environment began when life began 400 billion years ago, and the immediate return environment started ending only about 500 years ago. That's like 0.01%, probably even more O's. Even though our brains have evolved over time, they're still about the same size they were even 200,000 years ago when we're still in immed in an immediate return reward environment. In this immediate return reward environment, the choices we made provided an almost instantaneous reward. For example, you searched for food and ate it right on the spot. As soon as you found it, yum. Or carnivore chased you and you got away. Celebrate or you search for a companion and you get the picture. Love the one you're with now. A really important part of the story here is that when we face stress in an immediate return environment, it usually went away quickly. That was the immediate return. We were chased and you're the got away or not. Either way would happen quickly. The stress wouldn't linger. It's bad when the stress lingers. We'll talk about that when we discuss our new environment. Now fast forward to our current delayed return or delayed gratification, or as I like to call it, long term fulfillment environment. Only relatively recently, in the last 500 years or so, have we moved to a predominantly delayed return environment. And as we've moved along that more recent timeline, the changes have increased exponentially. Think of how different the world looks now than it did just at the turn of the century. IPhones weren't even out at the turn of the century for almost another decade. I think it was 2007, 2008. So why is this important? Well, what happens when we don't get the reward immediately? Yet our brains are programmed to get it immediately. I'll tell you what happens. Stress. That's what happens. Remember that stress isn't always a bad thing. It's meant to serve a purpose. Yes, for survival. When we perceive some sort of threat, the hormone cortisol is released to provide you with valuable energy to use in an emergency fight or flight. But it must be used right away. We're not meant to stay stressed for long periods of time. If it's not used, your heart levels stay high, you get high blood pressure. It's a very long bad, bad list. So remember our example in the old environment, a wild animal gets chased, right? Goes into fight or flight mode, runs away and then is safe. And the stress hormones dissipate. Immediately it starts grazing again like nothing ever happened. In the new delayed gratification environment, what happens? We work hard, but you don't get your bonus, sometimes for a year. If you don't have the right mindset, this can be a long time for high levels of cortisol to be coursing through your blood doing its damage. Now what else happens when we don't get the immediate reward we're looking for? We seek other ways to get immediate gratification, even if it's not healthy for us. We binge eat unhealthy things. We might drink alcohol. That's also a long and healthy list for our minds and our bodies. So we need to adapt. So here are a couple of potential solutions and we'll discuss some more when we speak about emotions. Reprogram your brain. Right. Reprogram your brain to be satisfied with delayed gratifications. Be conscious or mindful that the reward will come later if we do that and if we do what we should be doing today. Now, another way to hack this is to set smaller goals that are less delayed. So you feel the short term gratification, right? Yes. Hack your brain. The key is to get your brain the feedback that it desires to let it know that you're moving in the right direction. Don't stress out. Give it some serotonin, for God's sake. Right. Stress can't live when you have a healthy dose of serotonin coursing through your brain.