Unhack Your Brain? What’s that about?
Living in the modern world is hard - and the struggle is real.
Our brains and bodies weren’t adapted for our modern lifestyles. In fact, our environment and our way of life is actively harming us. It’s making us physically sick, it’s making us stressed and anxious, and it’s literally affecting our brains.
We are complex biological machines, driven by electricity and neurochemicals. We are powered by a smart digestive system and we have a sophisticated sensory system to tell us what’s going on both inside and outside our bodies. Our nervous systems are more complicated and high precision than any machine ever built, with nearly a hundred billion neurons and perhaps five hundred trillion synapses, each controlled by the actions of just a few molecules and electrical impulses of a few millivolts.
But we’re getting hammered from every direction: our food, our sedentary lifestyles, the flood of political propaganda, relentless consumerism, pollution, climate change, lack of community, hustle culture, unrealistic expectations, excessive medication, rising population, economic anxiety… the list goes on.
All of those stressors have real effects. The physical and mental systems that we rely on are largely unconscious and automatic, but they were adapted for a world that no longer exists. We’re responding to stress and stimuli in ways that worked just fine for tens of thousands of years, but now those instinctive responses frequently actively work against us. Our exquisitely balanced systems are becoming increasingly disrupted. We can’t think straight any more.
In other words, our brains have been hacked.
This isn’t just my opinion. It’s science.
For the last few years, I’ve been studying the science behind what’s happening to us. I took a neuroscience course from Harvard. I became a qualified neurolinguistic programming practitioner. I studied sleep, breathwork, diet, ecology, climatology, and genetics. And most importantly, I learned how our brains affect our bodies, and vice versa. I researched how meditation and mindfulness affects the physical structure of our brains and our production of neurotransmitters. Then I put all that together with what I learned studying anthropology at Cambridge.
At first, it was alarming. Then it became terrifying. We can detect and measure the effects of all the stressors I talked about above. We can see how our lifestyles and our environment are messing with the fundamental signaling systems that control our existence: dopamine, cortisol, leptin, serotonin, adrenaline, melanin, and other neurochemicals. We can see how our unhealthy habits are becoming increasingly hard-wired into our nervous systems. And we can see how those changes at an individual, molecular level are affecting our communities, our countries, and the whole world.
Everything I have learned has led me to one conclusion.
We have to unhack our brains.
Maybe we can’t change the world, but we can change ourselves.
But here’s the good news. Once we’re aware of what we’re facing, we can choose to do something about it.
The better news is that the solutions don’t have to be complicated, expensive or risky. In fact, they’re often very simple and straightforward. (That’s not the same as easy, of course. Actually doing these things can be extremely challenging, especially since you’re working with a brain that’s already been hacked.)
So here’s what you’ll find in this blog.
Your brain has been hacked: how the modern world is affecting our brains. Understanding the science behind what’s happening to us helps us to become aware of the impact of our lifestyle choices and make better decisions.
Talk yourself out of it: how to change the way we speak so that we can change the way we think. The most important thing I learned from NLP is that our choice of words has a huge effect on the way we perceive the world. Simply saying things in a different way can put us in a different frame of mind, which can reduce stress and anxiety.
Try this: lifestyle changes that can have profound effects on our mental and physical health. There are lots of little things we can do - or stop doing - that will make a big difference. I’m not preachy. I’m not telling you how to live your life, just offering up suggestions.
Think straight: simple mental exercises to reduce stress. Actively training ourselves to think differently can affect our unconscious reactions to stress, as well as our default behaviors and thought patterns. It takes practice, but eventually you can break through the layers of conditioning.
Let’s create a better world, one brain at a time.
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