How to stop judging yourself
Sometimes it can feel that there are a lot of things to feel bad about when it comes to our choices in our daily or weekly habits these days. Particularly at the start of a new year.
Maybe you feel horrible about your habit of eating a whole slab of chocolate, when you only meant to have two pieces
Or you see yourself as a failure when you choose to spend your whole Sunday on the couch, instead of going for that run you said you would
Or we judge ourselves for watching the latest gossip-fueled reality show and wondering why we can’t turn it off
Whilst all of these are likely choices that we can control, what makes this process more complicated is that often there is something within that’s working against us.
We live in an age of evolutionary mismatches, and figuring out how to unmatch them is something we’re all having to learn to do.
But, like learning anything, the first step is becoming aware of what’s going on.
So, what is an evolutionary mismatch?
Over hundreds of thousands of years, evolution has given us many of the advantages that have led to humans becoming the dominant species on this planet.
We’ve evolved to learn how to tell stories, which gave us the ability to create language and effective communication, and thereby build things like road, cities and various technologies.
We’ve evolved to develop societies, which allowed us to cooperate and achieve more together.
We’ve evolved to create tools, which gave us the power to harness agriculture and nature’s resources.
These processes have occured over tens of thousands of years. And they worked really well for us for most of that time. In fact, if you track that progress all the way through history, they lead us directly to the modern advances that we all enjoy today. Running water, life-saving treatments in hospitals, electricity, the internet, increasing the availability of food and shelter; you name it, our evolutionary instincts have played a role in carving out the lives we have today.
But a lot of our recent significant and major advances, particularly in technology and food access, have happened incredibly quickly. In fact, new technologies and the way in which we consume food would be unrecogniseable to someone born only 100 years ago.
That’s the blink of an eye on the evolutionary scale.
And what’s that meant is that we’ve created these huge mismatches between what previously worked exceptionally well for us for many, many years in terms of evolution, and the current state of the modern world.
The software of our bodies and minds in many cases is still designed to operate as though we’re still wandering making our initial ventures into agriculture and establishing small villages.
But our modern world doesn’t really take that into account. It tries to ignore this fact and push it to the back of our minds. Until our minds and bodies push back.
We’ve created entirely new ways of being that are at odds with what previously worked so well for us.
It’s like someone placing you in the middle of a unknown crowded city at night laden with bright lights and massive skyscrapers all around. Your task is to navigate yourself to a certain place using the stars, and you’re only given a compass. 100 years ago, in this same place, you might have had a chance, but in this modern city, in these conditions, you can’t even see the stars, let alone use them. You end up hating the compass and the ideas of stars, thinking of them as useless tools because they can’t help you.
But in this case, it’s not the tool or the instinct that’s wrong. It’s that the circumstances we’re trying to use them in are mismatched.
However, if we view our circumstances differently, the tools can still prove incredibly useful.
How to turn evolutionary mismatches into useful tools for physical & mental health
Powerful evolutionary benefits have helped us across 4 key areas that we can still benefit hugely from today:
Physical Fitness
Diets
Being part of a community
Finding meaning or purpose
These areas can often be the cause of feelings of anxiety in a lot of people when we feel like we are failing in them. And that’s understandable, because they’re hugely important to our overall well-being.
But ‘failing’ in them might have more to do with evolutionary mismatches than you think.
And once you understand that, you can find create a plan to correct them in ways that work for you.
Physical fitness
When we lived as hunters and gatherers, or even more recently in the agricultural and industrial revolutions, much of what we did in order to produce things to survive involved a lot of hard work. A lot.
We were in some form of constant exhaustion. Therefore, it made sense for us to really value comfort when small windows of opportunity opened themselves up.
And that deep-seated desire to seek comfort still exists in us today.
But for many of us, we spend our days sitting in chairs, within comfortable settings, bashing out emails. Whilst this work might be difficult, it isn’t physically demanding in any way that our evolutionary history prepared us for.
We have a mismatch. We’re conditioned for regular physical toil, but we’re filling our lives with comfort.
Physical mismatch correction: resist the comfort urge whenever you can. Sweat every day.
Your body was made to move. Modern day living wants you to stay still.
Fight the mismatch.
Diets
The vast majority of us have a deep love for sugary and fatty foods. We can’t resist chocolate, or pizza, or full-fat Coke. It feels great ton consume them, but we admonish ourselves afterwards, regretting our self-discipline for not being able to resist. We see it as a failure, rather than the mismatch it truly is.
Back in historical days, when food was scarce, our preference for high-calorie stuff was a survival advantage. It meant we could store some much needed energy because we would undoubtedly need it the next day when we had to hunt or trek for miles to gather resources.
But in a world where there's a pizza place on every corner and sweets at every occasion, our bodies still crave those high-calorie foods even when we don't need them as much.
You’re not being weak for wanting sugary foods, it’s simply an evolutionary mismatch. Unless you’re running a marathon every couple of days, you don’t need them. But your ancient bodily instincts don’t know that.
Dietary mismatch correction: allow yourself to satisfy the craving, but only in a small amount.
Treat one bite of chocolate as a reward and a way to quieten your ancient inner worrier who stresses about his energy reserves.
And as you do, remind yourself that you don’t need all that energy to sit on your couch.
Being part of a community
Gossipping has developed a hugely damaging reputation in the era of reality television and dubious news on social media. And rightly so in many cases.
But we cannot forget that the instinct to gossip used to give us huge benefits. So wanting to engage in it isn’t something to berate ourselves over.
Picture our ancestors living in small groups where everybody knew each other. Gossip was like social glue – it helped keep everyone in line. If word got out that you couldn’t be trusted, your role in the group would be threatened and you faced the grave threat of being isolated and left to fend for yourself.
Gossip was a self-correcting behaviour that improved the overall welfare of the group.
But in today's world, where information spreads faster than wildfire through social media, our gossip instincts can sometimes cause more harm than good. Gossip can still aid us, and the instinct isn’t wrong, it’s just mismatched to the amount of it we’re exposed to today.
Community mismatch correction: question the source of gossip carefully before acting.
In smaller groups, gossip may hold more sway. But in a global village, we must be more vigilant about the sources we choose to place our trust in.
Finding Purpose
Because so much of what we previously did on a daily basis led to a directly valued outcome, it was easier to find purpose in what we did. If we toiled all day in the fields for months on end, we produced food for our village and that gave us an important role. Therefore, it felt intrisically purposeful.
But today, when we graft away at a spreadsheet for days on end that simply gets lost on the company’s sharepoint or in someone’s inbox, we don’t see a direct benefit. The gap between our efforts and our value grows larger.
And we end up feeling hopeless and purposeless as a result. And, therefore, we don’t have an immediate sense of our role within our groups. Much of modern day work has designed out the direct link to purpose by not offering a clear way to view what you do as adding value to the groups you care about.
Purpose mismatch correction: use this mismatch as an alarm to re-evaluate what gives you purpose, and do more of that.
We can no longer rely on our way of life simply providing us with purpose. We must create it for ourselves.
Give yourself a break
Too many of us view our ‘failures’ today too deeply, and too personally. Not finding physical motivation, or wanting to eat something sugary, or wanting to share a little tidbit with a colleague can very often be rooted in evolutionary mismatches rather than fundamental flaws.
They’re not always failures, or signs that you can’t do what you think you ‘should’ be doing. More often, they’re ancient signals that need updating for our modern world.
They don’t always represent the worst sides of ourselves, but they should be alarms to the fact that we need to be aware of and correct the mismatches we know exist.
Whilst we might not always be to directly blame for our somewhat less desirable impulses, we are always responsible for them.
Life is a set of choices. Make them meaningful in ways that matter to you.