METHOD III: EVOLUTION THERAPY
According to professor of psychiatry Witte Hoogendijk (Live like a Beast, 2017) we should learn to live like an animal again. With a better evolutionary understanding and the right tools, we can turn our conditioned and often unhealthy behaviour in relation to our environment back into animalistic ‘healthier’ behaviour. He proposes to call this impetus for behavioural change “evolution therapy”. Something for which you have to (learn to) make good use of your brain and your reward system.
You must first accept that much cannot be changed, because our body is formed in the course of a long evolutionary process. With that result you have to do it, you don’t have another body. But with your way of life you exert influence every day on that result of your genetic, biological and psychological predisposition.
One of the most important mechanisms by which evolution has equipped everything that lives is the reward system. Where pain is the ‘punishment’ for life-threatening situations, pleasure drives organisms to the things that are good for them. To water, to food, to sex. The only problem is that homo sapiens can also artificially induce a good feeling. The nicotine from your cigarette, the alcohol in the beer. The first cigarette of the day targets the exact same brain systems as the first sip of water after a trip through the desert. But where the water saves life, the body can get sick from the cigarette.
So the reward system has 2 sides: on the one hand, it is evolutionarily outdated and causes us misery, because it makes us vulnerable to useless modern-time distractions in the form of creampuffs, cold glasses of white wine, fragrant Cuban cigars and likes on Instagram. On the other hand, we can use it smartly as an instrument that helps us to live more pleasantly and healthily. You can let your brain negotiate with your reward system and decide that there is nothing wrong with a fragrant Cuban cigar in its time, and not with a creamy cake either. They may give you a few bad substances or extra calories, but they also give you a lot of pleasure. in the end, it’s about the right dosage.
The key to evolution therapy is to turn temptation into reward, so that you give in to it less often and enjoy it more. This way you can change your lifestyle based on repeated reward. In the practice of health programs for people with cardiovascular diseases, for example, rewards are used in the form of points to be achieved in blood pressure measurement, counting steps and centimeters.
EVOLUTION THERAPY IN PRACTICE: LIVE LIKE AN ANIMAL
Hoogendijk explains evolution therapy as stimulating lifestyle change based on rewards. The stimuli are derived from the basic needs of every (mammal) animal: playing, moving, communicating, eating, sleeping, focusing and doing nothing.
1 – Play like an animal. All animals play, including humans. Especially playing outside is good, and especially moving play. And especially in a natural environment. If playing/moving outside is not possible, which often leads to 'winter depression' in the elderly, then another evolutionarily derived stimulus – such as light therapy – should be considered. Research has shown that light therapy has a positive effect on mood in depressed elderly people. The daily need for hanging, pulling up and climbing must also be taken into account when designing all living environments. Just as it has been done for other primates in the outdoor (and indoor) enclosures of zoos for some time. In some residential areas, 'tree climbing' has already made way for outdoor gymnastics equipment.
2 – Move like an animal. We all know that exercise is good against obesity, helps against high blood pressure, has a positive effect on mental well-being and lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes 2, depression, breast and colon cancer and cognitive decline. But unfortunately, preventive behavior is not in our nature, we have to learn it. In order to move enough, we have to use our brain and reward system with ease. The brain to think again and again why exercise is good again (not as little as a sloth and not as much as a leopard but in between), the reward system to stimulate that you actually carry out your good intentions. For some, moving together is the best stimulus, for others, devices like iWatch or Fitbit (with which you can see, among other things, how many calories you consume and how many steps you take) that keep sending you encouraging messages when you have achieved a goal.
3 - Communicate like an animal. For every animal, no matter how social, there is a limit to the size of the herd in which it feels pleasant. In homo sapiens, that limit is about one hundred and fifty. Communicating like a beast starts with defining the group of peers with whom you communicate. There should not be too few, but certainly not too many. Otherwise, an "information overload" quickly arises, an important cause of overstrain. Even though our brains can remember a lot, processing information takes time. Especially in an increasingly complex world, that time has not been given to us in all cases. The brain then falls back on instinct and intuition to come to a decision – and that can turn out to be quite wrong.
4 – Eat like an animal. Fat people are not characterless slackers but victims of the gaping gap between the environment they are built on and the environment as it looks today. Humans (and other beasts) have a strong tendency to be economical with their energy and not to exert themselves if there is no need for it. And that necessity has largely been banished in Western society. There are devices for everything. To face this mismatch between your evolutionary legacy and the new environment , you should NOT rely on your feelings, but you should use your brain and draw a plan: Know what you eat and measure what you eat.
5 – Sleep like an animal. In the West, people no longer sleep as nature intended. They generally sleep fewer hours and spread over fewer periods, namely one. Our way of life has disrupted natural sleep. Tribes of hunter-gatherers – whose lives have changed less drastically in the last few thousand years than ours – maintain a 'biphasic' sleep pattern; every afternoon everyone goes flat for an hour, a sleep pattern that we also see closer to home in warmer countries such as Spain and France. But also our 'normal' nightly sleep often goes differently than is biologically desirable. Artificial light, ringing alarm clocks, alcohol, blue light from the smartphone, psychological stress (worrying).
6 – Experience like an animal. Experiencing is living in the here and now and that is good for your sense of well-being. Those who are consciously engaged in something enjoy the activity more than those who only do half of things. But people don't naturally master the art of focusing well. Our brain loves distractions. With every distracting tinkle of the mobile, some dopamine is released, and dopamine is tasty. In a world wheresomething new is always offered, you get addicted to those dopamine shots all too easily. Those who want to become proficient in focusing can of course practice mindfulness or meditate. But reading (or having it read aloud) or listening to music are also great ways to be busy in the here and now. Although reading is a fairly unnatural activity, while reading you do make use of brain areas that were evolutionarily partly intended for reading nature: traces of a wild animal, the possibility of a place to sleep.
7 – Relax like an animal. To live like a beast, you have to make serious work out of doing nothing. Lummeling is extremely important for animals and vital in the long term. They know better than people when it's time to do nothing, and they take that time to the fullest. But people are not good at it. If people think they are doing nothing, doing nothing usually only concerns the body. The head goes on hard. Evolutionarily, after we had come out of the trees, we always surrendered muscle power for brain content (Desmond Morris, The naked ape, 1983). Where the brain of the average ape at birth is 70% of the final size and the remaining 30% is added in the six months after, our brain size at birth is only 23% of the total. Around the age of 25, the brain is formed, but the ability to learn new things persists throughout our lives. There is also our weakness there: the developed, increasingly curious brain does not want to do nothing, while doing nothing is very good for your brain. And the body does not want to move too much, but moving is very good for the body. So put the body to work and calm the brain down – with the help of your brain.