Just as we have an obesity crisis, we also have an attentional health crisis. Though their presentation is different, a significant part of their underlying cause is the same, and some of the solutions are too.
Researchers use the terms evolutionary mismatch or dysevolution to describe situations in which our modern environments come into harmful conflict with our innate hardwiring.
Let’s start with obesity: For over ninety-nine percent of our species’ history, we lived amidst scarcity. The threat was not chronic disease or metabolic dysfunction, it was dying from starvation. As such, survival depended upon a few features that are still in our DNA. First, we are predisposed to eat calories whenever we come across them. Second, we are predisposed to conserve energy by being sedentary.
Back on the Savannah, life was about energy balance. But unlike today, the risk wasn’t too many calories, it was too few. We were highly active not because we were worried about our V02 max or blood pressure, but because our lives depended on finding and hunting food. We ate everything we could because the next famine was right around the corner. It’s our deep-seated programming, and it’s still within all of us.
Today, however, we live in a world where cheap and enticing calories are on every corner. The majority of us—save those in jobs requiring manual labor—don’t need to move our bodies much, if at all. The result is an obesity epidemic.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who simply exists in our food and activity environment and is healthy. The deck is too rigged against us. At the individual level, the only healthy way to navigate our modern food and activity environment is to develop principles, rules, and constraints.
We have heuristics such as go to the gym five days per week, get in at least 8000 steps per day, do one HARD workout per week, only eat fast-food once per month, never have ice-cream in the house, eat fruits and vegetables before a second serving of starch, only eat at restaurants on weekends, stick to a pre-planned menu of options for breakfast and lunch, and so on.
Rules around food and activity can be taken too far, and when they are, disordered eating and body dysmorphia are dangerous consequences. But in general, we need our individual rules or guidelines to navigate the modern food and activity environment. Simply going along with the default is not conducive to flourishing.
The same is true for our attention. Much like we explicitly develop nutrition and exercise plans, we desperately need to explicitly develop plans for our attention.
Early humans evolved to pay close attention to novel and exciting stimuli, and for good reason. On the Savannah, our ancestors who were constantly scanning their environments to avoid snakes and find food were the ones who lived to pass on their DNA. That DNA is still within each of us—only nowadays, instead of snakes and food, we have TikTok videos, “breaking news,” and emails. We also evolved to be socially conscious, because falling out of grace with the tribe almost certainly meant death. But back then, our tribes consisted of ten to fifty people who we knew well and who provided us with in-person feedback. Today, we put ourselves up for judgment in front of the entire internet, compare ourselves to airbrushed fiction, and get a constant stream of shallow (and often anonymous) feedback.
The result is that anyone who merely tries to exist in today’s attention environment—without any rules or guidelines—suffers from overload, the degradation of attention, and internet brain. We also suffer from increasing aloneness, not just because our digital devices replace time for more intimate connection, but also, as Derek Thompson recently pointed out on our podcast FAREWELL, because the stimulation of being online all day leaves us too exhausted to make plans or hang out.
If we don’t consciously protect our attention in today’s environment, it will almost inevitably go to shit.
Here are a few ideas:
- Carve out explicit times for deep-focus work where you are not connected to the internet and your phone is physically in another room. Do the same for deep-focus connection and perhaps for entertainment too.
- Commit to a deep reading habit, aiming for at least twenty-five minutes per day using physical books.
- Create no-go zones for digital devices, such as the bedroom or kitchen table.
- Put your phone in your glove compartment whenever you drive. Do not take it out at red lights. (This is basic safety, too.)
- Consider a “digital sabbath,” or an elongated period without the use of digital devices.
- Try mindfulness meditation.
- Create a no double-screen rule—e.g., when you are watching television, don’t have your phone with you.
- Try no phone runs or walks. Leave the device at home and see where your thoughts take you.
Your attentional health plan will look different than mine. Similar to food and physical activity, there is plenty of individual variation. But also just like with food and physical activity, if you don’t have any plan in place, if you just go with the flow, your attentional health will suffer.
And the quality of your attention shapes the quality of your life.
