Why Your Ancient Body Rebels Against our Hyper-Novel and Dysfunctional Society

You’re not unfulfilled, anxious, or depressed —you’re an animal in a culture obsessed with the machine.

Do you ever feel a vague sense of wrongness about our culture and its seeming trajectory? For many people, this perception translates into what we might call depression or anxiety.

The problem is that the solutions offered by mainstream culture — anti-depressants or commercialized “self-care” — often aren’t so different from putting a bandage over a hand still punctured by glass. They help you contend with the surface-level manifestations of the problem but don’t relieve their true source.

If you accept mainstream solutions to your suffering, you might spend an entire decade drinking wine in a bathtub while attempting to silence the nagging resentment that comes from a life that isn’t working.

Worse, you can end up a life-long customer of an industry that considers sexual dysfunction, weight changes, and emotional blunting necessary collateral damage in a war on a “broken” brain.

There’s a better way.

Evolutionary Mismatch: A Non-Pathologizing, Robust Explanation for Human Suffering

When a person complains of depression or anxiety to a doctor, they might prescribe antidepressant medication. At best, this represents an incomplete solution to the problem. At worst, it only intensifies it.

After reading books like Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, my understanding is that the long-term, corrosive effects of these drugs radically outpace any initial short-term benefits.

The book documents the disturbing trend that as rates of antidepressant use increased in the U.S., rates of disability went up in lockstep. If these drugs worked, we’d see the opposite.

Compared to people who don’t get “treatment,” the book showed that individuals who take anti-depressants are less likely to ultimately recover.

But the perspective I’d like to present isn’t dependent on whether these drugs work. The real problem with antidepressants is that they presuppose the dysfunction lies with the individual, not with society or the current large-scale predicament humans face.

Similarly, classic forms of self-care — spending your nights in candle-lit bathtubs or complaining about your problems over social media — might temporarily give you relief from stress. But when you confront suffering this way, you only contend with the side effects of a dissatisfying life rather than confronting and ending the problem.

While there’s nothing wrong with finding modes of relaxing or relieving stress, it’s often better to address the problem directly, not just relieve the stress that comes with it. Like antidepressant medications, self-care often becomes a way of overlooking or numbing the signs of a problem while it rages on in the background.

A non-pathologizing, overarching explanation for human suffering — and with the many forms of unrest in our society — is the evolutionary mismatch theory. The idea is that humans have non-negotiable diet and lifestyle needs as a result of the timescale on which evolution proceeds.

Because it takes hundreds of thousands of years for our genes to adapt to environmental shifts, humans thrive when their daily lives mirror dietary and lifestyle patterns with the most extensive history.

The average person’s lifestyle is full of mismatches, but I’ll focus on three: diet, movement, and (loss of) community.

Processed foods: Information the Body Can’t Use

The Standard American Diet (SAD) causes dysfunction from at least two perspectives. On the one hand, omega-6 fatty acids overwhelm the SAD diet thanks to the ubiquity of processed seed oils found in most processed or restaurant foods.

For optimal health, we need a delicate balance between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. According to functional medicine expert Chris Kresser, our ancestors ate a ratio of about 3:1 (with omega-3s outpacing omega-6s), while Western diets range from 10:1 to 20:1, favoring omega-6s.

Thanks to our reliance on packaged food (and that most restaurants rely on cheap, low-quality, omega-6 dense oils to create their foods), the average SAD consumer is drowning in omega-6s.

Since our bodies don’t know how to use these oils as proper fuel, they lead to excess free radical production, driving inflammation, a root cause of depression and other health issues.

At the same time, our diets are incredibly homogeneous, revolving around processed sugar and wheat.

While there was never just one ancestral diet, humans around the globe all relied on natural foods (fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, fish, and meat) and a diversity of options.

Conversely, our modern food supply revolves around a few key ingredients. As a result, the microbiome — the collection of bacteria, fungi, viruses (etc.) that keep us alive— is full of redundancies and bereft of the diversity that, for hundreds of thousands of years, kept our health robust.

Movement: The Original Elixir

Earlier humans spent most of their time foraging for their resources, in motion, outside, and under the sun. In the last 200 years, we’ve become indoor creatures who occasionally go on walks or sit on park benches.

The problem is multi-fold. On one level, if you spend most of your day sitting down, anxiety or agitation may be a side effect of excess physical energy you’re not discharging.

Strangely, the culture that has arisen around our need for exercise — the emphasis on treadmills, weight lifting, and gym memberships — ironically intensifies the very problem it’s intended to solve.

Even if you run for about 30 minutes a day, pairing that exercise with six or more hours of sitting defeats its purpose.

Research in the Journal of Epidemiology found that a sample of 100,000 people who sat for more than six hours a day had a 40 percent greater risk of dying within 15 years than those who sat for less than three.

In this way, the focus on exercise as an isolated activity — rather than something integrated into our way of life — distracts from the real source of the problem: that we’ve adopted lifestyles centered on being motionless.

It would be better to integrate movement more deeply into our way of life, centering our work lives around walking and working, taking frequent dancing or stretching breaks.

Yet traditional health advice often focuses narrowly on exercise as its own separate end, without a conversation about how it can become fundamental to your way of being in the world.

The Lost Tribe: How a Fractured Social Environment Darkens the Mind

We were once inseparable from extended circles of family, friends, and neighbors. As living standards rose in the early modern and modern eras, we began flocking to single-family homes.

Of course, even more recently, we’ve become increasingly solitary creatures, and knowing your neighbor’s name has become a rarity.

Socialization isn’t just a nice-to-have luxury: it produces endogenous reward chemicals that regulate mood.

Collectively, we’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, yet if you look at the tendencies of people in shared public spaces — in waiting rooms, trains, and grocery store lines — they’re often bent over a screen.

Our internet-bearing devices are wonderful resources, yet they also interfere with emotion- and society-regulating processes that keep us psychologically balanced.

Seeking to correct the global mental health crisis with drugs doesn’t account for the far-reaching disruptions brought about by our technology.

But Humans are Nothing if not Adaptable, Right?

Humans have given birth to tremendous advancements, like the internet and space travel. Is it silly to assume we’d struggle to adapt to the consequences of eating bagels or staring at screens?

A central critique of the evolutionary mismatch theory is that humans have a robust ability to adapt to changes. But the problem is that our bodies are increasingly out of sync with a world that is changing at an alarming rate.

Our social lives run on digital platforms available for less than 15 years old. Yet we lived among extended networks of family and friends for hundreds of thousands of years.

We use plastic bottles, detergents, and soaps with industrial chemicals with unknown combined effects on our environment and body.

We’ve eaten natural foods like meats, fish, and vegetables since our beginnings. But many people live on inflammatory, processed oils only around since the early 20th century.

The problem doesn’t affect just the individual. It’s a mismatch that reverberates throughout the very structural bedrock of our culture. A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century frames this mismatch as a form of hyper-novelty.

“Humans are extraordinarily adapted to, and equipped for, change. But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society that is changing faster than we can accommodate is turning us into people who cannot fend for themselves.

Our species’ pace of change now outstrips our ability to adapt. We are generating new problems at a new and accelerating rate, and it's making us sick — physically, psychologically, socially, and environmentally. If we don’t figure out how to grapple with the problem of accelerating novelty, humanity will perish, a victim of its success.”

The great irony is that the resourcefulness and sophistication of our species have led to our creating far-reaching imbalances that threaten our survival.

When framed in this light, it’s clear that tools like antidepressants or commercial self-care are bandages at best and forms of gas-lighting at worst.

The reason many of us struggle with anxiety, depression, or even just chronic tension works its teeth into every human body currently on the planet.

When we numb this reality with bubble baths or prescription pills, we’re ignoring the source of our problems.

The truth is this: If we’re going to thrive in an increasingly chaotic, strange world, we need principles that support real vitality rather than paper over superficial layers of a predicament that haunts our entire species.

How to Use Evolutionary Mismatch Theory as a Map toward Immediate and Long-term Vitality

“The world is going to hell, and the only way it might not is if we cease to do anything to try and stop it.” — Alan Watts

Sometimes when people learn about evolutionary mismatch theory, it can become a new flavor of disempowerment. They think everything is toxic: our daily sitting, the food system, etc. Might as well just let go and enjoy life.

The problem is that people who aren’t interested in lifestyle optimization, at some point, usually seek out medical help to extinguish health-related fires. Yet this sets them up for a game of whack-a-mole. The conventional model focuses on symptom “management,” not reversing issues at their root.

When you focus on symptom management rather than root causes, it’s easy to assume your experiences have no meaning. From the conventional medical perspective, they’re just random neurochemical misfirings brought about by “bad genes” or “bad luck.”

Operating from this perspective, many people don’t see how their physical symptoms or distressing emotions can become optimization data they can use to transform their experience.

In her book Own Yourself, holistic practitioner Kelly Brogan describes mental and physical health issues as healthy responses to various traumas or environmental or lifestyle imbalances.

On the topic of the meaning behind what we might see as symptoms of illness, she writes:

“Distress is a gateway to change, an invitation to look at and fix what might be misaligned or out of balance.”

When you approach your symptoms as messengers, you exit a model of reality based on pointless accidents and enter a space of purpose and meaning. You begin to see suffering as helpful nudges. They become access points that help you re-align your life to find balance.

Here are ways you can use diet, movement, and mindset work to find equilibrium in the face of distress, whether you’re feeling anxious, discontent, or simply not as energetic or physically vital as you’d like to be.

Rather than being strict directives, these are overarching principles that can illuminate and mitigate the underlying sources of imbalance in your life.

Eat ancient foods.

There is so much contradictory advice about what to eat, leading many people to give up on diet optimization.

It’s also not rare for people to reflexively adhere to certain diet patterns based on ideology or their allegiances to thought groups. For example, when I see vegans eating veggie burgers, I get the sense that they’re blinded by their stance against meat.

Soy protein and processed seed oils abound in commercial veggie burgers, so while they may not be eating meat, they’re also not eating health foods.

Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) in processed seed oils create toxic byproducts when heated because they’re unstable fuel sources from a molecular standpoint.

When heating or re-heating these oils, they create trans fats and lipid peroxides, causing DNA damage and igniting chronic disease trajectories.

In Fat for Fuel, osteopathic doctor Dr. Joseph Mercola explains the corrosive effects of PUFAs like this:

“Poly” refers to the double-bonded atoms in their molecular structure. These double bonds are vulnerable to attack by free radicals, which then cause damage to the molecule. When you eat too many PUFAs, they are increasingly incorporated into your cell membranes.

Because these fats are unstable, your cells become fragile and prone to oxidation, which leads to all sorts of health problems, such as chronic inflammation and atherosclerosis.

The simplest, yet most potent guiding principle: Eat biologically compatible foods. When you eat grass-fed meats, berries, nuts, seeds, low-mercury fish, broccoli, and other whole foods, you know that your body has the machinery to digest and use them.

Rather than committing to a specific diet, just eat natural, earth-originating foods and drinks. You could say I’m recommending a paleo diet, but even that idea can bog you down with ideological commitments.

In Food Rules, author Michael Pollan recommends a principle I admire: eat quiet foods! In other words, the best foods won’t announce how healthy or protein-rich they are because they won’t have labels.

Of course, everybody is different, and it’s possible to go overboard on certain types of protein. But as a general principle, focusing on foods that your ancestors would have eaten helps minimize inflammation.

In addition to being at the heart of so many chronic diseases, inflammation and depression fuel each other. As a result, diet represents a way of optimizing your health as well as the moods and emotional experiences that guide your life.

Integrate movement into your daily experience.

When you exercise as an isolated activity, it’s easy to develop a super-egoic relationship with it. It becomes something you force yourself to do. It turns into a chore.

The solution is to integrate movement into everything you do and to connect movement with something that feels like play and pleasure. I’ve found a few ways to do this.

Because I’m a music lover, I’ll often dance to my favorite songs. It sounds simple, but its effects are profound. Dancing not only brightens my mind but builds a bridge between my desires for movement and my channels for self-expression, rather than being a means to an end for staying healthy.

This might not sound revolutionary. But wellness culture has programmed so many people to see exercise strictly as an isolated activity done in the gym. When you make it a natural outpouring of your life, it feels closer to the bone, and it brightens your spirit without an element of force or obligation.

Dancing to your favorite music, running, skipping, and walking in the sun, taking frequent work breaks for gardening or stretching, can help you discharge the excess energy that is an inevitable by-product of sitting for extended lengths of time.

Since being in the sun, especially in the morning, regulates the sleep-wake cycle, you can balance your sleep habits and maximize mental energy during the daytime if you exercise outside.

Another way to support your circadian rhythms and get more sun exposure is to do as much of your daily activities outside as possible. If you become a dweller of the outdoors who occasionally goes inside, you’ll be aligning with ancestral patterns.

Reading in the park, playing guitar on a bench, and stretching outside quickly improve your mood. But it may also help you feel more immersed in your neighborhood, leading to new connections.

Optimize your mindset.

I framed the absence of a tribe as another central source of discontentment and misalignment in our society. To settle this tension, I won’t tell you to seek out meet-ups or talk to people in line at the grocery store (though these might be worthwhile adventures).

Instead, I want to focus on a strategy that can improve every dimension of your life, helping you create meaningful friendships, find purpose-driven work, and make more money.

The most potent way to transform your life is to recognize how the information you consume enters your subconscious and programs your assumptions, beliefs, and worldview.

Your subconscious determines how you feel and whether your life becomes the materialization of your dreams or an exercise in boredom and broken aspirations.

Many books about manifestation directly or indirectly reference autosuggestion, the practice of repeatedly consuming information that program your subconscious for success.

Autosuggestion helps you unlock the power of podcasts and books. Rather than seeing them as a source of entertainment, something absorbed once and/or forgotten or returned to the library, they become tuning forks you can use to re-calibrate your state of mind over and over again.

If you habitually check social media or email first thing in the morning, you will feel astonished at the difference in your mood when you start the day with books that support your understanding of your creative power.

Every morning, I devote my first hour to explicitly programming my subconscious mind with uplifting material, as if it were prayer, meditation, or exercise.

Some of my favorite autosuggestion materials include:

• The Power of Awareness by Neville Goddard
• The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Slight Edge by Jeff Olsen
• The Yoga of Eating by Charles Eisenstein
• The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday

Though some of these books focus on wealth creation, that’s far from their only purpose.

By reprogramming your subconscious, these texts support the release of all kinds of blockages that separate from the experiences and results you want.

Re-calibrating your inner programming allows you to gain equilibrium in every dimension of your life — whether it involves forming relationships, changing your relationship to movement, or finding satisfaction in your work.

Autosuggestion will help you see books as constant companions that deliver fresh insights every. single. time. you return to them.

If you look around, you recognize we’re living in a bizarre and alienating period in world history. Thanks to the hyper-novelty of the environment, our bodies lurk within states of disequilibrium, leading to low-humming yet pervasive forms of suffering.

Fortunately, with a few foundational principles, you can create inner shifts that support physical vitality, emotional balance, and psychological freedom.

These principles are more robust than commercialized self-care or anti-depressants because they help reverse physical and emotional imbalances at their root.

In summary, focus on:

• Eating ancient foods
• Moving your foundation
• Optimizing your mindset

And you will have a toolset that brings focus to the coordinates you can optimize, rather than all that’s wrong or uniquely insurmountable about your circumstances.

If any of these suggestions resonate with you (or if you have other resources you want to share), leave a comment and let me know.

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