Why is it hard for most people to eat healthy or get good sleep or even workout if ultimately this will be good for our health and survival ?
In: Biology
Our instincts are geared toward traits that made us more likely to survive 10,000 years ago. Our environment has changed significantly since then but evolution hasn’t quite caught up yet. If you go over habits that are “unhealthy” today you’ll find that for the most part they made perfect sense back then.
Why do we love salt, fat and sugar so much? Because salt is rare in nature, and fats and sugars are high-density energy sources. When you’re struggling to get enough food they are excellent for survival. It’s only in the past hundred years or so that we have so much access to it that it becomes a problem. In addition, a lot of junk food consists almost entirely of the stuff that our bodies associate with high nutrition because they’re often found together in nature, but without the actual nutritional value that we need.
Why are we lazy? Because activity costs energy, and again, up until recently we were operating on a tight energy budget. Our bodies want to conserve fuel unless we push them not to. “Exercise” wasn’t really a thing in the distant past because we needed to perform a lot of physical activity to survive at all. Today we don’t and our bodies haven’t caught up to the change.
Stress is basically a result of our bodies reacting to pressure in the way that they would have reacted to pressure in the wild. Back then, the reason you’d be under stress is because there were dangers nearby, and it would be a bad idea to sleep since you’d have to be ready to fight. Today, staying awake and being ready to fight isn’t really a good solution to our problems, but it is the only way our body knows how to react to trouble, so we have to fight against that natural impulse and use our brains to take more useful steps.
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