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
Well working out is not beneficial to survival, we didn’t need to lift weights to get stronger it would happen as a result of day to day activities as hunter gatherers.
Eating a lot is beneficial to survival because it increases our fat reserves aiding us in dry spells.
Your primal instincts don’t care about good habits as they are far more focused on short term gains.
because the kind of survival that our brain is trained for is short term “stay alive now and withing the next few days” kind of survival.
the goal is to keep your body fueled with energy and what ever else it needs, long term effects of things like smoking or consuming tons of alcohol are not of any consideration for the brain itself.
Not doing things that will hurt you long term requires you to make that decision and people are very bad at making decisions if the problem is far in the future.
Evolution doesn’t select for survival per se, more that it selects for survival until reproduction – and in some cases, like with humans, survival at least long enough to rear your children until they become self sufficient, or the evolution of social behaviors leading to community child raising.
Long term survival just wasn’t/isn’t an important trait. You can be pretty reckless with your health and fitness and still be fine well into your fertile years.
Things that are important are not “talents” but skills and habits that need to be developed. Other than basic things like feeling hungry, cold etc, your “brain” is not built in with knowledge and skills. Unfortunately skills and habits need time, focus and effort to master.
A ridiculous example: knowing how to read leads to better health because we can better follow instructions and avoid danger. But that doesn’t imply that people have brains that automatically know how to read.
Take for example the health problems around obesity. At the population level obesity causes major health problems, so why have we evolved so that we overeat?
For most of our evolutionary history we’ve lived in environments were food could often be scarce. Therefore eating a lot when food was available and storing the calories as fat was a good survival strategy – it meant people were less likely to starve in times of food scarcity.
The problem is that many of us now live in situations where food is never scarce. So we still have the drive to eat a lot, but we never use up the stored fat.
Humans are basically animals that have the ability to think critically and then disregard their instincts.
You may overlook the obvious fact that animals don’t eat 3 meals per day every day. Animals eat when they can because they’re unlikely to eat again for days in some cases.
Some animals overeat and carry the food back to their young in their belly to throw up for their pups. It’s entirely possible that humans used to do this for young children.
The same reason why this post exists. People are stupid animals, nothing more, nothing less.
to add to this, your brain has fine priorities, but only for life in some small tribe in a wilderness survival situation.
take for example diet: if food is scarce, eating as much as you can during times of plenty means you can go back on your reserves when starvation comes. only, starvation is probably never coming in our cases. in a similar vein, your body expects you to be forced to move around all day, maybe build with wood, do agriculture, hunt some animals, etc. so you are programmed to avoid extra strain if at all possible, which, if no physical labour is required for survival, manifests in lying around all day.
Because we’ve evolved to survive deficiencies, whereas modern day health problems come from abundances.
For example, we’ve evolved to preserve energy and save it up as much as possible, which is backfiring now that energy is too easily available, causing obesity, T2 diabetes, etc.
Another example is the kind of food we seek. Fat, sugar, and salt are all important for our survivor, and they are much rarer in nature, so we’ve evolved to seek them out. Nowadays, we have too much of them for our body to handle, causing problems.
Evolution is pretty loyal to the rule of “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” You don’t need to be in tip-top shape to find a partner and reproduce, especially with the tools and social structures we’ve built dramatically lowering the bar of how much work it takes to survive, so your brain is good at settling down once things are “good enough” to avoid wasting time and energy.
Latest Answers