How your environment impacts you
You can’t understand your environment without taking into account your genes
As a genetics professor, I talk a lot about the role of genes in everything from child behavior to addiction and mental health, mostly because that’s the part that’s often overlooked, that people aren’t talking about. But that doesn’t mean that the environment doesn’t play a critical role as well. It absolutely does.
About half of the differences between people — whether we’re talking about how risk-taking or impulsive or anxious or conscientious people are — are due to differences in the DNA sequences they were born with, and about half is due to differences in our environments.
But here’s the piece I think is really interesting: You can’t understand the way your environment impacts your life without taking into account your genes. In other words, genes and environments don’t act alone when it comes to human behavior and growth. DNA sequences in a petri dish don’t spontaneously generate human beings; that DNA sequence needs an environment (a mother’s womb) to grow. Conversely, the environment is different for each of us depending on our DNA. That’s why my husband and I can walk outside, at the same time to the same temperature, and I think it’s freezing, and he thinks it feels great. Same environment, but we’re different people, with different wiring, so it affects us differently.
This means it doesn’t actually make sense to think of the environment and our genes as separate things that impact us. They are intertwined and inseparable. Nature versus nurture was a silly debate. You can’t understand one without the other. Which is why when we talk about wanting to make a change, it’s unfortunate that we often focus only on the environment; we’re ignoring the other critical half of the puzzle — the role of our genes in understanding our environment.
So, let’s unpack the environment a bit more with that in mind.
Some environments are random — for example, whether we experience a natural disaster like a hurricane or a tornado, or maybe even if we get hit by a car. But most environments don’t just happen to us. You don’t just wake up and discover you’re in a library, or a bar. We play a role in choosing our environments, and our genes are involved in those choices. So, people who have a love of reading, or who enjoy quiet spaces, are more likely to spend time at the library. And people who are more predisposed to be extraverted, are more likely to enjoy being at parties or bars. Maybe that car accident wasn’t just because someone randomly hit you; maybe you’re a risk-taker and you were speeding. Our genetic predispositions influence the environments we find ourselves in, and then those environments further shape us. It creates a feedback loop between our genes and our environments.
Not only that, the way we respond to certain environments — including other people in our lives — is shaped by our genes. This why something your child does that drives you crazy, may not be a big deal to your spouse. Or, you may have a co-worker that you can’t stand, but your friend thinks they are great. Same person, difference experiences due to our own unique wiring and how it interacts with that person’s wiring. And on an even larger scale, these differences in how we respond to the environment are part of the reason why some people can just bounce back from stress or adversity, and others may experience depression. Or why some people can drink socially, but for others, alcohol use leads to addiction.
Our genes impact the environments we seek out, and the way we respond to different environments. So yes, the environment is a critical influence in our lives, but you actually can’t disentangle the environment from your own genetic wiring. And that’s why it’s so important to understand our dispositions. Because by understanding our natural tendencies we can start to break cycles that aren’t working for us.
It turns out that the objective environmental events that we experience (parental divorce, trauma, discrimination, poverty, parenting, etc.) are often less important than the way we experience them, from our own unique perspective. That leads us to the very best part: there are lots of pieces of our environment, and our life histories, that we can’t change, but we can work on our reactions to them. And that means change is possible.
Visit my website at danielledick.com for free resources, check out my new book The Child Code for parenting tips and tricks, or follow me on social media at Dr. Danielle Dick, for more information about how understanding genetics can help you in your parenting, relationships, health, and wellbeing.
