A Glitch in Our Psychology Could Explain Why We Rarely Do What is Best For Our Health
Your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about.
Lack of motivation to choose health promoting options remains one of the most puzzling contradictions about human psychology.
There is an attractive simplicity to the notion that we choose to do what is best for us. We assume that we are logical decision-makers, and that with sufficient knowledge and information we will make choices that best serve our interest and our survival. Unfortunately, it is simply not true.
Why are we so bad at making the right decisions when our future is at stake? Is it lack of motivation, poor insight, or perhaps a glitch in our psychology?
Predictably irrational
Most of us live as if the future does not matter. Even though we know it’s bad for us, we can’t stop smoking or eating junk food; we sign up at the gym for a yearly membership and stop going after a month; we can resist anything except temptations; we procrastinate; we are reluctant to put away money for our retirement; we give up easily in the face of frustration or obstacles, and we’re less likely to try to prevent long-term challenges like climate change.
Behavioral economics has already debunked the myth that people are rational by showing that many cognitive biases are at play. As psychologist Dan Ariely has showed in his bestseller, we are Predictably Irrational.
Motivating the unmotivated
Many people are not motivated to engage in health-promoting behaviors, despite knowing that those could confer important health benefits. Physical activity, eating a healthy diet, not smoking, drinking alcohol in moderation are activities that can lead to a 11–14 year delay in all-cause mortality.
An analysis of the health behaviors of thirty-five thousand adults across the United States was published in the American Heart Association journal. Most of the participants didn’t smoke, about half reached their weekly exercise goals, and about a third of the population got a pass in each of the other categories — except diet. Their diets were scored on a scale from zero to five to see if they met a bare minimum of healthy eating behaviors, such as meeting recommended targets for fruit, vegetable, and whole-grain consumption or drinking fewer than three cans of fizzy drinks a week. How many even reached four out of five on their Healthy Eating Score? About 1 percent.
We eat almost as if the future doesn’t matter.
Motivating individuals presents a significant challenge to public health practitioners. Very few strategies are effective in promoting behavior change in individuals with little or no motivation to change. Most social psychological theories applied to health behavior change assume that individuals have a certain motivation for change, and have focused on attempts to convert motivation into action. Goal setting, self-monitoring, action planning are all strategies that focus on harnessing motivation and promoting action in those already inclined to be motivated to change.
But what about motivating the unmotivated? How can we possibly not be motivated about the things that affect our health and longevity?
Our future selves are strangers to us
A neurological glitch could explain our lack of motivation concerning our future.
Recent research has focused on how perceptions of the self over time can dramatically affect decision making. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies suggest that when you imagine your future self, your brain does something weird: It stops acting as if you’re thinking about yourself. Instead, it acts as if you’re thinking about a completely different person.
Here’s how it works: When you think about yourself, a region of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, powers up. When you think about other people, it powers down. And if you feel you have nothing in common with the people you’re thinking about the MPFC activates even less. The further out in time you try to imagine your own life, the less activation you show in the MPFC.
Your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about.
This “glitchy” brain behavior makes it harder for us to take actions that benefit our future selves both as individuals and as a society. The more your brain treats your future self like a stranger, the less self-control you exhibit, and the less likely you are to make choices that could help the world in the long run.
Evolution is at play
To make matters worse, 300,000 years of Homo Sapiens evolution seem to have hard-wired behaviors that favor the present and ignore the future.
Our ancestors were mostly concerned about daily survival strategies. For millenniums humans had little to no business thinking about their future self. Life beyond the next day was uncertain. Humans became physiologically hard-wired to gorge on fat and sugar for fuel whenever food was available, and efficient at storing energy when food was scarce — which was often. Our ketogenic system was designed for scarcity. We use energy stored away in the liver and adipose tissue and convert it to glucose for fuel.
It seems obvious that the utility of those evolutionary traits are a lot less relevant today. Today, we are almost never in survival mode, most of us in the western world eat up to four or five times a day, and everything is plentiful to the point of excess.
How not to die
What do these findings tell us about our modern relationship towards heath promoting behaviors, and especially our diets?
In his bestselling book “How Not to Die”, Dr Greger, founder of nutritionfacts.org, explains that there may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of over 42,000 autopsies, centenarians — those who live past one hundred — were found to have succumbed to chronic diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined. Though most were perceived, even by their physicians, to have been healthy just prior to death, not one “died of old age.”
Most death related diseases are chronic illnesses that are lifestyle-related and take decades to develop — such as cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, and cancer. We’re living longer, but we’re living sicker.
Science shows that most deaths are preventable and are related to how we live. But symptoms of these chronic conditions can stay silent for years, and our philosophy towards prevention is mostly “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
“No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.” — Old Sephardic Wisdom
It’s probable that the neurological glitch that affects the perception of our future self may be linked to an evolutionary trait and makes us prone to disregard the impact of our lifestyle on our health in a distant future.
Carpe diem, or “seize the day” may be bad advice for health and longevity. Chronic diseases are the consequence of all the poor lifestyle choices we have made over decades by dissociating with our future self. However, each of us has been granted free will and we can choose to live in denial if we wish.
As Woody Allen puts it “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
My personal take is that motivation strategies are overrated. You can only help who is already self-motivated. Our modern lifestyles are defined by abundance and we should start by questioning whether our choices are made at the expense of our future selves. Enjoyment does not have to be incompatible with frugality. In ancient Greece, Epicurean philosophers emphasized the pursuit of true pleasure by promoting a simple and frugal life.
When we choose to indulge in behaviors that are known to be detrimental to our health, we should remind ourselves that we are using up our health credit, and start thinking about being accountable to our future self.
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