Our environments and lifestyles don’t constantly affect our
emotions, temperaments, and brainpower.
Our environment and lifestyles constantly define them.
The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the people you interact
with, the things you do, the position you sleep in, all contribute to building
your biology. Whether or not you’re
inclined to believe in a transcendent personality or soul, temperaments,
emotions, reactions, energy, and brainpower all happen in this world as
biological phenomenon. You can’t feel
happiness without serotonin, you have no motivation without dopamine, you have
no energy without food, and you have no thoughts without neurons. There’s no escaping this.
Science has been and continues to discover things like how,
posture affects productivity, diet affects nervousness, light affects
happiness, and social contact effects concentration. But what our broader culture has not shifted
to yet is the idea that we don’t just have a static temperament that is then
effected individually by specific stimuli, but that our temperament itself is
defined by the constant input of environmental stimuli. They are who we are and they are what we
feel.
When you come to this conceptual knowledge, and pair it with the
individual scientific studies surrounding it, it’s incredibly empowering. Since we can control our environments and
lifestyles much more than our supposed unchangeable static personalities, we
can become smarter, faster, better people with the use of logic and reason,
instead of trying to trudge through the murky, unstable, and subjective waters
of theoretical psychological principle.
I.e. “Between the ages of three and seven, my mother showed me affection
by giving me food, now when I have an existential longing for love, it becomes
expressed as a craving for salami, which I then internalize into sexual
distance from my spouse, which contributes to a reemergence of the anxiety I
formed between the ages of 13-16,” etcetera.
This all may be true, and introspective emotional analysis can be one of
the most powerfully transformative experiences in life, but if your trying to
stop eating salami sandwiches, or increase your sex drive, or feel less
anxiety, starting your effort with looking at your environmental input is the
biggest bang for your buck, it’s the most measureable, and has the most visible
and obvious results.
Drugs are the easiest metaphor to use to grasp the concept. Your environmental stimulus is like a
constant drip of drugs that you have no choice but to take. You can however, control what kinds and
amounts of drugs are in the IV bag. If
you have an anxiety problem, before (or at least at the same time) you talk to
your shrink about your problems with father figures and authority, try taking
out anything in the methamphetamine category from your regular drug
regimen. Gluten, over 65% of diet as
carbohydrates early in the day, sleep schedule, processed sugar, flashing
lights late at night, mild allergens, breathing habits, types of cardio
exercise, too little exercise, eye movement habits, color in living spaces,
different types of media, cluttered visual space, etc. all can cause anxiety in
the same way that an anxiety pill would cause you anxiety. And your doing these things every single day of your life, multiple times a day. Yes, you may really be nervous because of credit card debt, but bill collectors
calling all the time is going to be way more scary on meth, and your not going to react as productively.
So go to Pub Med, Google responsibly, and then change a variable
in your drug intake and try to measure the results and analyze
objectively. You may get intended and
unintended consequences both positive and negative. You also may start to see changes in what you
thought was your static identity or your permanent personality. The knee jerk reaction can be a sense of loss
of identity and a knowledge of who you are, but a closer look will show you
that you’re learning more about yourself, not less. Keep measuring and improving and learning, because
if you stop, you’re just leaving the type of person you are to blind chance,
and in today’s modern world where our body isn’t designed to do any of the
things we do everyday, it’s probably not going to turn out as optimally as you’d
like.
