Reprogramming your stone age brain for health and happiness

Lurking beneath your consciousness is a stone age brain that can cause you to make self-destructive choices. But there are effective ways to reprogram it to achieve your goals without struggle.

As a Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, my job is to help people identify the habits that are undermining their health and happiness, and guide them to develop new habits that support their goals.

And this means that virtually every day in my practice, I see people who are intensely frustrated by how difficult it is to break those bad habits and replace them with good ones!

Intelligent, successful people who are accustomed to achieving anything they set their minds to in every other arena of their lives, often suffer the most intense frustration. Why, they ask me, is it so hard to stop engaging in unhealthy behaviours, even when they know they’re sabotaging their health and weight loss goals?

In most cases, the answer is surprisingly simple: non-conscious circuits in your brain have assessed the costs and benefits of your bad habit and decided that it offers more benefit than cost, and conversely, that changing your behaviour would incur more cost than benefit.

The problem is, the algorithms used by these non-conscious circuits to compute cost-benefit ratios were shaped by our evolutionary history. We evolved in an environment in which food was scarce and generally quite low in energy density; daily physical activity was required in order to find food and avoid becoming food for predators; and everything that felt good was actually good, either for us as individuals (finding food – especially calorically rich food – shelter and warmth, feeling socially connected, honing our survival skills) or for the perpetuation of our genes (receiving positive feedback about our mate value, having sex, nurturing our children).   

However, the modern world bombards us with supernormal stimuli that evoke strong responses in the reward centres of our brain, and therefore feel very, very good, but have the potential to be very, very bad for us. Anything that evokes a pleasure response gets reinforced by reward circuitry involving the neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s this reinforcement that creates a habit loop in our brains, so that we repeat the behaviour in the future when exposed to the same or similar stimuli.

For example, if during childhood your parents rewarded you with a chocolate bar when you were well-behaved, the association of the pleasurable feeling generated in your brain by the high fat, high sugar treat, and the positive emotion, creates a powerful habit loop. As an adult you’ll find yourself reaching for that chocolate bar when you feel down and want to cheer yourself up, or even when you feel happy but want to ratchet up the intensity of that emotion.

Substances and processes that overstimulate the reward circuits in our brains – think hyperpalatable ultraprocessed foods, psychoactive drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography, social media, and video games – fool our non-conscious brains into believing that we’re engaging in positive and productive behaviours, even while our conscious brains are bemoaning the train wreck that these behaviours have created in our lives.

This is why perfectly sensible people continue to eat junk food even when they’re sick, overweight and miserable… and know better. Their nonconscious brain circuitry judges high calorie, fatty, sugary junk food as ‘good’ because throughout most of human history, such food was incredibly hard to come by¹ and obtaining it made all the difference to one’s survival chances and reproductive success.

How do we override this ancient conditioning so we can make conscious decisions that will help us thrive in the 21st century? In a nutshell, we need to reprogram our brain’s reward centres so that they compute the cost-benefit analysis of health-promoting behaviours in more favourable terms than unhealthy behaviours. Once it has assessed a new behaviour as more valuable than an old one – more efficient, pleasurable, or advantageous – the brain gets busy laying down neural circuits that reinforce the behaviour, ensuring that it will be repeated in future.

And how do we reprogram our reward centres? By engaging in mindful awareness of our habitual behaviours, so that we become consciously aware of their true impact on our health, and on our lives in general.

Mindful awareness does not mean guilt, shame and self-loathing. By definition, mindfulness is “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” Adopting an attitude of nonjudgmental, non-attached curiosity about your automatic behaviours is key to changing them.

If you eat a food that isn’t on your healthy eating plan, beating yourself up for it will get you nowhere. In fact, the emotional pain that you inflict on yourself is likely to drive you to continue eating, in order to numb out – after all, that’s your conditioned response to unpleasant emotional states.

Instead, turn the spotlight of nonjudgmental awareness on your internal experience:

• How does the food actually taste? Often, when people slow down and really focus their attention while they’re eating hyperpalatable foods, they report that the supposedly ‘treat’ foods taste too sweet, or too salty, or ‘chemical-ly’; or they feel greasy or oily in the mouth.

• How does it feel in your body – first in your stomach, then as it works its way down your gut. Do you notice that you feel bloated, ‘heavy’, or sluggish after eating it? When does that feeling begin, and how long does it last?

• How about your mood – how long do the pleasurable sensations last? What emotions or mood states follow them? How do you feel about yourself, after you've eaten foods that don't make a positive contribution to your health?

• How about your connection with other people, or with your sense of purpose and meaning? Is it strengthened or weakened after you’ve eaten unhealthy food?

• What is the quality of your sleep after eating that food? How does that impact on you and those around you?

Next time you eat a health-promoting food, repeat this whole process, paying mindful attention to the taste of the food, body sensations during and after eating it, your energy level, emotional state, self-appraisal and sleep quality.

Utilising these simple mindfulness practices in everyday life will allow you to make far more accurate cost-benefit analyses of your habitual behaviours, and will also buy you the mental space that you need in order to consciously experiment with new behaviours, and make accurate cost-benefit analyses of these.

As you heighten your conscious awareness of the full costs and marginal and transient ‘benefits’ of unhealthy behaviours, and the dramatic and prolonged benefits of health-promoting behaviours, the nonconscious regions of your brain will adjust their computations, resulting in diminished reinforcement of habit loops with a negative cost-benefit analysis, and increased reinforcement of those with a positive CBA.

Of course, you’ll still have slips from time to time – you’re human, and that means you’ll get distracted and become susceptible to old habit loops being reactivated – but you can prevent lapses from turning into relapses by renewing your commitment to mindful awareness of the impact of your bad habits on your physical and mental health.

So, even though your brain's circuitry was built in the stone age, it is possible to rewire it to thrive in the twenty-first century, if you're prepared to invest a small amount of time and effort into mindful observation, on a consistent basis.

For information on my private practice, please visit Empower Total Health. I am a Certified Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, with an ND, GDCouns, BHSc(Hons) and Fellowship of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine.

1. In fact, there is no food found in nature, except mammalian milk, that is both high in fat and high in sugar, with human milk being sweeter and less fatty than the milk of species typically used for milking purposes:

Table 1 from Composition, Structure, and Digestive Dynamics of Milk From Different Species—A Review