Instinct

Rewire Your Brain with Science-Backed Solutions to Increase Productivity and Achieve Success

Rebecca Heiss

• Publisher: Citadel Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780806541051
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Éxito personal

A revolutionary approach to unlocking your innate ability to achieve success in business and in life. Why do we constantly feel overwhelmed by stress, dissatisfied in our careers and relationships, and lacking in real purpose? Why do we seem to sabotage ourselves, hampering our productivity and success? The answer lies in our instincts... In every area of life, from business to relationships to health, we act on outdated instincts that were built to help us survive a world ruled by scarcity and danger. But in today's world, those same instincts stop us from succeeding in the environment in which we actually live: a diverse world of abundant choices, and almost limitless connections. Now evolutionary biologist Dr. Rebecca Heiss offers a new approach that harnesses the power of our instincts, and redirects them to work for us rather than against us. Dr. Heiss reveals the science behind our self-sabotaging behaviors, then provides simple, actionable techniques that can rebuild our instinctive minds. Both practical and inspiring, Instinct is a roadmap that anyone can use to finally stop living on autopilot, improve productivity and happiness, and consciously craft a better life.

CHAPTER 1

Survival

Making Haste, Slowly

I WAS FREEZING. LITERALLY, FREEZING. Soaked head to toe with the icy waters of the Hudson River, I knew I was in trouble. I was blowing into my hands, my breath the only remaining source of warmth in my body. But soon even that began to come out of me cold. I don’t remember much after that, just a blur of numbing, stinging, icy-hot sensations along my skin as I slipped into hypothermia.

The day had started as an adventure. My father and I were rafting along the Hudson River for our annual father-daughter trip. There were icicles hanging on the trees overhead; a late snow dusted the branches. I’d always wanted to go whitewater rafting, so Dad chose the best time for it—the first day of the season, when the rapids were running fast. My dad knows that if there’s a possibility for speed, I want the top speed. But on this day, the first of April, the weather was unseasonably cold . . . even by New York standards.

We’d come prepared in our wetsuits and, at the start of the day, I was feeling optimistic and undeterred by the rapidly falling temperature. Then, about an hour into the trip, I experienced the first signs of hypothermia: I lost feeling in my extremities. Everything in me started to feel heavy, and the world around me began to move in slow motion—especially my own body. I looked back at my dad smiling and paddling at the rear of the raft. I looked ahead and determined we had another hour before we’d make it to shore, to warmth and safety. I couldn’t think myself out of this situation. Even if I told my dad that I was in trouble, he’d be as helpless as I was to do anything. And that’s when my survival instinct took full control, sending a rush of blessed warmth from between my legs down to my feet.

My body had ceased paying attention to social niceties. It wanted to live and it would do whatever it needed to ensure survival—including constricting my blood vessels to keep warmth around my essential internal organs, thereby forcing my kidneys to keep pace with my rapidly increasing blood pressure. I was sixteen, and I had just urinated all over myself. Honestly, I was too cold to even care. Survival instincts had completely taken over my bodily response.

Human beings are adept at creating constructs that enforce civil behavior. But those constructs go out the window when our survival instinct is activated. Urinating on oneself, for example, is suddenly a viable option when we are under duress.

Our survival instinct kicks in strong in order to drown out “should” or “shouldn’t” voices in our heads. We just take action. Consciously or not. Thank goodness, because (spoiler alert!) I’m still alive because of it. Once back to shore, Dad quickly got me in front of a fully stoked fireplace that relieved my body from threat.

In this situation, my survival instinct got to work by conserving heat. But in other scenarios, this instinct can lessen your disgust response to, say, eating the family dog for sustenance (a sad reality for hiker Marco Lavoie who, in 2013, was forced to eat his beloved German shepherd after being stranded for months without supplies in the Canadian wilderness). A strong survival instinct can even reduce pain receptors that would otherwise prevent you from amputating your own arm—just as Aron Ralston, the subject of the movie 127 Hours, discovered. If you’ve ever consumed a stupid amount of alcohol, you can thank your survival instinct for shutting down your behavior by putting you into an unconscious state, vomiting the poison, or both.

Survival is at the root of all the other instincts you’ll learn about in this book. It is powerful and deeply written into our subconscious. You can easily witness this if you were to intentionally try to harm yourself. (But please don’t! I’m not advocating this behavior, just illustrating a point.) One of my favorite urban myths is the idea that we could bite through our fingers as easily as a carrot if our brain didn’t stop us from doing so. Despite the fact that it’s not true (it takes a lot more force), it does provide a sense of how our instincts really are trying to protect us from our, admittedly, dumb ideas.

A better example of your survival instinct in action is when you accidentally put your hand on a hot stove and your brain quickly and reflexively directs you to remove it. But here’s the cool part: That movement away from the source of danger occurs before your brain has time to process what happened: The pain receptors are activated before you are consciously aware of the pain. In other words, your instinct is driving your behavior before you fully comprehend the reason.

When our Stone Age ancestors felt stress, the survival instinct came racing to the rescue because stressors back then—say, a tiger about to pounce or impending starvation—were often life threatening. But here’s the problem: Our survival-primed brain is overextending itself. In a modern context, that tiger becomes Joseph the accountant wondering where your financial reports are, or Kathy the CEO wondering when you’ll get back to her on that email she sent you a full two minutes ago. The same survival instinct that served you so well in the wild is responding to everyday stressors as if they were full-out, life-threatening events. There is a mismatch in our modern brains. Our fears and discomforts today no longer mean that we are in immediate danger.

We will explore this disconnect more in depth when we examine the stress reaction, but suffice it to say that most of the stressors we encounter daily are not life threatening. So why does our body react if they are? Why can’t our brain differentiate between real threats and perceived threats? The answer is that our survival instinct is running the show far beyond the value of its contribution.

We still need this instinct (think about the last time you got out of the way of an oncoming vehicle just in time), but we need to learn to better control it. Otherwise, survival can cause lasting damage to our health and our relationships, and even lead us to miss life’s most beautiful moments.

The Street Performer

One day in January 2017, at 7:51 a.m., a man in jeans and a ball cap set up a post along a busy hub of the Washington, D.C., metro and began to play his violin. He left the instrument’s case open by his feet, should one of the hundreds of commuters passing by care to reward his efforts.

For forty-three minutes, masterfully crafted music poured from his violin—agonizingly beautiful strains of Bach, Massenet, Schubert, and Ponce that had moved concertgoers to their feet in halls across the world. But they went mostly unnoticed here. None of the people who were rushing by seemed to know that they were turning a deaf ear to internationally acclaimed virtuoso Joshua Bell, who was performing on one of the most valuable violins ever made, a 1713 Stradivarius.

A child prodigy, Bell had sold out symphony halls, played to standing-room-only crowds, and commanded prices of up to $1,000 per minute. But standing there on the subway platform, looking much like a beggar, his melodies fell on deaf ears. People hustled past. Busy. Late for wherever they were rushing to—perhaps, ironically, so they could get off early enough to get highly sought-after tickets to one of Bell’s concerts.

Bell left with only the few dollars that had been hurriedly tossed into his case. Of the 1,070 people who walked past, just seven took in his performance for longer than a minute, and most of them were children. The majority of commuters didn’t even bother to look up from their programmed march.

What does this say about us as a society? Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten, who originally covered this story, summed it up perfectly: “If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that—then what else are we missing?”

What else are you missing because you are too busy to stop and pay attention? What pleasures are drained by the stress of everyday life? And why are we overlooking the beautiful overtures in our abundant, modern environment? I believe our instincts are to blame.

Ironically, even among those who can afford to pay $1,000 per minute for music, fly in private jets, and choose what they want to eat—rather than being grateful to have anything to eat—their brains are still stuck in a cycle of survival. Daily existence in the modern world has forced us into a perpetual state of busy that persisted even in the midst of stay-at-home orders. We tend to view time as a precious and scarce resource, as if there were never enough hours in the day to get everything done. Why is that? Technological advances in the last two hundred years, from washing machines to Uber Eats, afford us more free time than ever, yet we lull ourselves into the illusion that we have less time.

Consider your daily routine. Maybe you woke up this morning to the blaring beeps of your alarm, drank a steamy cup of stimulants, and then huddled up against strangers on a crowded train platform or spent the morning behind the wheel of your car jammed in traffic. You rushed into the office or onto your Zoom call just after 9 a.m., hoping no one would notice you were a few minutes late. You spent your day communicating with strangers, doing what you could to interpret signals (often without the benefit of a face or tone of voice). You left work at 6 p.m., feeling anxious for all that’s still on your plate, and the reports you never got around to. You picked up your kids at day care, thanking the strangers you’ve entrusted your most precious assets to all day. Then, your in-laws call: They’re coming over for a surprise visit! What’s for dinner? Finally, after everyone else is asleep, you lie in bed doom-scrolling mindlessly through social media to make sure you’re not missing out on important updates. By the time your head hits the pillow it’s nearly midnight. Notifications from your phone stir you as you toss and turn in bed for the next six hours. The blaring alarm starts the cycle all over again.

Writing that paragraph actually elicited a bit of a stress response for me, and I was just writing it. Stress used to be a life-saving stimulus that triggered our fight-or-flight-or-freeze response—a behavior that pushes us to fight a predator, run to safety, or hunker down and hope to go unnoticed. But our brains are lousy at interpreting the difference between real and perceived threats. A real threat, for instance, is a hungry tiger jumping into your bedroom at night. Not likely to happen in a modern environment. But that doesn’t stop our brains from “protecting” us from threats it perceives, and triggering the fight-flight-freeze response in inappropriate circumstances, like when we’re around people who are different from us, or when we’re stuck in a particularly nasty traffic jam, or when we hear the sound of dinging emails that require immediate attention. Externally, our lives are far safer and easier than those of our ancestors, but our survival-obsessed brains act as if we’ve encountered one hundred tigers by lunchtime! Our brains are experiencing a different reality altogether.

The result is that our brains stay locked in survival mode, preventing us from experiencing or lingering in pleasurable moments, like the sound of violins in the subway station or the smell of freshly baked bread wafting out of a bakery. Pleasure is secondary to survival. So we scope out the “danger” all around us, certain that there’s not enough time for “luxurious” activities. But missing the most precious moments of life is not the only downside of our out-of-date instincts. Our health and performance take serious hits as well.

Stressing the Effects of Stress on Health and Performance

Stress has been called the “health epidemic of the 21st century.” Why is this? Let’s look at what happens when your body goes into a fight-flight-freeze response and a cascade of hormonal reactions occur. First, adrenaline is released, giving you that immediate shaky, sweaty hands, pumping heart, super strength. Adrenaline is a powerful, but short-lived, neurotransmitter, because in nature, real-life battles don’t last very long. Either you escape the tiger or you’re its meal. Adrenaline is very useful in those first precious seconds after a threat is detected, but then cortisol, the main stress hormone, is quickly called in to assist in sustaining the fight-flight-freeze response, and to repair any damage you sustained during the threat.

Cortisol’s most important function is to break down proteins and give you quick access to glucose, the fuel currency of the body. During a stressful experience, glucose provides immediate energy to the major muscles to assist you in fighting or fleeing the situation. It provides energy to combat trauma, illness, and infection. Similarly useful is cortisol’s suppression of the immune, reproductive, and digestive systems, all of which are nonessential in the stressed state. Imagine if in the middle of a fight for your life, you were suddenly sexually aroused or hungry. These distractions are completely eliminated, compliments of your adrenal system binding cortisol to receptors in your brain that regulate the behaviors.

All of these intricate components work together in a miraculous, choreographed dance to keep you safe from harm without your ever having to consciously sound an alarm. But here is perhaps the biggest biological flaw that has revealed itself in modern times: the failure of our stress response to adapt to and differentiate modern stressors from truly life-threatening stressors.

In our ancestral environment, this cascade of responses was a short-term and rarely elicited solution. Modern life, however, constantly bombards us with sensory input at speeds we simply cannot process. As a result, we often find ourselves in a condition of sensory overload, causing our brains to perceive everything as stressful in order to “keep us safe.”

Ironically, this over-sensitization puts us in a dangerous state of chronic stress. Chronic stress differs from the acute stressors your body was built to handle in that you never fully get a reprieve from the surge of cortisol. During an acute stress response, your cortisol levels shoot up until the threat has passed and then return to normal within about an hour. With repeated, nearly continuous exposure to stressors in a modern environment, our cortisol levels are constantly being stimulated, resulting in new, higher baseline norms, with potentially devastating consequences.

We know, for example, that chronically elevated cortisol levels depress the immune system, leaving you prone to illness. Corporate America endures significant costs associated with illness-related absenteeism—an estimated annual price tag of $1,900 per employee according to research by John Hancock, on top of health care costs that are 46 percent higher for stressed employees relative to their less-stressed counterparts, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. So it’s no surprise that the state of stress (including the mental, physical, and psychological costs) during the COVID-19 pandemic skyrocketed. Approximately 88 percent of workers reported “moderate to extreme stress,” in an April 2020 survey, with 62 percent saying they lost “at least 1 hour a day in productivity,” and 32 percent “at least 2 hours a day” due to pandemic-related stress. Ironically, their stress leaves these workers more immunologically vulnerable to illness.

The American Psychological Association links chronic stress to the six leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide. Stress can even prematurely age us! Studies show that chronic stress is associated with shorter telomeres, the protective caps of your chromosomes that affect how your cells age. Telomeres are akin to the plastic ends of shoelaces—they keep everything from fraying. But as cortisol levels rise, telomeres unravel causing more rapid aging. Along with the quickened aging process, elevated cortisol decreases brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that protects your brain cells. Raised cortisol has even been implicated in lowered IQ. When your body endures stress, it turns on stem cells in the brain that inhibit connections to your prefrontal cortex (where most of your higher-level cognitive processing occurs).

A 2018 study published in Neurology linked higher cortisol to poorer performance on tests of memory, organization, and attention. Within a sample of over two thousand asymptomatic middle-age workers, the subjects with the highest cortisol levels were also more likely to have physical changes in their brains consistent with early markers of Alzheimer’s disease. But our health isn’t the only concern. Our performance at work suffers as well.

Separate peer-reviewed scientific studies published in 2003 and 2015 found that the administration of cortisol to artificially induce stress impaired the subject’s ability to detect errors while simultaneously increased their appetite for risk. It’s hard to imagine a worse recipe for workplace disaster. Participants in a 2016 study were asked to solve math problems aloud at increasingly rapid intervals, with harsh buzzes sounded when they answered incorrectly. The stressed subjects suffered significant decreases in such executive functions as attention and inhibition, task management, planning, and coding.

Our work and our health suffer when we are stressed. A stressed-out brain creates a vicious cycle, causing you to stay locked in survival mode. But you can break free of stressful interpretations by using your higher cognitive powers to make better choices.

Just Enough Time . . . to Make a Poor Decision

Survival is like an internal bodyguard, poised to pounce into action swiftly and efficiently whenever it detects a threat. H...