1.2 – Accelerated Evolution

Why is it so hard to consistently do the things we know are good for us and avoid the things we know are bad for us? Simple: our world has changed so much over the last 0.1% of human history that many of our instinctive emotional responses are now totally outdated.

The second chapter of the Supermorning series shares several ways in which to deal with this fundamental challenge. Mastering your primitive emotions is the best pathway towards a happy, healthy, wealthy, productive and sustainable life!

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Recap: Accelerating Evolution

Over the past two months, we’ve talked a lot about our outdated emotional responses and how to handle them. 

Taming our primitive emotions is not easy. If it was, everyone would be genuinely happy, healthy, wealthy and productive in this truly amazing modern world of material affluence. 

That’s why it’s so important to set ourselves on a journey of accelerated evolution towards full compatibility with our modern world. 

The checklist

Here’s the 1-2-3 of staying on course during a journey of accelerated evolution:

  1. Make it part of your identity.
  2. Focus on tiny saves during day-to-day living.
    • Use a counter app on your phone to track your small victories over the Big Five.
    • Use some fun visualizations to dispatch the Big Five when needed. 
  3. When bad stuff happens, it really is time to step up.
    • Recognize the danger of a Big Five stampede and learn how to stop it.
    • Use such events as a valuable experiment to learn more about yourself. 

So, that’s it for the second chapter of the Supermorning series! Next week, we’ll shift our attention to the pursuit of perfect health. 

If you have any feedback or suggestions that can help me improve these accelerated evolution guidelines, please use the form below.

Your message will not be publicly visible, so please don’t hold back. Having gone through the scientific peer-review publication process about 100 times, I’m used to critical feedback 🙂

The Supermorning blog will run on an annually repeating basis, so this time next year I will present an improved version of these guidelines on accelerated evolution. Your feedback is important to make sure that next year’s version really offers a clear improvement.

Thanks in advance!

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Stopping a Stampede

From time to time, life will just randomly walk up to you and kick you where it hurts the most. There’s a lot we can do to minimize the likelihood and intensity of these painful experiences, but it’s impossible to guarantee that bad things will never happen.  

Responding well during such troubled times is crucial. A poor and primitive response has the potential to launch you into a downwards spiral that can inflict serious damage to your life. 

Such a spiral is what I like to call a Big Five stampede.

Possible stampedes

Maybe you find yourself giving in to Craving after every bad thing that happens to you. Over time, this can develop into fixed unwholesome consumption habits that severely damage your health, wealth and reputation. 

Perhaps your Ego takes such a serious knock during some patches of bad luck that it causes you to miss out on big opportunities when good luck eventually comes your way. 

Some setbacks at work could render you paralyzed into inaction by Sloth. This inevitably causes you to fall further behind and could really sour your relationship with your work, making your Sloth grow even larger. 

Bad experiences involving other people can easily morph Frustration into Anger or even Hatred. At best, this is a huge mental burden. At worst, it can lead you to rash actions with serious long-term repercussions.

Exposure to one of the millions of wrongs in the world can trigger excessive Worry that keeps you up at night and stressed during the day. Such Worry often serves no useful purpose. It just drains you of the energy and focus needed to make a positive impact, fueling even more Worry. 

But a Big Five stampede rarely features just one primitive emotion. Mostly, it will be a confusing mess of multiple self-destructive emotions. Getting trampled by such a stampede can do lasting damage. 

Prevention is better than cure

The best way to stop a Big Five stampede is to ensure that it never gets going. For this reason, the period shortly after something bad has happened is critical.

No matter how bad it is, you always have a say in how you react. Will you give in to primitive self-destructive instincts? Or will you choose the more enlightened route?

My go-to path to enlightenment in such times is to see this event as a valuable experiment to learn more about the Big Five.

Think about it… We really only see the Big Five up close and personal when we’re in an emotional state. If we’re not in such a state, we can theorize all we want, but we don’t have a proper chance to test our ideas. 

But when that emotional state hits, it’s game on! These are the only real opportunities to learn how your mind operates. The moment that you decide to seize this precious opportunity for self-discovery, it can trip up the entire stampede, causing the Big Five to end up in a harmless heap. 

This might not make all that much sense to you right now. But please try it next time something bad happens. If you manage to catch yourself in that crucial moment, it will all become clear 🙂

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The Tiny Saves Counter

Habits are formed in small increments. Many times, we’re not even aware of our default thoughts and actions, but, whether we recognize them or not, every little one counts.

That’s why it’s so crucial to address those negative patterns we’ve unconsciously developed over the years. Far too many of our default thoughts and actions are driven by caveman instincts that no longer serve any useful purpose in today’s world. We need to take control. 

The best way I’ve found to do this is the tiny saves counter. 

Tiny saves

The tiny save counter is nothing more than a simple app on my phone with counters for each of the Big Five primitive emotions. I use a free app called Multi Counter, but there are many options out there. 

Every time I manage to catch a clearly detrimental thought or action caused by the Big Five and stop it in its tracks, I pick up my phone and add one click to the appropriate counter. 

Sometimes these tiny saves can have a huge positive effect. One save could be the difference between a healthy and productive day and a self-destructive day of binge-eating and binge-watching.  

Try it! See how many of these tiny saves you can make in a day. Over time, the counter will also give you some interesting insight about which member of the Big Five gives you the most trouble. 

When you catch one of these primitive creatures, dispatch it with the visualization trick we discussed earlier. You’ll know you’re doing it right when it brings a smile to your face 🙂

But there will still be times when more serious bad stuff happens, triggering a Big Five stampede that cannot be stopped by a few tiny saves. Managing this stampede will be tomorrow’s topic. 

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Completing Your Constitution

Welcome to the last week of the Accelerated Evolution chapter of Supermorning! This week will be all about making this advanced state of mind a permanent part of our lives. 

The rewards for getting this right are tremendous. If you can evolve your mind to the point where good actions happen naturally and bad actions simply fade away, a happy, healthy, wealthy and productive life is guaranteed 🙂

So, let’s start with this week’s…

Monday 5-minute action Make Accelerated Evolution part of your constitution

 

Over the past two months, we’ve spent our time trying to fix a simple problem: many of our natural instincts and emotions are totally outdated in today’s world.

In fact, we’re all cavemen stuck in the future. And these caveman instincts are pushing us to act in ways that are bad for ourselves, our families and our society. 

Training your caveman for effective living in the modern world is the only permanent solution. And this becomes substantially easier if you give yourself a regular daily reminder through your personal constitution. 

As a quick refresher, the whole idea of a personal constitution is to gradually improve your definition of yourself. It’s a series of simple statements of how the ideal version of yourself will act. 

Today, we’ll add the final touch: a section about Accelerated Evolution. Here’s mine as an example. 

I will continuously accelerate my evolution towards full compatibility with our modern world, thereby automating the spontaneous occurrence of wholesome thoughts and actions. Today, I’ll go on my daily safari, make plenty of tiny saves, and patiently tame my primitive, self-defeating emotions. 

After many repetitions, this final constitution segment has made the act of continuously updating my mind to our modern times an integral part of my identity. 

Try it! I think you’ll like having a mind that automatically gravitates towards wholesome thoughts and actions 🙂

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Recap: Acceptance

Most of us waste a huge amount of time and energy obsessing about things that are not going to change. Here, the simple act of acceptance can make your life a whole lot easier. 

Freeing yourself from this unnecessary burden will allow you to get to many more useful priorities. Give it a go. I think you’ll like it 🙂

The checklist

Here is the 1-2-3 to successful acceptance:

  1. Accept your caveman.
    • Our primitive emotions of Craving, Ego, Sloth, Frustration and Worry present many challenges.
    • But once you accept and understand them, they become manageable and, sometimes, genuinely entertaining 🙂
  2.  Accept yourself.
    • Accepting your caveman makes it much easier to accept yourself. 
    • You will never be perfect, but you can always improve your emotional balance to reduce wasteful inner conflict. 
  3. Accept the caveman in others.
    • Another important source of wasteful inner conflict is festering negative feelings about others.
    • In most cases, a little bit of Tolerance of the caveman in others is all that is needed to win back this wasted energy.

I really hope you give acceptance a go! It can free up a lot of time and energy for more useful things 🙂

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Accept the Caveman in Others

Over the past six weeks, we’ve talked a lot about our inner caveman – the primitive instincts and emotions that formed over the first 99.9% of human history before industrialization changed everything. 

Understanding and accepting your caveman can free up a huge amount of mental energy that was previously wasted on self-defeating thought patterns.

But there is another category of self-defeating thought patterns that consume lots of mental resources: frustrations with other people. 

Resolving inner conflict about other people

Relationships, complicated as they are, often involve some conflict. Only a tiny fraction of conflict results in an all out brawl or screaming match. The vast majority just simmers beneath the surface, wasting time, draining energy and slowly souring relationships. 

There are basically three ways of managing such simmering conflict: confrontation, avoidance and tolerance.

As cowardly as it may sound, avoidance is often the best solution. If you’re clearly incompatible with another person, there are nearly 8 billion other options in the world. Just move on. 

If moving on is not an option, confrontation is sometimes the right way, but this is rare. You must have irrefutable evidence that the other person is clearly in the wrong before opening that can of worms. Confrontation on weak or biased grounds can end very badly. 

That just leaves us with a proud member of the Great Five: Tolerance.

Tolerance = accepting the caveman in others

It really pays to remember that other people, like us, are just cavemen stuck in the future. They all struggle with Craving, Ego, Sloth, Frustration and Worry. And they’re very rarely “out to get you”. 

In fact, most of our grievances with others originate from them just being their own unique selves struggling with their own unique cavemen.

We cannot control the cavemen in other people. Heck, we can barely control our own cavemen. The only thing we can control is how much we allow their cavemen to affect us.

And this control has a name: Tolerance. 

So, try out this way of thinking next time you experience strong negative emotions about someone else. Check out what happens. It could be interesting 🙂

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Accept Your Caveman, Accept Yourself

Yesterday’s post was all about accepting your caveman: that part of you that evolved over all those thousands of generations before fossil fuels ignited the industrial revolution. 

This is a critical step because, if you understand and accept your caveman, it suddenly becomes much easier to accept yourself. 

All those self-destructive cravings, embarrassing insecurities, irresponsible procrastinations, pent-up frustrations and baseless worries are happening for an easily understandable reason: society has changed completely over the past 0.1% of human history, leaving most of our natural emotional responses totally outdated. 

This doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means that you, like the rest of us, are a caveman stuck in the future.  

Fighting your caveman

Most of the problems in today’s world arise because we’re fighting our cavemen. All this fighting drains our energy, making us unproductive and prone to worry, frustration and self-destructive cravings. This, in turn, creates insecurities and low self-image that strengthen the vicious cycle.

Our weapon of choice for fighting our cavemen is willpower. As you have seen many times before, your caveman will always win this fight. He will wear you down and mercilessly unleash the Big Five when all your willpower is exhausted. 

There are many senseless wars in the world, but this daily war that each of us fights with him or herself may be the most senseless of them all. 

We need to stop. We need to make peace. 

Accepting your caveman

So, I hope we can all agree that fighting your caveman is useless. It’s almost like falling asleep – the harder you try, the lower your chances of success. 

No, the best way to live well in today’s world is to accept your caveman. Go on your emotion safaris. Gradually introduce the Great Five positive emotions into your life. And patiently build some intelligent environments where good things happen automatically.

Your caveman is an inseparable part of you. Working together is the only option.  

Accepting yourself

Like any relationship, your rational consciousness and your primitive self will never be in perfect harmony. There will always be the occasional conflict. There will always  be times when you let yourself down.

But even though we can never reach perfection, we can always get better. Every day presents another chance to increase the balance between the Big Five and the Great Five in your mental ecosystem. 

This balance is the key to that mythical ideal of “inner peace”.  

And when you stop wasting all that mental energy on your inner wars, you will be open to something much more interesting: understanding and accepting other peoples’ cavemen. 

But that is tomorrow’s topic. See you then!

Schalk
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Accept Your Caveman

We’ve now spent a good six weeks exploring the challenges we face as cavemen stuck in the future. I sincerely hope that this philosophy has helped you understand why you (and the rest of us) find it so difficult to consistently do the right things.

But it’s not enough to just understand intellectually that many of the instinctive responses we evolved over the first 99.9% of human history are badly outdated today. To get the most out of this idea, it’s important to really accept it on a deep level.

Accepting your caveman

Here are two simple ways of attaining this invaluable acceptance:

  1. Really see the humor in your caveman’s behavior. If you understand the Big Five, many of your caveman’s instinctive reactions become genuinely funny. Transform these irrational emotional responses from a source of frustration to a source of laughter 🙂 
  2. Commit five minutes to your daily emotion safari. If you do it right, these safaris become quite entertaining and are well worth sacrificing 5 minutes of your TV time 🙂 As mentioned in the previous point, be fully open to the humor in your caveman’s default thought patterns. 

Doing this allows you to cultivate an unlikely friendship between your evolved consciousness and your primitive instincts. After all, you’ll be stuck with these two opposing motivating forces for the rest of your life. Might as well make the best of it! 

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how accepting your caveman can help you to do something even more important: accept yourself. See you then!

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Recap: Building intelligent environments

The last two weeks have been about the gradual construction of intelligent environments where healthy and productive actions happen naturally and self-destructive actions become much harder. 

Without such intelligent environments, your primitive emotions will always get the better of you. You can try as you might with willpower, but it will be a losing battle. 

However, when you tilt the scales so that healthy and productive actions become automatic, life becomes much more interesting. 

Let’s take a look at the summarized guidelines to getting this done. 

The checklist

Here is the 1-2-3 for intelligent environment design:

Building intelligent environments takes time and patience. But you should start seeing some benefits already early on in the process. 

The process itself can also be very interesting. So just get started and watch what happens 🙂

See you tomorrow for this month’s edition of Practice What You Preach.

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Taming the Big Five

Most people today live in environments where their Big Five primitive emotions are out of control. In this state, there’s little we can do about all those self-destructive tendencies responsible for the global obesity and stress epidemics, the looming pension crisis and our serious global environmental problems.

As we’ve all found out multiple times, trying to control these impulses through sheer willpower doesn’t work. It could even make things worse by agitating the Big Five even more. 

But once we start making some good progress with intelligent environment design, the Big Five start calming down. 

This is the time to step in and start taming your primitive emotions…

The technique

The best technique for taming the Big Five combines humor and visualization. In this technique, you turn each member of the Big Five into a vivid character that you can interact with whenever necessary. 

It’s a bit weird at first, but it can genuinely transform the Big Five from a major source of pain and suffering into some pretty good entertainment 🙂

The characters you choose are completely up to you. Anything that embodies that particular emotion will do. This previous post on the nature of the Big Five can be a useful read before you choose your characters. 

My characters are shared below as an example. 

Craving

I see Craving as a young dog. Like most young dogs dogs, Craving really loves its master, but it often gets overly excited in its quest to bring instant pleasure through consumption. 

Thus, whenever Craving jumps up against me and licks me in the face, I must instill some discipline. Sometimes when I’m alone, I even say “down boy!” out loud. 

As ridiculous as it sounds, it genuinely works. Do this consistently whenever an irrational Craving jumps on you and see what happens 🙂

Ego

We have plenty of seagulls (a.k.a. flying rats) here in Norway. When those things are nesting and you walk by minding your own business, they will swoop down on you screeching at the top of their lungs. 

Their young are safely up on the rooftop, but they keep making lots of unnecessary noise about any perceived threat that comes near. 

This is my picture of Ego. Whenever my Ego starts screeching in my ears for no good reason, I just walk by as if it wasn’t even there. Like a seagull, Ego will stop pestering you soon enough if you just keep moving forward.  

Sloth

For someone who spends as much time working as me, Sloth is actually quite important to protect me from burnout. Thus, my chosen character here is a cute little miniature sloth that I carry around all the time. 

When I experience laziness for no good reason (which happens quite often), it means my cute little pet is becoming too fat and is weighing me down. 

That means it has to exercise. Have you ever seen a sloth running on treadmill? Neither have I, but the visualization is hilarious 😀

Frustration

Frustration is the most primitive of the primitive emotions. I therefore see it as a typical dumb caveman with a big wooden club. 

Whenever Frustration starts running around with its big club trying to smash a sophisticated or totally out-of-reach problem. I pull out my tazor and make it go to sleep. 

Tazing a caveman is good fun! Try it 🙂

Worry

Worry becomes a problem when it keeps showing you some cataclysmic future scenario you have no control over. Such Worry drains your mental energy for no good reason. 

Given Worry’s ability to suck all the mental energy right out of you, I visualize it as a mosquito (one of those huge ones you get on the Swedish wetlands). 

Whenever a useless Worry starts draining my mental energy, I unceremoniously squash it. There will always be more Worries, so killing off a couple doesn’t hurt. 

So, there you have it. Very weird, but weirdly effective. 

But remember that this technique will only work well if you have committed to calming your Big Five by intelligently shaping your environment. 

Do that first and then give this fun visualization exercise a try.

See you tomorrow for the wrap-up of this week’s topic! 

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