Unhack Your Brain
Neuroscience, mental health, and adapting to the modern world
Creating a better world, one brain at a time.
Living in the modern world is hard - and the struggle is real.
Our brains and bodies weren’t adapted for our modern lifestyles. In fact, our environment and our way of life is actively harming us. It’s making us physically sick, it’s making us stressed and anxious, and it’s literally affecting our brains.
We are complex biological machines, driven by electricity and neurochemicals. We are powered by a smart digestive system and we have a sophisticated sensory system to tell us what’s going on both inside and outside our bodies. Our nervous systems are more complicated and high precision than any machine ever built, with nearly a hundred billion neurons and perhaps five hundred trillion synapses, each controlled by the actions of just a few molecules and electrical impulses of a few millivolts.
But we’re getting hammered from every direction: our food, our sedentary lifestyles, the flood of political propaganda, relentless consumerism, pollution, climate change, lack of community, hustle culture, unrealistic expectations, excessive medication, rising population, economic anxiety… the list goes on.
All of those stressors have real effects. The physical and mental systems that we rely on are largely unconscious and automatic, but they were adapted for a world that no longer exists. We’re responding to stress and stimuli in ways that worked just fine for tens of thousands of years, but now those instinctive responses frequently actively work against us. Our exquisitely balanced systems are becoming increasingly disrupted. We can’t think straight any more.
In other words, our brains have been hacked.
In Unhack Your Brain, I draw on anthropology, neuroscience, NLP, meditation, pranayama, and other scientific and spiritual disciplines to understand what's going on and what we can do about it.