The 3 Killers of Resilience

We were designed for a world that we no longer live in. 

That single statement explains one of the reasons that we are facing such a crisis of resilience and are struggling to deal with the pressures of the modern world. Let me explain…

Evolution moves slowly. Natural selection and the adjustment that follows take thousands of years to change a species. Life on this planet is around 3.5bn years old but that figure is meaningless because we can’t comprehend it.

If the story of human evolution was written as a novel, with each page representing 1000 years. The whole book would be 350,000 pages, 1200 times the size of a regular book and roughly the height of a four storey building!

Homo-sapiens, human beings as we’d recognise them appear in the final 20-30 pages of the latest chapter. 

Now let’s just consider the last couple of pages or the last 2000 years. Highlights include, the birth of Christ, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and then finally the last century.

The last 200 years would probably be the last couple of sentences in our 350,000 page book - and that’s precisely where the majority of the changes have taken place. 

Consider the UK at the turn of the last Century. Most people would have still been employed in manufacturing and farming. Life would have been tough, physically challenging and dangerous for most. This was a time when people were still suffering from day to day, just to survive. Many outside of the West remain in that state, like their ancestors before them.

In the West, we like to think we’ve got it right. Our capitalist system has been brilliant at fulfilling our needs and wants, driving an unprecedented pace of economic development and lifting millions out of poverty. It’s not a perfect system but if you look at the data of human progress, it’s hard to ignore the fact that for many people, the world is a significantly better place.

But not everything we create and invent is necessarily good for us and I think that goes some way to explain why so many people are struggling with the pressures of the modern world.

Consider three simple inventions and the unintended consequences they have had on our health. The lightbulb, the car and the modern diet.

When you think about it, the lightbulb gives us the ability to control night and day. In evolutionary terms, this was invented seconds ago. The lightbulb turns up in the last couple of ‘words of the 350,000 page book’. For billions of years, when it got dark, humans went to sleep. Now, we stay awake, working, checking social media and watching Netflix. Matthew Walker’s book, ‘Why We Sleep’ highlighted the fact that we are suffering from an epidemic of sleep depravation. We’ve never experienced this before so the long-term effects are poorly understood - like they were with smoking in the late 1950s.

The car and mass transit systems mean that we don’t have to walk as far as we used to. We exercise less leaving our cardiovascular systems and muscles to rot whilst we sit in chairs for 8-10 hours a day. We fix mobility issues such as lower back pain with drugs and reward ourselves by eating and drinking to excess. 

We’ve confused the difference between what hurts and what harms us. Doughnuts and booze feel good but harm you. Exercise often hurts but is good for you.

If you want to know how your body is designed to work, watch a child pick something up off the floor… the perfect squat. The same technique Olympic Powerlifters demonstrate - how do most adults lift? By bending at the back because their hamstrings are so tight.

Lastly, the modern diet is abysmal. In my humble opinion, this is one of the biggest failings of the 21st Century. Organic food, which was just called food a couple of hundred years ago has been made niche and expensive. Affordable for the few, not the many. The majority of people ‘survive’ and I use that word deliberately on high carbohydrate and high sugar diets. Kids deprived of sleep, self-medicate with high-caffeine energy drinks. We know Type 2 diabetes is a problem but it is the results of a diet for which we weren’t designed.

What’s the Solution?

The solution is simple to understand but difficult to implement and requires a deeper understanding of the evolutionary brain which I am not going to go into now. We all know the answers. Get 7hrs of sleep, lift stuff, get yourself into a state so you’re out of breath, eat healthily so ‘if a caveman could find it, you can eat it’.

Simple doesn’t make it easy though.

I think that the first thing is to consider your current behaviour. If you carry on behaving like this, where will it take you? What impact is your behaviour having on those around you? You lead by example at home and in the office. What sort of example are you setting?

Then journal. Everyday, write about the last 24hrs. What did you eat, how did you sleep, did you work out? How are you feeling? What’s the most important thing you have to do today? What are you avoiding doing? Whats concerning you? Are you being a good parent/spouse/co-worker?

Self-reflection is the key to self-understanding. If you want to change, you have to know ‘how you think and why you do what you do’.

Create Boundaries

I love boundaries. They help me seperate those increasingly blurred lines between my work and home life and you can apply them in a number of ways. Firstly, a good day tomorrow starts this evening. Going to bed early makes getting up early much easier. Go to bed at 9pm, read, sleep by 10pm. Up at 5am, not a problem. 

Start the day with the most important things first. This is about following a process that becomes a habit. 0500-0530 Wake up, don’t think, get up. Brush teeth, splash water on the face, let the eyes adjust to the light. Read a Medium article - ponder on some new information, something of high quality. Don’t check emails and allow yourself to become distracted by someone else’s agenda. Meditate for ten mins, use the Calm app to make it easy. Stretch and prepare for exercise. Gym for 0600, exercise (intervals or strength, depends upon the goal. Don’t sweat without a purpose). 0700 Shower and get my daughter up. Start the day.

I created the above process when I asked myself, ‘what does the perfect start to the day look like?’ It became a process, now it is a habit and now it’s harder not to follow that routine.

Self-Reflection. Think about ‘what good looks like’. Create standards and processes for how you live your life. Discipline isn’t an art and people are not born with it. It’s a habit - and like all habits can be built or broken.

There are several components to resilience but the foundational one is ‘looking after yourself’. You are a high performance, highly evolved organism, like a Formula One race-car. But you’re in a demolition derby - an environment for which you are hopelessly unprepared.

Nothing I have shared in this article is complicated. It’s simple but that doesn’t make it easy. But if it was easy, everyone would be doing it and we wouldn’t be struggling to manage the challenges we’re faced with in the modern world.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and get in touch. I am a leadership coach and behaviour change specialist not a mathematician so if I’ve got all the figures wrong in the book analogy, I apologise, I am sure someone will tell me though - for which I will be grateful!