The Riverbank Mind

As we saw in the last module, our immediate environment influences our behaviour, despite our best intentions. In this module, we’re going to delve a little deeper into understanding why that’s the case. And see that this is less about lacking discipline, and more about your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do. To better understand this, we have to go back in time. So, cue the time-rewind music - and imagine that you are no longer in the 21st century—but more like sometime 15,000 years ago. Picture in your mind, a sort of campground settlement, a clearing along the banks of a river, where a tribe has just found a place to spend the winter. There are maybe 4 or 5 tents in various stages of completion, made with animal hides, you may see someone carving a canoe by the river, a group of women gathering berries, a couple of adults drying animal skins, a few children running around, others around a fire or fishing with weighted nets.  The clearing is surrounded by trees as far as the eye can see. The neighbouring tribe is 50 miles away. There are no ads. No phones. No magazines. Just the people around you. The wind in the trees. The sound of the river. This—or something like it—was your brain’s environment for most of human history. It’s important to have this image in mind, because it was in this kind of environment that humans have spent 99% of their time on the planet. Our brains are very adapted to this kind of environment. And it shaped how we think… and how we react. So to put that into perspective. If we took the age of the modern human brain—roughly 200,000 years—and represented it as a one-meter stick, we’d see that the ancient civilzations, like Egypt or easly China, were two centimeters ago. The Industrial Revolution was about one millimeter ago. And our hyper-connected lives today? You can’t even see them on the meter stick! For nearly the entire length of that meter, we lived in small groups, in natural environments, with limited stimulation. Your brain evolved there. Not here. For the entire stretch of human history (as shown on the meter stick), it made sense for our brains to be highly sensitive to environmental cues. It made sense to respond to a sound in the bushes. It made sense to respond to a baby’s cry (well, it makes sense to respond to all those things today as well). But basically, the point is that being highly sensitive to what was right in front of you wasn’t a flaw. It was a superpower. We were made to notice the berries that were ripe, and a ton of other cues - our brain evolved to prioritize the immediate. Because back then, the immediate was important, what was in front of us mattered. But now: The environment is no longer neutral. That same reactive brain is navigating a totally different world. Today, you’re surrounded by dings and buzzes—designed to grab your attention, sugary foods—engineered to hit your ancient cravings and social media feeds—triggering constant comparison. Your instincts haven’t changed. But your environment has. So the takeway here is that you are not broken, or undisiplined or lazy, you’re just using an ancient, beautifully adaptive brain in a modern environment it wasn’t built for. And once we understand that, we can stop blaming yourself and start changing the environment! So this week, we’re going to build on this idea. You’ll start to notice how often your environment nudges your behavior. And you’ll learn how to design small changes that work with your instincts—instead of against them. Because willpower is overrated. Design is where the power is.