Simple: Yesterday’s Brain, Today's World, and the Forgotten Science of Living Well [9781538772850]

Overview

The modern world has out-evolved our brains and wrecked our mental health. Simple reveals the science behind closing the gap using six principles of our brain’s innate design.

The world around us is changing faster than ever. Between social media, intense work cultures, and clothes and food at the door with the press of a button, having the world at our fingertips is leaving us burnt out and lacking purpose and belonging. Simple is about the mismatch between our fast-paced, tech-obsessed world and our brains that evolved to their current state 300,000 years ago. Through six key principles, evolutionary psychologist Kristina Durante shows us how to harness our brain’s evolutionary superpowers to foster purpose and belonging.

Simple shows us how to cope, not by abandoning modern life to sleep outside and live off the land, but through thoughtful restructuring of our lives exactly where we are. Each of the six principles addresses a critical element of our natural, human habitat that modern life has stripped away but that we can restore. Dr. Durante tells us the story of how she hit rock bottom—facing eviction, job loss, and grief all at the same time—as a case study for the importance of meaning and purpose. She breaks down the psychology studies that show us how serendipity and pleasurable activities determine our day-to-day happiness. She points to our friends in the animal kingdom who can teach us a thing or two about empathy and interdependence. And she encourages us to look to our past to show us how the caregiving our young brains needed but didn’t receive resurfaces as adult anxiety—and the surprising fix.

Simple helps us heal the brain so that personal wellness has a fighting chance. It’s a blueprint to build a psychological greenhouse in a concrete world.