Live your best physical, mental, and emotional life using the Ancestral Lens
“NOTHING IN BIOLOGY MAKES SENSE EXCEPT IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION” - T. Dobzhyansky
Hello again everyone, and welcome to another segment of Smartt Talk.
My last segment focused on the longest day of the year, where I shared the importance of light as the primary cue for guiding our circadian biology (that phrase given to myriad processes in the body based on the rhythm of night and day).
Having touched on that topic, I’m inspired to take a step back and offer a broader perspective on health and wellness that is at the core of my entire view on how to live a life of physical, mental, and emotional well-being. It’s called the Ancestral Lens (an idea based on evolutionary biology), and the quote above sums it up perfectly. So many questions that we have today about the food we should eat, how to be social, how we should move our bodies, and how we should sleep. Things impacting our health that we don’t even know about can be understood (at least to the extent that we can understand anything) through this idea of looking at a topic through the blueprint of our hunter-gatherer ancestry or the Ancestral Lens.
Take the topic of circadian rhythm from last time. Recently, much research has been done on shift-workers, sufferers of jet lag, and the consequences of disrupted sleeping patterns, showing how hormones are disrupted, mental health suffers, we gain weight, performance drops, etc.
The results of that research provide very useful information, of course. If we look at circadian rhythm through the Ancestral Lens, we immediately get a simple, holistic understanding of how and why circadian rhythm is important for our health without getting lost in the weeds of detailed (and often siloed) scientific research.
The key to how and why this is so useful is to understand that our genetics are largely the same as our hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Paleolithic; not exactly, as we are always evolving, but so much so that our biology is very much expecting the same inputs (food, light, sleep, movement, social interaction, stress, etc.) that we experienced over our evolution (~2.5 million years worth).
Looking at circadian rhythm through an Ancestral Lens, we know that our ancestors woke up to see the reddish light of the morning sun, spent time in the peak, the blueish sun of mid-day, and finished their day with the reddish sunlight of dusk (cloud cover makes no difference, in case you are wondering).
What our ancestors did not experience was waking up to alarm clocks before sunrise, only to stay indoors with very dim light (relative to the outdoors); they didn’t generally avoid exposure to the sun during the day; and they didn’t stay up late looking into machines that produce a kind of light that our eyes didn’t evolve with (TVs, smartphones, computers, etc.).
So, with or without modern research (often seemingly conflicting, especially via the press), the Ancestral Lens offers a very simple and clear way to see that this aspect of modern life (artificial light and circadian rhythm) will inevitably be very difficult for our Paleolithic biologic genes to deal with. For most intents and purposes, that’s all the info we’ll need to guide some of our lifestyle choices. If more information helps you, there’s always plenty of research and experts to refer to.
Put simply, the more we stray from a natural circadian rhythm, the more stress is placed on our bodies which will be a significant factor in whether or not we develop one of many modern chronic diseases.
I hope I’ve conveyed the Ancestral Lens concept in a way that helps you look at your health issues within the context of our modern world and how they might affect your health. We’ll apply the Ancestral Lens to more topics of health and wellness going forward, where I’ll do my best to make it useful and pragmatic for you as you tackle the challenges of modern life.
Remember, you are the one with the most control over your health.