Hey I’ve listened to a lot of your content on obesity and how it is ultimately a largely unconscious process determined by how our genes interact with the surrounding environment. I was curious about what your thoughts are about how this is related to other behaviors such as addictions, mental health and emotional issues, etc? Do you think our understanding of this would be better if we dealt with the ideology around how diseases and disorders happen? It seems as if we are swimming upstream with this idea of self-control and how people get what they deserve (or don’t). I was also wondering if you know any good books on the biology or environmental causes of human behavior and perhaps how they ultimately have a large impact on our behavior? And one last question, if you have a patient that you interact with who is heavily bought into these beliefs, is there any way you gently interact to perhaps help them out with believing a lot of unconscious processes are happening in regards to behavior? What is your first step to help someone change their behavior?
This is a much bigger topic than we can feasibly discuss via the forum here, but you are correct that similar principles apply.
This understanding is relatively well-established in the research world and among experts in these topics; it just doesn’t effectively penetrate the “lay public” understanding of these things, for a variety of reasons.
“Behave” by Sapolsky.
We have a lot of content on this topic. For example, check out podcast episode It also comes up relatively often in our seminar Q&As that get put up as podcasts and on the YouTube channel.