Mind over matter

Dear Dr Ash,

When I was four or five years old, my friend and I used to dig holes in the sand and pretend they were racing cars. We’d sit in those little dugout vehicles for hours, decorating the dashboards with shell buttons and equipping them with driftwood gear sticks. It’s one of my earliest memories of friendship. We’ve remained close throughout our lives, but in our early 30s things started to change. At first, he started joking about how the Apollo moon landing had been faked, and we’d laugh about it. Then he got pretty serious about flat earth stuff – he was no longer laughing. He now thinks the sun went out many decades ago and “they” have put some sort of giant lamp in the sky; that the clouds and winds are generated by fans; and there’s a secret agency rigging our elections. Needless to say, he thinks the American deep state conspired with China to release Covid-19 and the vaccines were devised to microchip humans.

The thing is, I don’t even mind that he’s into all this stuff, it’s mostly quite harmless. It’s just he never wants to talk about anything else. Every topic comes back around to conspiracy. And it’s frustrating trying to talk to him about it because he seems to have mountains of “evidence” at his fingertips and endless time and interest for all of the tiny details. I feel sad about it, but more and more I find myself avoiding his company. How can I convince him that at least some of what he believes is crazy? I’d like him to be himself, but does this mean at some level I’ve got to suppress my own views about reality? More than anything, I just miss my old friend.

Conspiratorial,
Coddenham

Dear Conspiratorial,

I had plenty of time to think about my reply to you because I was stuck in traffic on my drive back to Somerset from Winchester. That route follows the A303 directly past Stonehenge, where there is inevitably a traffic jam, leaving plenty of time for theorising. Has the A303 violated some sort of ancient Druidic planning code? Is the flow of traffic akin to an energetic flow, and the road will never work because it crosses ley lines? Is the stone circle channelling power to punish the world for the consumption of fossil fuels? If you have never experienced delusional thinking yourself, I promise you that half an hour of crawling bumper to bumper can be very illuminating.

Such attempts to make sense of a chaotic world represent the most uniquely human function of our brains. We are all natural-born scientists, generating and testing theories that help us understand the world in order to predict what may happen next. A more predictable world feels safer – we feel we have more agency in it – so emotionally these theories can feel very important. The greater our need for safety and agency, the greater our need for the theories.

At a basic level, we all engage in the sort of thinking that drives conspiracy theories. Our brains latch on to apparent patterns in random information, like when we see a human face in the bark of a tree trunk. Psychologists sometimes use the term “apophenia” to refer to this tendency to find meaning in meaningless things. An epiphany gives you insight, but an apophany, which feels very similar, only masquerades as insight. It’s not always easy to know the difference.

Your friend is seeking meaning in the world, like everyone, but he is going miles farther. His emotions are on the accelerator and his reason is on the steering wheel. It will take a few steps to communicate with him. First, remember his obsessions are likely both coming from and producing anxiety, so treat him with compassion rather than ridicule or scepticism. Second, don’t try to out-argue him – he is far more invested in these topics than you, and demonstrating that will only strengthen his views. Instead, take a Socratic approach: ask questions that elicit more details about his theories. Most people think they know more about a topic than they really do, and this sort of questioning will let them see that for themselves. Finally, remember that every single one of us holds beliefs that, on closer inspection, are demonstrably false. We just don’t know what those beliefs are until, in the end, we do.
Sometimes the best we can do is to maintain humility in the face of the unknown.

Best wishes,
Dr Ash

Dear Dr Ash,

I knocked back a much-needed half-bottle of wine (alright, a bottle, don’t judge me) after a heavy day at work last Monday, knowing it would give me a bad night’s sleep and a fuzzy head next day. It was the wrong way to cope with stress, but I was too tired to fight my lifelong programming – that I needed a treat. My question is: why do I slump on the sofa and reach for crisps when I know perfectly well that what my body really needs is a brisk walk, a litre of water and a healthy, vitamin-rich supper? Why, when I most need to nourish my body, does my brain tell me the solution isn’t the lovely fresh kale in the fridge but a large portion of hot, chunky fries doused in salt and vinegar from the chippy? Why does my brain collude in choosing short-term comfort over long-term health? Can I re-programme it to crave raw carrot sticks?

Unhealthy,
Upminster

Dear Unhealthy,

In the beginning of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, we meet Rebeca, an orphaned eleven-year-old girl who arrives, traumatised, with her parents’ bones in a canvas bag and the bizarre desire to eat soil. “The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered…” and soon was secretly stuffing handfuls of earth into her mouth with a “confused feeling of pleasure and rage”.

Rebeca’s story was my first encounter with pica, or dirt-eating. In Marquez’ story we see it as an expression of both trauma and suppressed sexual desire, but in clinical practice individuals with pica are often deficient in essential minerals such as iron, calcium and zinc. In these cases, evidence suggests that the drive to eat dirt may arise from the combination of a nutritional imbalance with a cultural and psychological state. Your preferred snack foods are more socially acceptable than Rebeca’s, but I wonder if the drives are not similar.

The food choices we make are influenced first by what scientists call homeostasis – the body’s natural drive to balance nutrients with needs. Many studies demonstrate that when infants and young children are given free access to healthy foods, they tend to binge on one at a time in the short-term but achieve a balanced diet in the long term. They may eat nothing but carbs for a few days in a row, for instance, and then nothing but protein. We all start from this place of balance.

But as we get older, our brains begin to make associations between the foods we eat and the internal states they create. We can be taught that foods with a lot of fat and sugar are rewarding and foods which require more effort to chew like kale are not. We are told that ice cream is a treat but an apple is “good” for you. The food industry bombards us with advertising that promotes highly processed foods over simpler ones, and our food choices become dominated by cultural and psychological factors over physiological ones. This is why it seems to take so much willpower to make better choices: we feel we’re going against our natural instincts. But the truth is that our natural instincts would serve us well, were it not for misdirection.

You can take back control, but not by relying on willpower and reprogramming. Just make sure that the healthy diet is, first and foremost, the most delicious diet. Skip the raw carrot sticks, and instead roast them in the oven until they are sweet and caramelised. Put some butter and salt on that kale, dish it out with some scrambled eggs. Splash out on the absolute best produce you can find – it will still cost you less than that meal at the chippy – and then cook it in very simple ways. You won’t be reprogramming your brain, but you will be tuning in to your natural instinct for balance.

Best wishes,
Dr Ash