Neuroscience Nuggets #3: Know Your Body Budget
I'm sorry to break the news to you, but your brain couldn't care less if you have a meaningful job, make a positive impact, or feel inspired daily.
It's got one main subject on its mind: to keep you alive and well. Basta!
The brain's #1 job is to regulate your body’s energy so that you can grow, survive and sow your seeds. This is called allostasis, or the body budget.
Think of your brain as a brilliant (albeit not-so-fun) bank account manager. She knows (even when you try to convince her otherwise) the amount of money coming in and out of your accounts at all times. She has exclusive analytics and back-end prediction algorithms that can anticipate and satisfy your spending needs based on your past experiences in order to keep you on track and out of trouble.
The way she works her magic is by:
Perceiving the sensations within your body (which she reads without your conscious awareness).
Perceiving the information from the outside world via your skin, your eyes, your ears, etc.
Interpreting your internal and external worlds to decide the best way to allocate your body’s energy to keep you alive based on your past experiences.
While she's fussing over all of this data, you, my friend, are doing normal life things that may strain your body’s budget in small and big ways: filling your to-do lists will impossible tasks, meeting up with friends four nights in a row for drinks, bing-watching Netflix series and going to bed each night after midnight, eating take-out because you have no time to cook, feeding yourself a steady stream of anxiety-producing news. Sound familiar?
Your day-to-day habits can take a toll on your body budget, resulting in a distressed bank manager who can resort to extreme behaviour to get your attention (like burning out, having a panic attack, lashing out at your kids at the end of an exhausting week).
But, more often than not, she’ll just send out a more subtle vibe or outlook on life.
In scientific terms, this is called “affect.” In common language, it’s called mood and it’s the energetic budget our brain is working with.
Affect is the general sense of feeling you experience throughout your day. It’s much simpler than an emotion and is based on the intersecting levels of two general feelings: pleasantness (aka valence) and intensity (aka arousal).
The combinations of high to low valence and high to low arousal look like this:
When your body budget is unbalanced, it colors your mood. But a general bad feeling doesn’t always mean that something major is wrong (e.g. Like you need to leave your life and move to Brazil). It could mean that, or it may simply mean that you are taxing your body budget.
What's the best way to maintain your body budget and positively influence your mood and energy? Healthy diet, exercise and optimal sleep are the three main ingredients to a balanced body budget.
So, what's the moral of the story then? Before you jump to conclusions about what's wrong with humanity, or make big life decisions, you might want to first stop and look at your body budget. Are you hungry? Exhausted? When did you last get some exercise?
These very basic factors have HUGE implications on our moods, and therefore on everything.