Hacking Evolution: Ditch Anxiety Get Happy...Forever

By Brad Kelln

Hacking Evolution: Ditch Anxiety Get Happy… Forever (Revised)

By Brad Kelln

Approximately 47,000 words

 

Advance Praise for Hacking Evolution: Ditch Anxiety Get Happy… Forever

 

"HACKING EVOLUTION is a self-help book for people who hate self-help books. In it, Dr. Brad Kelln offers the equivalent of an operator's manual for the human body, the most complex 'machine' we know of, but written in a very plain and straightforward way, devoid of anything that might sound 'airy-fairy'. Not one to soften a punch, Dr. Kelln hits you right between the eyes with practical skills and science-backed information to help you manage your anxiety in ways that are easily understandable and offered with genuine care. Gritty, funny and very honest, HACKING EVOLUTION will help you to see that even your super-anxious brain is probably still a very normal one — one that you can learn to ignore more often to find greater calm and peace in your life."

- Dr. Ian Shulman, PhD, Clinic Director & Clinical Psychologist

Shift Cognitive Therapy & Assessment, Oakville, ON

 

"This book makes so much sense...a must read for anyone who has any level of anxiety and who wants to generally feel happier and more content."

- Shauna, 37, Mental Health Professional, Halifax, Nova Scotia

 

"I loved the suggestion of creating a badness scale. There were times over the past few days where using that technique really helped put things in perspective of not letting something trivial elevate me or affect my mood."

- Richard, 44, Mental Health Professional, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Description

Why aren't people happier?

What can we do about it?

Do you want to reduce negative feelings and feel better? 

 

This book was written to help. 

 

Fully revised, updated, and with new exercises.

This ground-breaking book explains why evolution wants you to be unhappy and what you can do about it. With over 20 years of experience, Dr. Brad Kelln, clinical psychologist, takes you on a fascinating journey into the evolution of your brain. In this humorous and personal exploration Dr. Kelln will explain how your brain is designed to make you look for problems and be anxious but he will also show you a path to fixing it. You will learn about finding those spaces between thoughts where you can exist without anxiety, anger, or concern – you will learn to find your own QUIET MIND.

 

The premise is so simple you'll wonder why people haven't talked about this before. Your brain evolved in much the same way as the thumbs on your hands. Throughout the early stages of humankind, the brain worked to help us survive. But our world has changed drastically in a very short period of time while our brains haven't. Find out what your brain was meant to do and why that is making you unhappy today.

 

This edition of the book also contains a new appendix with more exercises to help you reach your goals of reducing anxiety and finding your own Quiet Mind.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brad Kelln
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781777304515

Brad Kelln

Dr. Brad Kelln is a clinical and forensic psychologist with over 20 years of experience. He has worked in hospitals and private practice for the entire length of his career. In addition to presenting at local, national, and international conferences, he has been qualified, numerous times, to be an expert witness in court proceedings. He also maintains a small, but busy, private practice and regularly consults to law enforcement. Throughout his career, Dr. Kelln has struggled to understand the most difficult and concerning behaviors of others. Never satisfied with existing models of psychology and mental health, he has sought to expand the scope of mental health and make it more accessible and useful to everyone. Over and over his search for answers has led him back to human evolution as a key component of understanding people and ultimately helping people feel better. For years, an evolutionary model has provided him to tools needed to work with a forensic population. When Dr. Kelln turned that evolutionary lens on general mental health and the global epidemic of anxiety a light bulb went off!    Personal Statement from the Author This is the most important thing I’ve written. I truly believe in every word and have lived this model of Quiet Mind for years. I think it is time to share this with the world. The ideas here represent a fundamentally new way of understanding our brains and why they work the way they do. More than that, this book helps get the conversation of change started. We don’t have to be unhappy and anxious any more. Let’s Change how we Think About Thinking.

Book preview

Also by Brad Kelln (fiction):

Lost Sanity (2001)

Method of Madness (2002)

In Tongues of the Dead (2009)

Tell Me More: A Blake Waiter Mystery (2018)

The Russian: A Blake Waiter Mystery (2019)

New (Under) Ground: A Blake Waiter Mystery (2020)

Introduction

You’ve made a great choice. From this moment on you will be moving towards change, towards feeling better. You will expose the inner hardwiring of your brain that kept you anxious and unable to feel content, relaxed, and open to happiness. It starts here.

Do you often wonder why you aren’t happier? Do you sometimes feel guilty because, objectively, you seem to have everything you need but you’re still not happy?

Maybe you wake up thinking that there’s nothing to look forward to. Life is boring. Work sucks. I should buy something on Amazon.

But that makes you feel guilty. So you try to convince yourself that it’s a nice day outside. You remind yourself that you have a nice place to live, a job that pays the bills. Maybe a family that cares about you if you choose to believe it. So who are you to whine?

In fact, your logical, rational brain tells you that you’re better off than 99% of the rest of the people on Earth. You’ve heard, so many times, that a good proportion of the world lives in poverty or war-torn countries or both. A lot of people aren’t safe, don’t have enough to eat, and in some places they don’t even have access to clean water!

And now you contemplate how good you have it as you let your perfectly clean water run and run while you hover over the sink brushing your teeth.

What a selfish bastard you are!

So yes, not only do you feel unhappy but then you feel like a total jerk for feeling unhappy. It’s a bit of a double whammy. You really want to be one of those count your blessings people and feel happy and content but you just don’t. Or can’t.

Then you go to bed.

Then you wake up and start all over. Eventually, it just feels like you’re killing time. Eventually, it feels like you’re simply trying to get by as best you can until something fun happens.

How many people are waiting for the next big vacation trip? Or Christmas? Most of us try to suppress our feelings of unhappiness – divert those negative energies – in favour of planning the NEXT BIG THING. We store up all our positive energies waiting for that all-inclusive vacation, the once-in-a-lifetime Europe trip, or the fabulous Christmas break just to block out the day to day drudgery. And it works!

For a bit.

It works until the big event comes and goes in the blink of an eye. Even worse, how many times does the big event, the big holiday, or the Christmas break just not live up to the hype. That makes it so much worse because then we have the disappointment of coming back to reality paired with feeling cheated by how crappy the trip was! That ends up simply throws us headlong, smack back into the same old, same old:

Why am I so unhappy all the time? (Maybe I should plan another vacation.)

You aren’t alone. Most of us are unhappy. It’s an epidemic in our world these days but not the kind that makes everyone wear a mask to Wal-Mart. It feels like the more conveniences and advances that arrive in the world, the more and more unhappy we all are.

This book is going to introduce you to a very radical concept that might not initially provide much comfort but in the end there is genuine hope. Hope for a new pathway. Hope for a greater understanding of how, and why, your brain is wired to make you unhappy...and then how to change that. The premise you will soon explore is the result of a revelation I had based on my years of attempting to understand people and coming to the ultimate realization... 

You aren’t supposed to be happy.

Seriously.

You know how you see some people who seem happy all the time – like nothing ever bothers them? I used to refer to those people as Homer Simpsons. I assumed they were somehow clueless to everything around them, otherwise how could they be so gloriously happy and unaffected by how miserable the world was. Right? I labelled those people because I was jealous and because I saw them as exceptions to the rule. Annoying exceptions to the rule that we’re all supposed to be unhappy.

Well, those Homer Simpsons were actually, legitimate, exceptions to the rule. We aren’t supposed to be happy. Our brains are hardwired to prevent constant happiness. Instead of criticizing the Homer Simpsons’ of the world we should have tried to learn from them. How does someone stay happy in a sea of misery? Maybe we might have figured that out if only we hadn’t been so wrapped up in our own misery.

Too often, we just stop caring about being happy. We settle at being distracted from our unhappiness and just keep on surfing around Facebook. There’s nothing like a good dose of social media when you want to pretend to forget how miserable you are.

You don’t entirely realize it but going online shuts your brain off. It isn’t happiness but at least it isn’t unhappy so you accept it. It’s sort of like a state of numbness. All the pointless surfing time trains your brain to crave that state of oblivion where, at least for those brief (and sometimes not so brief) periods, you don’t feel unhappy, guilty, frustrated, and alone.

That is, until you shut off the iPad.

This is a book about what’s actually going on. A book about why you feel the way you feel and why anxiety is so rampant. It’s going to take you back to the origins of humanity to help you understand what an enormous uphill battle you have to be happy and free of anxiety. Being unhappy is actually built into you. It’s hardwired into your DNA – a part of your programming because it provided a tremendous advantage to our distant ancestors. The ability to worry was essentially one of the only reasons why we’re still around as a species!

But more importantly, this is a book about what you can do about it. And just to show my cards early – it ain’t easy but it sure might be worth it.

As a psychologist I’ve spent years trying to understand people and trying to figure out ways to help them. Every so often, a new pop psychology approach comes along. Some of the approaches eventually bring with them years of sterile, unrealistic clinical trials that generate statistics proving how effective they are. These days it is so common to hear empirically supported as a benchmark of what approach to try next. Truth is, in my twenty plus years, nothing worked really well all the time. People are complicated and the society we live in is even more complicated and changing rapidly. I wanted a model that transcended current fads. I wanted to understand people in a fundamental, basic way that intuitively just made sense.

Ultimately, evolution provides an answer. How can we hope to understand how and why people act, think, and feel the way they do unless we examine the millions of years that shaped and molded us? When I started to use evolution as a backdrop for examining even the most complicated and baffling concerns of psychology it turned on a light bulb. Then another light bulb. Then another. I expect you’ll have a similar reaction as you work through this book.

A central theme of my approach revolves around how anxiety was an enormously helpful characteristic, selected and cultivated by evolution, to assist early humans to survive. There are countless spin-offs from this idea that speak to our inability to relax, our difficulties feeling content, and even our tendencies to be irritated or angry. Luckily, the same ideas that explain our negative mindset also speak to ways to fix it - or ways to hack that evolution.

I have used the ideas you’re about to read to change my life and the lives of the people I work with. You will learn why worry was crucial for survival and how we can get rid of it now. You will learn what it means to feel relaxed, content, and open to positive experiences and feelings like never before. I have been so excited to develop and use this approach that I finally couldn’t deny the urge to get everything down into a concise document meant to educate and help anyone.

So sit back, relax, and join me on a journey of self-discovery that may end up changing your life and releasing you from the evolutionary chains of anxiety that have held you down.

Get ready to be happy.

Sincerely,

Brad Kelln, PhD

Clinical Psychologist

p.s.

One final note for readers: This book was written very deliberately to initially introduce and educate you about the way your brain evolved and why. The extended discussion in Part I gives the foundation for change that is possible in Part II. I would recommend you read Part I before jumping to Part II but I know some people will be too curious about making changes to be that patient. For those people I have provided some suggestions about how to jump around from Part I to Part II at the end of relevant chapters. The real point is that this book is yours to absorb, play with, try, and use, in whatever way will give you additional moments of calm. I hope you take full advantage of this book and the changes that are possible.

PART I

The way your brain works and why

Chapter 1: You’re Not Special or Unique

To understand why anxiety is such a common experience and why happiness seems so elusive, we have to travel back to our early ancestors.

Evolution is a very difficult concept for most of us to wrap our heads around. Sometimes we can’t even remember what we did for our birthday six months ago so trying to comprehend the enormous timeframes of evolution can be daunting.

But it is so important.

Think about it this way. Imagine you’re shopping for a new dishwasher and you have two choices. The first choice, let’s call it Model A, was built by one person in about thirty minutes and doesn’t cost very much. The second choice, Model B, was built by about twenty people over the course of six months and costs considerably more. Now you, being a wise consumer, want to get the best model and are willing to spend a bit more if it’s worth it. What questions do you have?

Do they both do the same thing?

Why did it take so long to build Model B?

Does Model B do something different than Model A? What else was Model B designed for?

And, in general, I bet you’ll assume that Model B must be better quality. I mean, it took more people and much longer to build it so it has to be better designed. Right?

That same argument and line of questioning should apply to the evolution of people. We, as a species, didn’t just arrive and weren’t built quickly to simply fill a spot in the world. We were built very slowly over a long period of time. As a result, there are a few crucial assumptions / foundational beliefs that you must understand - although understand is likely not a strong enough word. You must absorb and come to fully appreciate and integrate these things to get the most out of the rest of this book.

What needs to happen is you need to digest the rest of this chapter and let it sink in because the time scales, the nature of evolution, and the power of it, are all concepts crucial to understanding who you are and how you are built.

The first thing to appreciate is that life is random and we’re all just biological anomalies. You often hear people refer to humans as part of the animal kingdom. While this is true I think it is worthwhile to push the argument back even further. Humans are a part of the biological soup of this Earth. We’re only one possible recipe crafted from the same ingredients in the biological pantry as literally any other living thing from single cell organisms through to the blue whale. And just as most people wouldn’t confuse cookies with waffles or a fresh loaf of bread - humans aren’t often confused with blue whales or single cell organisms. But just like the cookies, waffles, and bread; humans, and all the rest of the living creatures, share a tremendous amount of the same basic ingredients with the rest of the biological world.

So humans aren’t special or unique.

Life isn’t special or unique.

It just happened to occur on this planet.

And why does life exist?

The simple answer (and the correct one) is that life exists because it didn’t die. Do you know why there are blue whales in the ocean? It’s because they haven’t all died. Do you know why there’s no tyrannosauri around - because they all died.

Life exists because it hasn’t died.

Life isn’t special. Humans aren’t special. We all exist on this Earth because we haven’t gone extinct. We haven’t gone extinct because we’ve survived. That does seem a bit circular but it’s really crucial that you understand it.

Every biological thing exists because it survived.

Life comes and goes. It is a great experiment of what works and what doesn’t.  Back to the recipe analogy. Let’s say you wanted to invent a brand new dish. You start by using whatever you have available in the kitchen. So for this experiment you toss together:

-  flour

-  eggs

-  some salt

-  olives

-  butter & milk

-  cayenne pepper

-  cheddar cheese

-  chocolate chips

After mixing, you decide to cook it in one big sheet until it browns and voila! Garbage. It’s sort