Ep #17 Training the Elephant

Making good decisions can be challenging during the holidays. Family activities, work parties and celebrations typically include foods that don’t serve our bodies. It’s easy to make excuses and overindulge. In the book, The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, the primitive brain and prefrontal cortex is described as an elephant its rider. As discussed in other podcasts, our primitive brain seeks to maximize pleasure, avoid pain and do the least amount of work possible. This includes justifying our bad decisions by saying, “it’s okay to overindulge during the holidays.” During this podcast, I expand upon this analogy and discuss how to retrain your elephant.