For much of my adult life, I was playing by the rules of the system. Following the standard blueprint of centering much of my life around career advancement, creature comforts, social status, etc. And by these metrics I was quite successful.
I measured success by what society deemed important rather than by how good I felt, or by how healthy I was, or by how aligned my day-to-day life was with my greater purpose, but through a years-long period of introspection and observation, I began to realize that our definition of success in the modern world is very much misaligned with the natural order of things.
As society has “progressed,” along with it has come an alarming rise in obesity, hypertension, mental health problems, feelings of aimlessness and being trapped in a system that seems incongruent with nature.
In a world where humans, just like all other mammals, are meant to be highly mobile we have become sedentary. In a world where humans are meant to eat natural foods from the earth, we have resorted to fueling our minds and bodies with processed and artificial substances. In a world where fresh air and sunlight should be an integral part of our existence, we spend most our time indoors protected from the elements. In a world where humans should be strong and capable, we have become weak and highly dependent.
In short, we have domesticated ourselves. We’ve become “civilized,” and it’s not without a cost.
I eventually realized that it was vitally important to find a way to take a step back and reconnect myself with the natural order of the universe by intentionally rejecting the aspects of modernity that we associate with progress. I realized that I needed to find a way to become “uncivilized” and embrace my primal human nature, but also while continuing to be a functioning member of modern society.
For clarification, by becoming uncivilized, I don’t literally mean going back into the woods and living like a caveman. I mean finding time and space in my life to embrace more primitive aspects of the human experience to counterbalance the negative effects of all the comforts and conveniences afforded to me in modern living.
So after much experimentation and exploration, I’ve managed to come up with a system that has reconnected me to my primitive roots and re-introduced to my life principles of daily movement, self-reliance, natural eating, exposure to the elements, taking on purposeful yet challenging projects, and more.
Doing so has profoundly altered the course of my life. I’m now much healthier than ever. I don’t think it takes much convincing if you look at photos of myself from 10 years ago and compare them to more recent ones. I’m way stronger and physically capable than I was in the past. My energy levels are higher than ever. My libido is higher than ever. My mood and my mental state is much more stable than before. My mind is much sharper and more resilient. I’m way more confident in myself.
Overall, I find myself having the desire, the determination, and the discipline to really live up to my fullest potential during my short time here on earth.
And speaking with many of you, people just like myself, people who have invested a lot of their time and energy into becoming successful within the traditional system, I’ve learned that I’m not the only one who has realized the need to shake things up, and reconnect themselves with nature for better health and wellness.
It turns out that a lot of you out there, do also want to become much more physically, cognitively, and spiritually fit. A lot of you want to find a way to fight against the social constructs of modern living which are leading you to put on unwanted body fat, rely on medications for chronic illnesses, become less physically capable than you once were, feel less confident than you wish, have less energy than you need, and struggle with mental health.…. and so I’m here to give you a few pointers that you may want to consider if you REALLY want to finally make it happen for yourself.
When it comes to becoming “uncivilized” I like to break things down into three domains, diet, movement, and lifestyle. I’ll very briefly go over each.
Diet –
Let’s start off with diet because I truly do believe it is the single most important, and impactful element in any self-improvement journey. A pretty big pet peeve of mine is that people tend to only think about diet in term of “weight loss.”
Yes it is , in fact, a very integral component in a physical fitness plan, but it is foundational to virtually every aspect of life, including focus, cognitive function, energy levels, immunity, mood, etc. The great thing about this is that the diet principles that apply to melting away fat and building muscle are the same principles that apply to improving all other previously mentioned areas of life.
Dieting comes down to some very simple rules that anyone can apply. The irony of these rules is that they follow a “less is more” approach, and are largely the opposite of the standard advice that’s typically given by the government, doctors, and various medical organizations. If you are skeptical about this, then Metabolical by Dr. Robert Lustig is a great resource for gaining clarity on this topic.
Once you let go of all of the previous programming you’ve received around what a healthy diet looks like, you’re ready to start adopting an Ancestral Diet similar to our primitive forebearers ate.
This means generally sticking with whole foods that you would imagine a hunter-gatherer would have eaten. These are usually foods that can easily be acquired at farmers markets or in the perimeter of the grocery store. Meats, seafood, eggs, fermented foods, non-starchy vegetables, low sugar fruits, leafy greens, nuts, herbs and spices, animal fat for cooking, and fruit oils (olive, avocado, etc) for non-cooking uses.
There obviously is a bit more too it than just eating these foods, but centering the majority of your diet around these foods will take you very far in your mind, body, and spiritual fitness journey, and most importantly in reconnecting you with your primal roots.
Conversely a few major culprits that you want to avoid as much as possible are processed foods, wheat-based foods, seed oils, and refined sugars. In the grand timeline of human history, these foods have only been consumed on masse in recent years. They are not representative of what the anatomically modern human subsisted on for the vast majority of our existence. So simply minimizing or fully eliminating these elements will take you a very, VERY, long way… and I do mean it.
Additionally, fasting is another interesting point to consider, as the concept of three meals throughout the day with virtually no extended period of zero food consumption is also a relatively recent facet of modernity. Constantly consuming food not only is a matter of calories, it is also a matter of hormonal imbalances, especially with insulin, which is the cause of so many uniquely modern epidemics ranging from diabetes to Alzheimer’s. So fasting is another way to intentionally incorporate beneficial primitive eating patterns into your diet routine.
Movement –
Regarding movement. When you think about it, agrarian society has only existed for, at most, 5% of the total amount of time that anatomically modern humans have traversed the planet. This means that most of our existence entailed us hunting, foraging, fishing, and gathering our food. This also means that we were not necessarily bound to one single physical location, as climate change and animal migration patterns drove our own movements.
All of this means that the modern human is a highly mobile creature. Our survival required us to run, jump, crawl, climb, swim, lift heavy things and our own bodies, and walk for very long distances. It was only after the dawn of agriculture that we started to slow down and fix ourselves geographically. And then as modern technology, supply chains, infrastructure, and service-based economies took hold in very recent years, we have effectively eradicated any amount of appreciable movement from our lives.
If you don’t use it, you will lose it, and that is exactly what is happening with our minds and bodies because of our sedentary lifestyles. The lack of physical exertion afforded to us in the modern world means we generally have less muscle, strength, agility, speed, balance, bone density, testosterone and the many other things you’d intuitively associate with movement. Thus, we end up with a slew of problems such as the preventable deaths among older people who end up in the hospital due to broken bones after losing their balance and falling.
What’s more is that the brain is directly connected to movement. Lack of movement also means higher chances of dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, lower cognitive function, mood problems, and so much more.
So next time you’re fighting for the closest parking spot to your destination so you don’t have to walk a few more steps, think about how much of a disservice you’re doing to yourself by refusing to use your body the way it was intended. This is the societal norm.
So it is essential to reintroduce daily movement into our lives, and my opinion is that the two most significant forms of movement are walking/running, and maneuvering oneself while under resistance primarily from their own bodyweight. Yoga, Pilates, and calisthenics all fall under the bodyweight form of movement.
While other forms of movement are also highly beneficial, such as sports, weight lifting, and others, I believe it is fundamentally important to first build a foundation of strength and mobility using the body and the body alone. Not only does this improve the mind-body connection along with other under appreciated skills such as proprioception, it also promote self-sufficiency as bodyweight training requires no equipment and can be done anywhere, any time, and any place, reducing dependence on external factors that prevent many from remaining consistent.
Lifestyle –
The lifestyle element is a bit broader as it covers basically everything that is not diet or movement related. While I’d love to discuss this aspect in its entirety, it’s a bit too much to cover in this article. But I’ll touch on a few.
To simplify, I like to break the lifestyle aspect into two subcategories which are 1) connecting with nature and 2) connecting with the subconscious. In short, they both allude to our need to connect with the natural order of both our external environments as well as our internal mindset.
With the onset of consumerism, an abundance of creature comforts, the internet, fast paced living, cheap dopamine, and endless distractions, most of us end up becoming disconnected from the realities of our existence.
We spend countless hours indoors, depriving ourselves of sunlight and fresh air. We sit down hunched over staring at digital screens all day. We use endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our cosmetics, household products, and our food and then we wonder why we suffer from seemingly random cancers and other chronic diseases. We follow a rapid news cycle which does nothing but increases our levels of stress, fear, and anxiety. We turn to social media to fill our time instead of facing the reality of boredom head on, causing the onset of a mass brain-rot epidemic.
I can go on, but I think you get the idea. However, if you’d like to explore this in more detail then I recommend picking up a copy of Civilized to Death, by Christopher Ryan (no relation) which discusses these issues at length.
So it is vitally important to intentionally incorporate lifestyle habits that re align us with our human nature.
Connecting with nature –
This entails connecting with the natural environment in the physical sense, as well as in the behavioral sense.
So connection with nature means literally spending time in parks, around vegetation, or even introducing plants into the home. It also includes practices like barefoot grounding, getting adequate fresh air and sunlight, and limiting exposure to artificial and hormone-disrupting substances to the greatest extent reasonably possible.
In the behavioral sense, it means practicing things like proper sleep hygiene by discontinuing use of digital devices an hour or two before bed and minimizing use of artificial lighting after the sun sets. It also means finding ways to slow down and live life at a pace that flows with nature rather than constantly being in a hurry. In other words, it means finding time to engage in productive yet challenging pursuits that unlocks curiosities, creativity, deep learning, and a state of flow which, in my opinion, are all factors that contribute to truly feeling a sense of fulfillment and abundance in one’s life.
Connecting with the subconscious –
This entails blocking out the daily distractions, anxieties, and stresses that come with modern living, and taking time to deeply understand one’s self.
They say that the conscious mind represents only about 5% of a person’s total life experience, while the other 95% goes undetected. This means that we barely even know ourselves. And without knowing ourselves, it is impossible to truly align ourselves with the proper mindset, habits, and lifestyle that brings us true health, wellness, joy, or fulfillment.
This is how we end up realizing that we actually hate our jobs, or end up trapped in a romantic partnership that leaves us feeling resentful rather than loving, or that we’ve spent half of our lives focused on things that don’t actually matter.
I speak from personal experience when I say that these misalignments within the subconscious mind affect the body at the genetic level and causes genes to be outwardly expressed in ways that we don’t want them to be. In other words, being misaligned in the subconscious mind can make us predisposed to getting sick easily, developing chronic diseases, putting on unwanted body fat, suffering from mental health problems, being depressed, etc.
I recommend Joe Dispenza’s book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, if you want to dive deeper into this, because I can’t do it justice with these couple of paragraphs.
So, now that we’ve briefly covered the three domains, let’s quickly go over a process that you can use to bring all of this together, become less civilized, and reconnect with your primitive human nature for better physical, mental, and spiritual fitness.
Focus on establishing foundational diet, movement, and lifestyle habits
Home in on your diet and movement regimen with ruthless intensity
Implement “lifestyle design” for greater connectedness
Firstly, it’s important to not do too much too soon. So you want to simply focus on introducing some basic habits into your life that will serve as a foundation for breaking the status quo of sedentary living, poor diet, and disconnected lifestyle.
In this first phase it is best to focus your efforts on doing some basic bodyweight exercises every single day, squats, pushups, pullups, and walking… nothing more complicated than that.
You’ll also want to start restructuring your diet to include 80% whole and minimally processed foods. This entails getting into the habit of looking at ingredient labels and generally being more mindful of how much processed foods have entered into our everyday lives.
Additionally, this is a good time to begin the daily practice of getting adequate amounts of sleep at night and sunlight first thing in the morning.
That’s it for the first phase.
For the second phase, you’ll want to aggressively build on top of the habits that you’ve begun establishing for yourself. So beyond the basic bodyweight resistance movements, you should start introducing some more sophisticated calisthenics into your daily movement routine so that you can really start to build muscle, increase your bone density, improve your balance, fortify your mind-body connection, and boost your cognitive functioning among other things. And in doing this, you also build self-sufficiency because you’re learning how to do all of this outside of a gym, so membership fees, travel, and lack of equipment will never be something that gets in the way of you and your daily movement practice.
Additionally, in the 2nd phase, you’ll start increasing the intensity of your ancestral eating practice. So here you’ll really start to home in on minimizing or even outright eliminating processed foods, sugars, seed oils, and alcohol. This is also a good time to start incorporating intermittent fasting into your eating routine as well. The main goal here is to not only develop a healthier relationship with food, but also to really begin to use food as medicine and as nutrition rather than always being something that is expected to be a source of pleasure and instant gratification.
Notice I don’t ever mention anything about counting calories or taking supplements, because once again, these are relatively new concepts that never existed as a part of the human experience up until 100 or so years ago. So in reconnecting with your primitive nature, there’s really no place for having such a formulaic approach when it comes to eating. When you break away from the Standard American Diet, and get back to eating foods that humans have eaten for all of our existence, nature does the job for you. Your appetite, your hormones, your metabolism will find their happy place naturally.
If you really attack this 2nd phase with focus and intensity, you will see significant change in pretty short amount of time. Once you begin to see progress here, then you’re ready to move onto the third phase.
In the third and final phase, the focus is more on the lifestyle aspect. You’ve now locked in on a solid diet and movement routine that is reconfiguring you mind and your body to operate at its maximum potential. You’ve focused on building better sleep habits and getting morning sunlight. So now you can shift your attention to incorporating elements that open up your spiritual being.
This is where you’ll start to incorporate a mindfulness practice along with implementing activities that will make you become more connected. These include practices like grounding, reducing exposure to endocrine disruptors, and altering your relationship with digital media among other things. With greater connection comes greater understanding of not only how the world works, but also what your place is in it. And with this knowledge, you are better able to navigate it in a way that is aligned with being more physically, mentally, and spiritually fit.
If you follow a process like this, then you can fundamentally change your life because you’ve started to be intentional about how you use your time, and you’ve allocated a percentage of your time to stepping outside of the conventions of modern living and reconnecting with the more primitive aspects of human existence.
This was a lot to cover, so I realize that I skipped over the intricate details in the name of trying to keep this article brief, but if this is something that you align with then you may like to know that I have taken the time to build out a 60-day program that walks you through this process in a systematic way to help you break the monotony of “civilized” life.
In my program I provide a step-by-step approach that you can follow to reinvigorate that primitive being that has been trapped inside of you. If you really believe there is value in tapping into ancient wisdom, using your own body to build strength and mobility, eating the same diet that your ancestors ate, and intentionally making lifestyle alterations to be more connected to your environment and your subconscious mind then this program is perfect for you.
If you can commit to 60-days of challenging yourself to “go primal” then I can guarantee that you will absolutely change your life. You will become slightly less civilized, slightly less domesticated… you’ll instead enjoy being significantly healthier, stronger, more capable, more grounded, and more connected.