What you see is what you get. We tend to think that our senses simply carry messages to us, messages to which desires respond. Yet our environment, in addition to being the physical source for what we sense, deeply affects the message we receive.
When people consult with me, it’s common for me to recommend dietary changes. More often than not, the issue of overcoming the desire for certain foods comes up. In these situations, we’re accustomed to thinking that the desire is in the person and the food is sending our “eat me” messages. It makes it look like the only way out is to suck it up and squelch the desire. What I often discuss is ways to change the environment so that the food is less provocative, which is really about developing an awareness of what the person’s senses are doing.
Several pieces of research brought this issue to my attention last week.
An article in the Journal of Consumer Research describes how choosing between a granola bar and chocolate bar is affected by words to which experimental subjects are exposed before making a choice. For example, if exposed to words such as “weight,” the person will tend to choose the granola bar (allegedly a healthy choice, something that deserves a whole other conversation). On the other hand, if exposed to words such as “delicious,” the person will tend to choose the chocolate bar.
Appearing as it does in a journal for the marketing professions, this experiment is more than a parlor trick. It has business implications. It is an example of priming, the psychological concept for how environmental cues set up how someone responds to sense data. The researchers note that this is important information for consumers as well as marketers. No kidding.
What’s calling to you isn’t just some object of desire overwhelming your senses. Your senses are also bringing a wealth of information from your environment that’s priming you for a particular response. As everyone should know by now, the center of the grocery store is set up to make you susceptible to high profit margin processed foods and those products at the checkout counter are where they are for the same reason.
Your environment sends information through your senses. If you become aware of those messages, you can act on it to affect the message you’re getting from that object of desire.
A second instance of how our senses affect us concerns secondhand smoke. A report from the Institute of Medicine concludes that banning smoking from restaurants, offices, and public buildings has been very effective in reducing such things as heart attacks. What they’re talking about is creating an environment that is not only hostile to smoking, but hostile to smokers. What messages come from such an environment? In a study of how social networks affect people who quit smoking, those who remained smokers become increasingly isolated—in other words, punished through ostracism. Yet smoking remains glamorized in movies and to a lesser extent in television under the guise of artistic freedom. Given the huge cost in suffering imposed by secondhand smoke, wouldn’t it make sense to create social and physical environments that prime people to end their addiction?
The final instance of how our senses affect us comes from a research project in the Netherlands. Researchers found that living close to green space reduced the risk of a wide variety of conditions—heart disease, depression, anxiety, diabetes, asthma, migraine, urinary infections, gut infections, and a category called “unexplained symptoms.” One researcher noted that areas with more green space have less air pollution, a major culprit in all of these conditions. But I can’t help thinking that the greener environment itself is communicating directly with people’s bodies. One of the oldest pieces of research in this area found that patients recovered from surgery more quickly and with fewer complications when their hospital beds looked out onto trees.
The individualist ideology that pervades our society leads us to the mistaken belief that we just have to suck it up and resist “bad” foods, cigarettes, and bad habits that cause the chronic diseases that plague our society. Like Ulysses resisting the Sirens, we just have to lash ourselves to the mast so we won’t throw ourselves to temptation. Instead, I believe that the environments we choose, create, and change can make all the difference if we give our senses the full awareness they deserve.
“Personal Environments” and “Natural Environments” in our book Too Much Medicine, Not Enough Health discuss these issues further.
