You have two brains for decision making: one emotional for making short term decisions (eat junk food now) and one logical for making long term decisions (don’t eat junk food at all).

Let’s say one fine day you come home and follow a familiar and delicious smell into the kitchen. On the table you see a dozen freshly baked cookies just sitting there begging to be eaten. Your hand is half way to the cookies before you stop yourself and think, “I’ve already had enough calories today so I can’t have the cookies.” Then you say, “what the heck” and chomp down a few cookies.

Has anything like that ever happened to you? Doesn’t it feel like parts of your brain are fighting each other? Doesn’t it feel like you are being torn between two different decisions?

Well, you are! Brain imaging studies of people making decisions clearly show there are two different parts of your brain competing to see which makes the ultimate decision.

Who is doing the battling? When it comes to decision making, you have two brain systems: one emotional system for making short term decisions based on immediately available rewards and one logical system for making long term decisions based on long term rewards. Different brain systems have developed to handle different types of problems.

Your emotional brain is all about getting the short term reward. It doesn’t deal well with imagining the future consequences of current actions; that’s the job of your logical brain. The more immediate the reward, the more likely it is your emotional brain will win out against the logical part of your brain.

Borrowing from Aesop’s classic The Ant and The Grasshopper fable, your emotional brain is the grasshopper, always thinking about the now. Your logical brain is the ant, always planning for tomorrow.

The sight, touch, and smell of food kicks in your emotional brain and makes it very likely you’ll give in and eat. Your brain is putting a higher value on getting precious calories now and less value on more abstract rewards like better health when you are 70.

You may regret eating later as your logical brain gets a chance to chip in, but the chances are you will still eat. It’s like your brain is saying “food now or health later? Duh, I’ll take the food now. You never know when our next meal will come from. We may not even live to 70.”

Is your brain wrong? Should you eat the cookie or not? For our ancestors, the choice was clear: eat when food is available. We aren’t our ancestors, but we still have their brain. Your decision will likely be to eat the cookie, because for most people the long term reward (health, etc.) of not eating the cookie is less than the short term reward (pleasure) of eating it.

Logically, you may have decided junk food is bad for your health so you don’t want to eat it. But when face-to-face with junk food, and especially when you are hungry, your emotional brain will win enough of the time that you will slip-up. And slip-ups lead to falling off your diet. Even one bad decision a day is enough to tip the balance toward becoming overweight.

The big questions are: How can you make the long term perspective more rewarding? How can you give your emotional brain as little opportunity to operate as possible? We’ll consider both of these questions in later strategies.

The Single Mind Illusion

Just to be clear, this “two brain” idea is not a metaphor; it’s actually how your brain physically works. And the idea of “competition” between the parts is not a metaphor either. The two parts of your brain are actually competing to make decisions.

Your ancient limbic system, which includes your dopamine system, is involved in decisions regarding immediately available rewards, and your more modern prefrontal cortex gets involved for decisions about longer term rewards.

Your thinking appears seamless to your conscious mind when really, behind the scenes, many different parts of your brain coordinate their actions to bring you your thoughts.

It’s like ordering dinner a restaurant. Behind the scenes, all the chefs in the kitchen work together as a team, talking, coordinating, gathering ingredients, mixing them together, and then cooking them properly. If they do their job right, all parts of your meal are done at the same time and the waitperson brings you your plate with everything on it. When you get your dish, you don’t see all the hard work that went to make it. You just get to enjoy a fine meal.

That’s how your brain works too, you just don’t notice because the chefs are so good at their job. It is even more amazing when you consider your brain has 100 billion chefs (neurons).

Through your conscious mind, your brain creates the illusion that all thinking is the same, but on the inside, thinking happens in different areas of your brain and you’ll make different decisions based on where and how your thinking happens.

You have this “short term/long term” split in thinking we’ve been talking about. There’s also a “you/other” split in thinking. You’ll make different decisions when thinking about yourself than when you are making decision involving other people. There’s also a “like/dislike” split in thinking. You’ll form different conclusions from the same information for someone you like when compared to someone you dislike.

All this makes sense from a survival perspective. It’s not necessarily bad, but it is difficult to deal with because you don’t consciously know it’s happening. So you have to structure your life to reduce the chance of making decisions you would rather not make. This is what the Weight-Proofing strategies are all about.