Emma Seppälä Has Thoughts on How to Avoid Kneejerk Decisions

When it comes to your brain, who’s in charge: you, or the onslaught of incoming stimulation? In “Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty and Chaos,” Emma Seppälä, a psychologist with academic postings at Yale and Stanford, argues that modernity has forced the human brain into a highly reactive mode, effectively hijacking it with nonstop information and noise.

To soothe ourselves, Dr. Seppälä says, we mindlessly adopt an array of coping mechanisms, some of which are self-destructive, from excessive eating and alcohol intake to angry outbursts and social withdrawal. But there are ways to interrupt our kneejerk reactions and cope more thoughtfully, Dr. Seppälä argues. She spoke to The New York Times about her work and the science of resilience. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In the book, you describe a formative experience in college involving your relationship to food. What happened?

Starting at the age of about 16 or 17, I developed an eating disorder. I would binge-eat when I was feeling low, and then I would feel worse. It was an addictive habit, a compulsion.

In college, in 1996, I went to a meditation session. It was Korean Zen, strict: You stared at the carpet for an hour with little to no instruction. I thought, I’m never ever doing this again.

But I felt peaceful afterward. Then, the next day, I felt down again. There was an old leftover pizza in the dorm room. It wasn’t even a kind I liked; it was gross. But I had this impulse to binge, because that’s what I did when I felt bad. And suddenly a light went off in my head and I thought: I always cry after I binge, and that makes me feel a little better, so why don’t I cry first? In that moment I thought, OK, I’ll cry and then I’ll binge all I want.