Super Stimulated: How Our Biology Is Being Manipulated to Create Bad Habits – and What We Can Do About It: The ultimate New Year, New Me book for 2026
by Nicklas Brendborg
Why You'll Love This
Your phone, your snacks, and your Netflix queue aren't winning because you're weak — they're winning because they were engineered to hijack your evolution.
- Great if you want: science-backed answers for why willpower keeps losing
- The experience: brisk and eye-opening — each chapter reframes a familiar frustration
- The writing: Brendborg translates biology into crisp, non-condescending everyday language
- Skip if: you want deep original research over accessible synthesis
About This Book
Every bad habit you can't seem to shake has something in common: it was engineered to beat you. In Super Stimulated, scientist and bestselling author Nicklas Brendborg argues that our struggles with doom scrolling, junk food, and binge-watching aren't personal failures — they're the predictable result of superstimuli, artificially amplified versions of things our brains evolved to crave. Tech platforms, food companies, and media algorithms have quietly reverse-engineered our biology, and the results are showing up everywhere: in our attention spans, our waistlines, our relationships. Understanding this mechanism doesn't just feel vindicating — it opens a genuine path forward.
What makes this book worth your time is Brendborg's ability to move between hard science and everyday experience without losing either. He writes with clarity and dry wit, making evolutionary biology feel immediately relevant rather than academic. The structure builds purposefully, diagnosis first, then actionable strategies, so readers finish feeling equipped rather than merely alarmed. It's the kind of book that changes how you see an ordinary Tuesday — the phone on your desk, the snack in your hand — and that perceptual shift is where real change tends to begin.