The evolutionary psychology of emotions, leadership, instinct, and addiction
Why Evolution Built Your Emotions, and How to Make Them Work for You
You are a hunter-gatherer in a glass tower, running ancient software finalised for a world that ended about a minute ago. This book is the manual you were never handed — a complete evolutionary account of every important feeling you have, where each one misfires in modern life, and what to do about it.
Leading People the Way Evolution Intended
Your employees are running stone-age software. If you manage in alignment with how that software works, you get loyalty, engagement, and performance. If you manage against it, you get resentment, quiet quitting, and turnover. A practical guide to managing real people in real organisations, built on evolutionary psychology and thirty years of experience.
When to Trust Yourself and When to Trust the Machine
In a world racing to automate everything, one thing remains stubbornly, gloriously human: your instinct. Part neuroscience, part leadership manual, part manifesto — the essential guide for anyone who refuses to be replaced by the algorithm.
The Evolutionary Roots of Alcohol and Drug Addiction, and How to Break Free
A drug skips the trigger and pours chemistry straight onto the reward — the purest case of evolved machinery turned against the person carrying it. A compassionate field guide to a trap older than any of us, for the person caught in it and for everyone who loves them.
Evolutionary insights applied to parenting, relationships, and everyday life
Understand Your Child's Emotions — and Parent With Less Frustration
Your child isn't a small adult — they're a small human running very old software, and every tantrum, fear, and flat refusal is that software doing exactly what it was built to do. A Designed to Feel companion for parents: what each of your child's emotions is actually for, where modern life makes it misfire, and how seeing that turns the daily battles into something you can meet with far less frustration.
What Evolution Reveals About Your Child’s Emotions
Your child’s emotions are not the problem. They are the operating system. From the carry-species instinct that makes your infant scream when set down, to the social-status machinery that makes your twelve-year-old cruel — every feeling your child has is traced to the survival problem it was built to solve. This book is the manual you were never given.
What Evolution Tells You About Leading People
Your employees are running the same ancient social software your ancestors carried on the savannah. This companion to The Tribe Manager strips leadership back to its evolutionary essentials — what actually drives loyalty, what triggers disengagement, and how to build a team that thrives because you’re working with human nature, not against it.
What Evolution Actually Built Your Partner’s Emotions For
Your partner is not broken. Your partner is running ancient software. She is running the gatherer’s brain — networked, emotionally tagged, socially calibrated. He is running the hunter’s brain — linear, solution-focused, spatially mapped. Both systems are brilliant. Both kept our species alive. And both are spectacularly bad at understanding each other without a manual. This book is that manual.
What Evolution Really Built into the Woman You Married
She is not mysterious. She is not irrational. She is running ancient software — the gatherer’s brain, finely tuned by millions of years of selection for social vigilance, emotional memory, and threat detection. Every argument you don’t understand, every reaction that baffles you, every silence that means something — this book traces it to the survival problem it was built to solve. A Designed to Feel companion for husbands: the manual you were never given.
What Evolution Really Built into the Woman You Love
She is not crazy. She is not overreacting. She is running a threat-detection system calibrated over millions of years of keeping children alive in a dangerous world. Every emotional response that baffles you — the sudden tears, the grudge that won’t die, the argument about something you said three weeks ago — is that system doing exactly what it was built to do. This book is the decoder ring.
What Evolution Really Built into the Man You Married
Your husband is not broken. Your husband is running ancient software — the hunter’s brain, linear, solution-focused, emotionally compressed. His withdrawal is not indifference; it is a stress response older than language. His fix-it reflex is not dismissal; it is the only form of care his operating system knows how to offer. This book is the manual he never came with.
What Evolution Really Wants You to Do with Your Life
You are running a programme designed for a world that no longer exists. This book shows you how to use it. From work and relationships to mastery, legacy, and mortality — a practical guide to aligning your modern life with the ancient system that is steering it, whether you like it or not. The capstone of the Designed to Feel series.
What Evolution Actually Built Your Joy For
Happiness is a signal, not a destination. A fuel gauge, not the fuel. This book picks up where Designed to Feel left off and walks the full path from insight to practice — what the Three Currencies of wellbeing actually are, how to earn them, and how to stop counterfeiting them.
Evolutionary Psychology Author
Peter Burchardt writes about one subject: what happens when you put an ancient animal in a modern world. His work sits at the intersection of evolutionary psychology, behavioural science, and the practical question of how to live well with the mind you were actually given.
Designed to Feel is the foundation — a complete evolutionary account of human emotion, from the survival problems each feeling was built to solve to the ways it misfires in modern life. Override explores the tension between evolved instinct and artificial intelligence. Hooked by Design examines addiction as the purest case of evolved reward machinery turned against the person carrying it.
The Happy series applies these insights to the arenas where they matter most: Happy Children and Born to Feel decode your child’s emotional operating system. Happy Couple, Happy Wife, and Happy Husband trace relationship conflicts to the different survival software men and women are running. Happy Employees and The Tribe Manager bring evolutionary logic to leadership. The Happiness Blueprint and Happy Life step back and ask the largest question: what does a well-lived life look like for the animal you actually are?
With more than thirty years of international experience as CFO, CEO, and board director, Peter brings not academic credentials to these subjects, but pattern recognition — decades of watching human behaviour up close and mapping those observations against what the science actually says. He is based in Dubai, UAE.
Available in seven languages
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