The Stone Age Origins of Anxiety

I know, it’s kind of hard to believe isn’t it? Or is it? I mean, if you took away electricity and law enforcement from the world right now where would we all be?

Although the question sounds trivial, when you sit down and think about it, it explains a lot about how close we really are to our ancient ancestors.

I think we tend to forget about where we come from and what we really are because it’s uncomfortable for us to think of ourselves as anything less than special.

But it’s the cave person inside you that really tells the story about why anxiety is such an important part of you. And if you ignore that part of yourself, I think you miss a great opportunity to take the proverbial step back and see things in a bright new light.

So, let’s start with a visualization to help us see how descending from cave people helped fine tune our anxiety.

Imagine for a minute the old stone age, bear skin jackets and all. You’re out hunting for food but, you could also very well turn into some other animal’s lunch at the same time, so you’re on edge 24/7.

Think you’ve seen some dangerous places in your day? Try the late Pleistocene, without guns,or even iron tools!

This type of perilous environment is what led humans to develop a keen sense of danger. As a result, over the past several thousand years that sense of danger developed into an alarm system second to none. And you know it works well because you’ve seen this alarm system at work every time you panic or feel uneasy about something. That thing is strung tight.

What I’m calling the ‘alarm system’ is, in fact, the fight or flight response. And in addition to affecting how our bodies react to stress and danger, it also influences how we think. And there in lies the crux of this article.

To help me explain how this system affects our thinking patterns I’ll use  an example from Daniel Gardner’s book The Science of Fear. In it, Gardner gives a genius explanation of  how the human thought process can be broken up into two competing camps: Feeling and Reason, or what Gardner calls Gut and Head.

Gut

If you could bring Gut under control today all your abnormal anxiety would be out the window tomorrow, it’s that important to your anxiety problem. Gut is behind the type of thoughts you have before and during a panic attack, or any other kind of anxiety related episode. Gut thoughts are also:

• Subconscious
• Fast
• Based on Assumption
• Tied to fight or flight

Thoughts based on Gut feeling can be so fast in fact that they make you feel anxious even before you know why you’re anxious. It’s blazing quick. It’s also the kind of thought process that our prehistoric ancestors depended on for survival.

And it’s easy to understand why this was the case. Because if you were walking through the jungle and saw a pair of glowing eyes from behind a bush would you really want to stand there and analyze what you were looking at? Or would you rather let gut find the best exit route using its light speed? Head on the other hand is totally different.

Head

Head is like advice from your parents, sometimes hard to understand and accept, but correct almost 99.99% of the time. Head is the rational mind at work. It’s the part of your thought process that you use to make logical decisions based on evidence. Head is also:

• Conscious
• Slow
• Fact based
• Calculating

Head also doesn’t always work with gut, and in fact, gut in many cases will compete with head to decide the best course of action, or reaction, to things. And guess which one wins out in your brain most of the time? That’s right, Gut. This is  because it doesn’t take any effort to follow gut, it’s just easier to go with the flow of instinct and habit.

And when it comes to how you think, habits have an enormous influence over you and your daily struggles with anxiety. A big part of why this is, is related to your unintentional use of something called confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is when you favor information that strengthens something you already believe. It’s like when someone hears news about a school shooting and says, “see, guns are bad and should be banned.” In this case, the bad event just confirmed what the person already believed.

It’s also similar to when you have a physical anxiety symptom, like chest for example, that you’ve already tied to something bad. So that when you have chest pain instead of thinking about it in neutral terms, you’re more likely to jump to conclusions and link it to a possible heart attack or something along those lines.

So, instead of looking at thoughts and feelings impartially with Head, you’ve developed an anxious bias that makes it harder for you to break the cycle you’re in because you rely on gut reactions to gauge the danger that anxiety poses to you.

As a result, your cycles of anxiety are kept alive — in part — by confirmation bias because it fosters things like:

• Over-generalization
• Negative thought filters
• Magnification
• Emotional reasoning (Gut)
• Mislabeling

The bottom-line is that this type of Gut based thought process only serves to recall information and feelings that support your deeply embedded ideas about what anxiety is and what it can do to you.

But, even given all that, it’s still not a lost cause. You can actually use Head — pure logic — in your own defense, because you can use it to influence Gut. You do this by learning and re-learning information that undoes your false assumptions about anxiety.

Over time this information will seep into your subconscious mind where it can take hold and change your reaction to anxiety forever. You can use the frosty waters of Head to cool off your imagination and it’s criminal relationship to anxiety.

This is all possible because Head is conscious and therefore controllable. It’s accessible to you, unlike Gut, which is tucked away in the far reaches of the subconscious mind.

You should also know that it’s not your fault that you think anxiety is going to kill you someday. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Anxiety is designed to call your mind and body to action using the nastiest of sensations, so it’s not pleasant.

But all the nasty feelings and thoughts you have do serve a purpose in the whole scheme of things, it’s just that for you — and for more reasons than I had space to mention — that purpose has been expanded unnecessarily, and the trick for you is learning how to put it back in line.

Just don’t forget that anxiety is a natural part of your survival instinct, even if it makes you feel like crap. And like it or not this is all because, at your core, you’re still a cave person. A cave person that lives in the modern world, with modern stress.

You’re walking around with an internal alarm system that was meant to keep you alive in an environment that hasn’t existed for almost a quarter of a million years.

And that’s made life harder for you, and for all of us with an anxious disposition. I just want you to know that nothing about anxiety is unnatural or beyond your ability to cope with it. It’s been with us since, well since forever.