Is Your Anxiety an evolutionary flaw or survival? Let’s learn if it really is!
It is said that no species in this world is equipped with any capabilities that it does not need. Nature is all about simplicity and it never does more work than needed. Even human consciousness, outside of all the possibilities that it opens us up to, was never an intention or a gift. It was needed for our species survival.
Even something like our ability to imagine and visualize things that do not exist in our visual capacity was born out of our need to survive. Our obsession with food and sex also exists for the need for our survival and the survival of the species.
So in a world where everything is given for a cause, why do human beings face anxiety? Is anxiety about our intelligence gone wrong? Is it nature’s miscalculation in assuming our environment?
For that, it is important to understand what anxiety is outside of just the symptoms of anxiety.
Anxiety is like a fire alarm where there is no fire and just a little heat and you do not know where that is coming from and now the alarm is way too loud. That is anxiety.
Picture credit- HelpGuide.org
The amount of safety and certainty that human beings live in is extremely new. A few hundred years ago, your chances of stepping out for a walk and never returning were much more than what it is now. So the human brain became extremely efficient in keeping us away from threats. And it used anticipation of the danger and the fear that comes from it as a language to demotivate us from getting into a dangerous situation.
Here, the interesting thing is that our conscious understanding and neurological understanding of what is dangerous is extremely different.
To understand this, it is important to work that your brain is an extremely complicated and sophisticated system that works on evidence. Hence if your brain does not have the existential evidence to prove that a situation does not pose any threat to your survival, it will try to keep you away from it. Hence, predictability and unpredictability associated with a certain situation become the determining factor of whether or not your brain considers it safe.
Your brain is designed to demotivate you from changes because that is how it kept you alive. Hence, your brain is also really good at detecting when something changes. The time you sleep, the cigarettes you smoke and everything else that you have made a habit of is what your brain thinks will help you stay alive.
So when you want to do something that you have never done before, your brain will switch the alarm on. Your brain goes “change detected. Unpredictability expected. Uncertainty detected. Might die. Abort mission. Save a life”. And here is why your brain is extremely complicated. It KNOWS how to demotivate you. It does that by exaggerating the threats associated with the action.
The thing is, your brain only knows one type of fear. Fear of death. So when that fear is born from uncertainty, that is what we call anxiety. If that fear was born from a certain moment where you come face to face with death, your brain will shut its logic system and send your body into a fight or flight situation. But in uncertainties, these fears manifest as anxiety.
Picture credit- Inc magazine
So to answer the question at hand, anxiety is not an evolutionary flaw. It is a major part of what got us so far in evolution. The problem though is that your brain is not quite sure of the time that you are living in. And it does not give up very easily on what kept you alive so far.
It is important to remember that a few thousand years ago, the alarm that went off in your brain was right 9 out of 10 times. And now due to our civilization, technology, and safety that anxiety is almost always wrong and we are left with feeling like wanting to run for our lives and we do not know what we are running away from.
So, when you want to go on stage and you are freaking out, your brain doesn’t think that you are going on a stage and the worst thing that could happen is that you could forget your lines. It thinks that this is an unpredictable situation that could kill you.
So, just remember that understanding anxiety is the most important part of fixing it. Anxiety is a miscommunication because of your conscious mind and your brain and it is up to you to tell your brain to stop buying the stories about the worst-case scenarios that your brain gives you and start doing what you want to do to help your brain get over the fear. And meanwhile, forgive yourself for freaking out, because if your ancestors hadn’t freaked out, you wouldn’t have been born. Just know that you are in a much safer place.
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Originally published at https://www.fuzia.com.