Understanding Anxiety Through Evolution
Anxiety - what is it? Anxiety may be best thought of as a feeling of unrealistic fear, worry and uneasiness.
We all know what anxiety feels like because we will all have experienced it at some point -but perhaps didn't know what it was at the time.
Symptoms of Anxiety
They grunt conversationally at each other at the sun slowly sets.
Suddenly one of them hears a twig snap and a rustling noise in the grass.
He immediately reacts and starts to run and hide out of pure instinct to the unfamiliar sound.
His buddy merely stays still and laughs at his "chicken friend".
Suddenly, a hungry sabre tooth tiger appears from the long grass and is able to treat himself to a caveman supper (with fries) to go.
"Chicken" caveman is the one who gets to go back to the cave that night and tells his family all about the days events over a nice rack of woolly mammoth ribs and obviously he's the one to survive to eventually pass on his "jumpy" genes" Modern Fear So we see how for our ancestors, fear meant real fear and usually meant something that was literally a difference between 'life or death' for them.
Although our worlds can be dangerous with speeding cars and possibilities of airplane crashes, compared to our ancestors we live in a pretty safe world.
There is far less likelihood that we'll get killed during the day before we get chance to return to our modern day luxury "caves".
Today, fear for us is very different.
Fear and stressors that cause us anxiety tend to mainly come in the guise of social interaction: We tend to become anxious at the thought of:
Despite none of these being anywhere near 'life threatening' (despite sometimes us feeling they are at the time), our reaction to them has been developed as a survival mechanism over thousands of evolutionary years and therefore, our reactions over the actual "threat" is very often far too great.
We greatly overreact and hence experience all these symptoms of anxiety that were originally designed to keep our ancestors alive.
Now, similar symptoms arise from fear of looking a bit stupid in front of others or fear of not fitting in.
We all know what anxiety feels like because we will all have experienced it at some point -but perhaps didn't know what it was at the time.
Symptoms of Anxiety
- feelings of inner turmoil
- nervous behaviour
- sweating
- butterflies in the stomach
- feeling nauseous
- inability to focus or concentrate
They grunt conversationally at each other at the sun slowly sets.
Suddenly one of them hears a twig snap and a rustling noise in the grass.
He immediately reacts and starts to run and hide out of pure instinct to the unfamiliar sound.
His buddy merely stays still and laughs at his "chicken friend".
Suddenly, a hungry sabre tooth tiger appears from the long grass and is able to treat himself to a caveman supper (with fries) to go.
"Chicken" caveman is the one who gets to go back to the cave that night and tells his family all about the days events over a nice rack of woolly mammoth ribs and obviously he's the one to survive to eventually pass on his "jumpy" genes" Modern Fear So we see how for our ancestors, fear meant real fear and usually meant something that was literally a difference between 'life or death' for them.
Although our worlds can be dangerous with speeding cars and possibilities of airplane crashes, compared to our ancestors we live in a pretty safe world.
There is far less likelihood that we'll get killed during the day before we get chance to return to our modern day luxury "caves".
Today, fear for us is very different.
Fear and stressors that cause us anxiety tend to mainly come in the guise of social interaction: We tend to become anxious at the thought of:
- not fitting in
- looking stupid in front of others
- being laughed at
- being criticized
- being scrutinized by others
Despite none of these being anywhere near 'life threatening' (despite sometimes us feeling they are at the time), our reaction to them has been developed as a survival mechanism over thousands of evolutionary years and therefore, our reactions over the actual "threat" is very often far too great.
We greatly overreact and hence experience all these symptoms of anxiety that were originally designed to keep our ancestors alive.
Now, similar symptoms arise from fear of looking a bit stupid in front of others or fear of not fitting in.
