how did my ancestors survive the brutal unforgiving wilderness when I get anxiety sweats from going to Target
to be fair im sure your ancestors would have the exact same reaction going to a Target
In the brutal unforgiving wilderness false positives cost nothing and false negatives are expensive. You’re better off being afraid of something that can’t hurt you than not afraid of something that can hurt you.
In a world where we mostly aren’t in danger, day to day, as long as we don’t play in traffic or jump off something, that’s no longer quite as adaptive.
We got our anxiety from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who were scared enough to survive, and pass on those genes!
It helps me sometimes to think about that at night, when I can’t sleep because my heart is pounding over something like “what if my usually reliable alarm clock doesn’t work in the morning for some reason and I’m late for work and lose my job and everyone hates me.” There’s nothing wrong with me, I just have a lot of extra, unused run-from-tigers juice that my grandparents left me.
“Unused run-from-tigers juice.”
I love that.
Our brains have been running Hunter/Gatherer 1.0 for 60,000 years without a software upgrade.
