Anxiety Reframe

When it comes to anxiety, sometimes it’s helpful to remember that, for all our innovation and genius, we are still just fancy animals. We share neurochemical circuits with crustaceans. We perceive threat with the same brain regions as other mammals. We have key features that separate us, but the overwhelming majority of our physiological and behavioral makeup is shared with the rest of the animal kingdom.

Why does this help? Well, for starters, it means that your moments of anxiety are designed, not destroy you, but to keep you safe. They don’t come from a malevolent force that hates you and wants to see you suffer but instead come from millennia of evolution; refining a system to detect possible dangers and warn you of them.

Sure, a hyper vigilant alarm system is a little mismatched for the environments of modern living, but consider for how much of our evolutionary history anxiety kept our ancestors alive. It was profoundly helpful. In fact, they likely lived to be our ancestors BECAUSE they were more cautious than their non-anxious counterparts.

This doesn’t solve the problems posed by anxiety, but it can help to know that anxiety doesn’t mean you have a problem with your humanity. It is a fundamental human trait.

Sometimes it‘a easier to tolerate anxious feelings when we consider the thousands of generations of our ancestors who fought and struggled to survive, developing these circuits in the first place; and that perhaps now, it is your duty to continue in that line and evolve to transcend them.