Just a Thought by Amy Johnson

Author:Amy Johnson [Johnson, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781684038183
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2021-08-05T21:47:40+00:00

What did you think in a moment in time that has stuck with you and now looks true?

Part II:

That’s Just What Minds Do

15. Minds Worry

I learned to worry at an early age.

My mom worried a lot, often aloud, and I had no clue that what she was worrying about wasn’t real. You don’t as a kid.

We were going to run out of money. We’d have to eat canned soup every night. We were going to lose our house. My dad was going to get custody of me and my sister.

It was all completely real in my mind, and I’m sure it was real in her mind too. But none of it was truly real. None of those things happened.

The things we worry about usually don’t happen because worry isn’t about what’s happening in the outside world. Worry is our imagination creating dramatic stories and images that we confuse with reality.

Worry is the natural result of evolution. The modern human brain is about two hundred thousand years old, meaning, it evolved to survive in the environment humans lived in two hundred thousand years ago when survival was tenuous, at best. There were physical threats like famine, predators, and dangerous weather that required nearly nonstop present-moment focus. When a person felt fear two hundred thousand years ago, it was an adaptive response, alerting them to an immediate physical threat. There was a clear and obvious protective action to take—when they took the action, the fear subsided. Scientists call this an immediate-return environment, one in which you get an immediate return on your actions (Martin 1999). Early humans followed their natural instincts in the moment and were immediately rewarded with surviving into the next moment.

Although our brains haven’t changed much in the past two hundred thousand years, the world we live in has. We now live in what evolutionary scientists call a delayed-return environment (Leary and Cottrell 1999). There are very few threats to our survival, and most of our actions, like working for next week’s paycheck and grocery shopping for tomorrow’s dinner, have a delayed return. They don’t result in an immediate payoff, and certainly not a life-or-death one. The return on our effort-investment comes sometime in the future.

Because the environment has changed far faster than our brain has, we have a bit of a mismatch. Your brain is still behaving as if you might starve to death or be eaten by a hyena at any moment even though you have a cupboard full of food and you only see hyenas at the zoo. When your mind screams in fear today, it’s almost never in response to true danger. And because there’s no immediate action to take, the fear doesn’t arise and then quickly dissipate like it did in an immediate-return environment. You can’t fix a problem that only exists in your imagination, so there’s little resolution. With nothing in front of you to immediately protect yourself from, your mind interprets the fear in other ways, by imagining what might go wrong. As

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