Anxiety: Disorder or Obsolete Tech?

As with all human traits, anxiety evolved. It was selected for because it had benefits that outweighed its costs in terms of supporting our species to adapt to our environment. Anxiety evolved both as a response to danger and as a defence mechanism against it. It’s the feeling and physiological response that both allows us to label danger and to prepare us to fight, flee or freeze in the face of the thing that caused it.

Anxiety is as much a part of us as happiness, sorrow, love, orgasms and shivering. We can’t throw or fully medicate it away because it’s part of what we are. It’s helped to keep us cautious of threat, unbalanced stress and other unhelpful pressures. In short: it’s helped to keep us alive.

So, if anxiety provided rich benefits to our ancestors, why do we treat anxiety in its various forms as a disorder in the modern world? Why do we target the systems of the brain responsible for it with medication? Why do we sell each other the story that experiencing it is something worth avoiding altogether?

Part of the answer is that, up until very recently (the last 500 years), the human central nervous system was evolving in an immediate-return environment.

How old is the human brain? Modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) – and our brains - emerged from sub-Saharan Africa approximately 200,000 years ago and took around 160,000 years to migrate from North-East Africa, up through the modern Arab Emirates and fold North-West into Eastern Europe.

During this time, our anxious responses were mainly acute (short-term) because they developed specifically to deal with the immediate costs or benefits of avoiding threats (predators etc.) or acquiring resources (food etc.). This meant that our ancestors were able to be with their anxiety in the present moment, use it to bring about a benefit and then allow it to pass when relief came.

Now, in the past 500 years, our environment has quickly shifted to one of delayed returns.

We have career aspirations; we have complicated families; we have communication streams pumping us endless information to consider; we have fifty-thousand varieties of quinoa to choose from to appease our health-conscious friends.

Our anxiety has adapted to an environment we no longer live in and the change occurred drastically quickly. Society speedily arranged itself so that most of our anxiety comes in response to things we must forecast relatively far into the future, causing chronic worry.

To visualise the speed of the environmental change, imagine there are five tall buildings facing you, each one bearing 400 windows. (That’s 10 across x 40 down). Each window represents 100 years of human history. All the windows representing 100 years spent evolving in immediate-return environments have their lights off. The remaining windows representing 100 years spent in other environments have their lights on. Only five windows have their lights on out of 200.

As a result, anxiety become a bad tool for the job. We have physiological and psychological responses that are designed to help us ride out short-term threats focused on problems that are hanging in front of us like abstract carrots, dangling in the murky future.

This often has the unhelpful result of tethering our thoughts to problems that haven’t occurred and don’t yet need to be solved whilst also leaving us ill-equipped at dealing with problems that are right in front of our face.

Immediate-return environment

Let’s imagine one of our ancestors 43,000 years ago – Fred. In Fred’s immediate-return environment, every decision and action she makes has some immediate cost or benefit:

1) Fred decides to expend a lot of energy climbing to get food when it’s scarce on the ground? Good job – Fred probably spent that energy wisely. Fred could have spent energy searching for more food on the ground >> this would have been a waste of time and energy >> Fred chose to search for food and resources elsewhere >> Fred makes it through the harsh winter.

2) Fred decides to spend a lot of energy overeating and failing to act when the food has run out? She probably won’t be so lucky. She’s over-eaten >> there’s no food left in store >> Fred fails to move and can’t even if she tries >> Fred cannot continue to sustain her gluttonous lifestyle.

How does anxiety figure into an immediate-return environment? Imagine you’re Fred and picture the scene.

You crouch uncomfortably low under a hawthorn thicket, your longer legs unused to such cramped spaces. Needles from the brambles puncture skin on your shoulders. If you could see the sky through the dense canopy of deciduous woodland above, its thick, grey cloud wouldn’t provide much more illumination to the black forest pressing in around you.

From several directions around you, you occasionally hear floor-level branches snapping or several leaves rustling in unison, suggesting that many colossal-sounding somethings are closing in on all sides. They’re closing in to kill you.

Your torso and shoulders are tensing, preparing to fight. It will be useless – the sounds around you tell you you’re outnumbered, and your hunters sound too strong at close-quarters. Your legs tense, preparing to run. This is also useless – you’ve spent hours crouching silently in the same spot and your calves and thighs are burned out.

As the sounds grow nearer, the only response your body is forced to make is freeze. You can’t move; your entire body is paralysed by surplus adrenaline; your throat feels tight; your thoughts become a fog of useless mist, dense as the trees you’re trapped in; you feel your pulse in your chest, wrist, neck and ears beating out-of-sync, like an excruciating drum; none of the air seems to satisfy your lungs; electrical fire seems to burn down your arms and legs as your nerves light up like a Christmas tree. You’re about to die and all you can do is wait in pain.

Suddenly, six figures burst through the trees – your kin. Your hunters were a familiar search party. Glorious relief courses through your body like sinking into a warm bath – you’re safe. One of them reaches out a hand to help you up and you continue your tracks through the forest.

Delayed-return environment

In a delayed return environment, most of the choices and actions you make will not benefit you right away. If you plan a great birthday party for your spouse, you won’t necessarily find out if they enjoyed it straight away. You must wait until the date of the party to oversee whether it goes off without a hitch and, even if it does, whether you pitched it in a way that your spouse enjoys.

If you write an essay or a piece of research, you normally must submit it and wait for an expert to evaluate it before you receive the result.

The intervening time is often a nail-biting wait to see if the returns you receive were worth the initial outlay.

Are there positive ways of engaging with anxiety? Many people continue to suffer with chronic anxiety, even after treatment, because of a story. It’s a short story that’s been written by multiple authors over a long period of time. The story’s authors include: the media; common sense; folk-notions of how medicine works; “Big Business”; the pharmaceutical industry; us.

The story goes like this. Anxiety is something like a computer virus which tampers with the software of our brain, corrupting some of its files, causing it to work improperly. If our brain is infected with this virus, we can go to a doctor and/or psychotherapist who can help us delete it so our brain can go on running normally.

It’s a story that has a strange relationship with the sudden change in environment that our species underwent. One the one hand, it suggests that our anxiety should be as transient as it used to be when we navigated immediate-return environments. On the other hand, post-treatment, when patients inevitably go on to experience further anxiety, the narrative that anxiety can be “cleared up” like a bacterial infection subjected to antibiotics can wind up being dissatisfying and alienating.

As with all archetypal stories, parts of it are true and helpful. We should go to medical practitioners, where a multidisciplinary approach of medication and therapy has been shown to give the best results in relieving symptoms of chronic anxiety. Anxiety certainly is to do with our brain and central nervous system.

But the truth is anxiety is not like a computer virus at all. Nor does any kind of intervention act upon it like our desktop ‘Recycle Bin’, although symptoms of chronic anxiety can be managed. It’s also not truly a ‘disorder’, despite the psychological nomenclature. Disorder, in medical terminology, is taken to mean roughly, ‘disruption to normal function’. That is: something that’s not working properly.

When viewed through an evolutionary lens, it’s not clear that chronic anxiety is a disruption to the normal function of human neurology. Chronic anxiety is simply how human neurology responds to critical pressure when it’s adapted for thousands of years to one environment-type, picked up and plonked in another. Can we say that an iPad isn’t working properly if we drop it in a swimming pool?

Consider shivering. Shivering is a central nervous response to environmental stimuli – namely exposure to temperatures that are even a fraction below critical. An area of our brain called the hypothalamus is set, like a thermostat, to recognise when our core body temperature drops. This centre is activated by ‘cold’ signals from the nerves in our skin and spinal cord. Signals are then sent to the muscles to produce activity (the shiver) and, thus, heat as a by-product.

If I really pay attention when I’m shivering, I notice that it’s an unpleasant experience. I’m cold when it happens; I feel fatigue after my body temperature returns to normal; my palms and other areas sometimes begin to sweat in sympathy with the production of lactic acid due to increased muscle movement in temperatures where my energy is thin-on-the-ground to begin with.

Fortunately, shivering is still a well-adapted central nervous response to a stimulus we still have an immediate-return relationship with. If the temperature is too low and we begin to shiver suddenly, we can go back inside or put on more layers to bring relief from the threat of hitting critical temperature.

Though, imagine if there was a subset of the population who developed a shiver to respond to temperatures, they knew were due to occur several weeks away. This would be a completely ill-adapted central nervous response to a delayed environmental stimulus. This is because it would signal to us and expend energy for us at a time that’s roughly useless.

This is something like the position our anxiety finds itself in as an evolved trait. It’s a highly adapted evolutionary trait which has become totally ill-adapted to a new environment.

How can thinking correctly about anxiety better equip us to deal with it as it arises? Tune in next week to find out… *Cough*