Our species — Homo sapiens — has been around for approximately 300,000 years. And for most of our early existence, our brains were primed to function on high alert, so that we didn’t become anyone’s lunch.
But times have changed, and most of us aren’t all that likely to become anyone’s lunch on our commute to work. In fact, modern life is now practically anathema to how we’re wired on an instinctive level.
If you’re prone to worry and anxiety, or have difficulty focusing on single tasks, you’re not alone. Rather than trying to make you happy, your brain is doing what it’s programmed to do best: simply trying to keep you alive in ways that are frustrating or even debilitating in our modern, everyday lives. Here are 9 frustrating ways that shows up:
1. Attempting to keep you in a cozy little comfort zone.
One of the most basic protective mechanisms that our brains have to try to keep us safe is to make us feel that our cozy little comfort zones are, in fact, the best, smartest places for us to remain. This ancient approach to maintaining existence must have worked well for our cave-dwelling ancestors, but it can cause a great deal of frustration in modern life.
For example, you may find yourself remaining in a toxic situation far longer than you’d like to because the fear of change is greater than the discomfort of staying. Alternatively, you may hold back from a potentially rewarding challenge because you might fail at it.
In today’s world, failure isn’t actually a big deal: you can just regroup and try again. But in the past, failure might have resulted in you falling into a tar pit or magma-filled crevasse. And that’s what your brain is trying to protect you from, even though those dangers no longer apply.
2. Placing you on high alert to potential harm.
Chronic, generalized anxiety is, in part, due to something called negativity bias. Basically, our brains are wired to detect potential threats rather than being focused on positive, rewarding situations. This makes us hypervigilant to all the things that could potentially go wrong at any time, in any area of our lives.
While this was invaluable for our predecessors to avoid being eaten by Smilodons and giant predatory birds, it’s not terribly useful for mostly sedentary office workers choosing hues for color-coded spreadsheets. Your lizard brain is chronically worrying and trying to keep you safe by any means necessary, even though there are little to no threats within hundreds of miles of you. If that.
3. Producing an intense fight-or-flight response that’s disproportionate to the actual threat.
If you get a stressful email or phone call, or your boss calls you into their office “for a talk”, your brain might respond with the same high cortisol and adrenaline response that would have enabled you to evade being eaten by a giant bear by running away as quickly as possible.
Logically, rationally, you know that your life isn’t in danger. You’ve proven yourself more than capable of handling challenging situations multiple times over the years. Your brain, however, is certain that it needs to jumpscare you in order to keep you alive, no matter how many times you try to convince it otherwise.
4. Struggling to lose weight.
Your brain and body have a finely tuned hormonal system that regulates almost every major function, from metabolism to reproduction.
This system takes note of when you aren’t consuming enough calories, and ends up holding onto fat reserves as fiercely as possible as a protective mechanism. The reason being that our ancestors never knew when their next meal would be, so weight loss could result in a serious threat of potential starvation.
As a result, if you’re trying to lose weight, you’re literally battling against your brain’s natural instinct to keep fat on you in order to keep you alive. This can get incredibly frustrating for modern-day people who are trying to remain as fit and healthy as possible.
5. Inspiring doubt where there should be none.
Your brain is constantly weighing up situations as a means of risk avoidance: essentially keeping you from leaping into potentially dangerous situations. Even if you know, logically and rationally, that you’re fully capable of doing something, your brain may sow seeds of doubt within you as a means of trying to keep you alive.
This can be frustrating because you may really want to do something, but your mind makes you second-guess your own abilities.
For example, you might have trained for a couple of years to do a marathon race, but you’re wracked with panic at the last minute because your mind keeps warning you that you might get hurt. You want to do this! You have people rooting for you, sponsors, new shoes, everything… but your brain just says “nope.”
6. A preference for instant gratification rather than long-term goals.
Our ancestors knew full well that there was no guarantee that they’d live another day. They’d witnessed life being cut short on countless occasions, for dozens of different reasons. As a result, they ate food when it was available, slept when they could, and took advantage of whatever benefits life offered them in the moment.
In many ways, your brain is still functioning with this Paleolithic programming. And this becomes problematic because, unlike our ancestors, we have everything at our fingertips now. Most of us have an abundance of everything, and we don’t have to wait for anything.
We’re inclined towards prioritizing immediate rewards rather than long-term gains, but now there are almost always immediate rewards to be had.
Without you realizing it, your brain keeps telling you that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, so it may encourage you to eat that burger and sleep for 10 hours instead of helping you to remain focused on your long-term fitness goals.
7. Freezing in awkward situations.
The same freeze response that kept our predecessors from being detected by predators with very large teeth and claws is what makes you freeze up in unexpected or awkward situations.
This is the response that would have made your ancestors hold very still in the shadows when a big, scary Something was near, and is now trying to keep you safe in a similar manner when your boss initiates a friendly chat in the elevator. And while this behavior might have served your predecessors well in the distant past, it can lead to frustration, embarrassment, and even lost opportunities when it happens now.
For example, if you freeze and lose the ability to speak when you’re feeling nervous or awkward, that can lead to rather horrendous results in situations like job interviews or first dates. You know deep down that this situation isn’t dangerous to you in any way, shape, or form, but your amygdala very much feels otherwise.
8. Catastrophizing everyday situations.
If your brain makes you jump to the worst conclusions you can possibly imagine to avoid being blindsided, you aren’t alone. We tend to overthink and make contingency plans for every possible outcome, and that often involves analyzing everything that could potentially go wrong so we’re prepared to leap into action as required.
The amygdala’s job is to flag any potential threats to your well-being. This is the part of your brain that keeps you up at night, trying to determine anything and everything that could go poorly, so you have potential maps to follow in any given scenario. It’s essentially a means of feeling a sense of control in uncertain circumstances.
None of us ever knows how life is going to unfold, and that causes most people an enormous amount of anxiety. Catastrophizing offers a veneer of certainty and stability in that regard, even though it’s ultimately only an illusion.
9. Stress insomnia.
When we go through difficulty, it’s difficult to get a good night’s sleep. Even though it’s one of the best and most beneficial things we could experience, it somehow manages to elude us.
People sometimes call this being “tired but wired” because they seem unable to wind down and get much-needed rest, even when they’re feeling exhausted.
This is due to nighttime hypervigilance. Many ancient predators came out at night and would have pulled our ancestors out of their caves or huts to snack on. As a result, if you’re feeling stressed or vulnerable, your brain will naturally remain on high alert at nighttime to keep you alive. It’ll keep adrenaline and cortisol swirling around your body, so you don’t drift off into vulnerable rest time.
Final thoughts…
Although it may be tempting to get upset with your brain for interfering with your life, try to remember that it’s just trying to keep you alive and well. Find techniques that can help you reduce stress — either on your own, or with a therapist’s help — and be gentle with yourself when your innate reactions run counter to your personal preferences.
The brain function that has kept our species alive for millennia has a very difficult time adapting to modern existence, and it can’t always tell the difference between a real threat and a temporary irritation. Understanding that is often the first step to gently pushing back on it so that you can prioritize happiness, and not just survival.
