So what if it was never supposed to be like this. What if your mind was never designed to cope with all of this input that we force feed it every day. Television at home, in the gym, at the doctor’s, on the go, Radio in the kitchen, in the car, internet everywhere, even my washing machine is on-line, the list goes on. Ask yourself right now, how many channels of input your mind plugs into each week.
I have always been fascinated by the human conditions and our evolution. As a behaviourist, I believe that primitive drivers have a bigger input than we give them credit for, and we overlook them because we believe we’re not primitive anymore, right?
The thing is we have no perspective. If all time was a clock and it was midnight, human evolution would only be 1 second, we’re practically wet behind the ears. We are hardwired with primitives still, and you only need to look at our success as a species to know that these strategies got us here. I wonder at what stage our design stabilised, and the environment considered us fit for purpose. Our minds must have been amazingly alive at that point and attuned to all things survival; food, territory, shelter, procreation.
It is fair to say that we began to form clusters and tribes from ‘the off’ because we needed each other to make all of that stuff work. What always blows my mind when I think about this, is the fact that way back at the very start of us, we didn’t have language; I can only assume we connected with each other’s souls and each knew what had to be done. People who have found a soul mate know that often words are not required. What brought/brings people together in a tribal way is shared objectives, ones designed for the greater good, and are bigger than the individuals they benefit. When you cooperate and connect emotionally with a person, the good brain chemicals kick in. You feel all of those feelings because your brain is rewarding any evolutionary behaviour it wants to encourage i.e.cooperation. Falling in love is an excellent example, especially at the beginning. As the primitive drivers go about ticking off things on their evolutionary todo list. We know now that it is not down to the stars or fate if we fall in love, we know instead that it’s the brain that’s mixing up the medicine. If you watch programmes like First Dates you will hear plenty of people say – ‘there was no spark,’ ‘I didn’t feel any chemistry.’
Look at our young; they are as so helpless, pretty useless actually. They can’t walk, hell they can’t even sit up. It takes many hands to raise them and for our ancestral selves it wasn’t any different; they collaborated to hunt and gather and care. The bones of an ancient skeleton were discovered to have a serious leg fracture, but one that had healed and refused long before she died. If it really were just survival of the fittest then the extent of this injury would have taken that bloodline out of the evolutionary chain. The fact that he grew old meant that a society or group had to have been taking care of them. I also heard a man on the radio the other day say that only humans and whales have a menopause. He explained that this is because we were needed to raise the grandkids and we wouldn’t do this if we could continue to have our own to nurture. So the eggs were counted, deposited a sell by date established, along with a programme to embrace the generation jump. This was set in the brain along with being part of that bigger family unit.
Ruby Wax, the American comedienne, explains the crux of the matter so very well in her video where she describes her journey to mindfulness and mental peace. She explains that our brains were designed only to know and care about what was going on in our family, in our tribe and with our neighbours and this was the parameters set by your survival territorial programming. As tribes grew, they merged, and eventually we became societies. Today for those who have the ways and means to get out there, and the good fortune to belong to the right tribe, we are now a global society, we can if we choose, be citizens of the world. That’s a lot of neighbours to worry about.
So then back to my initial point, we were not made to process all of the dynamics of all of the largest societies across the globe. Why? Because we can’t exert any influence over them. If the primal us were threatened, we would have fought for our territory or moved on. Either way, it would have been a direct action to an immediate threat. With these rumbling in distant lands, we are helpless to influence them; for some they live in our conscience and drive a primal instinct to act, but with no possible action to take.
The consequences, as I understand them, are serious if we allow ourselves to exist in this state for prolonged periods of time. Dr Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University in one of his lectures explains: In our brains we have neurons and at the centre of these neurons is the Axon Hillock. The Hillock is supposed to sit in negatively charged environment waiting for the stimulation of positive charges to the cell to cause it to activate. Enough charge and this will cause the cell to fire its message or instruction across the synapses. Scientist have shown that when we are under prolonged stress, results in the Hillock living in an environment full of positive charge, reducing its sensitivity and resulting in the alteration of your brain and its functions. In tests on rats, scientists showed that under continuous stress conditions, two major things alter in the brain. The hippocampus which deals with the passing of short term memory to long term memory by making meaning of things shrinks! Another change is in the Amygdala, the part of your brain that deals with emotions, it grows! So letting the ills of the world spin the flywheel of your mind, your firing all of these survival responses with no outlet. The consequences? A diminished ability to make reason of things and an amplified emotional response to issues rather than a reasoned one. Is that a tradeoff you are willing to make?
Knowing about the stuff that is going on in the world in unavoidable, unless you really are unconnected to the world, but if you don’t find a way to ensure it is not spinning the flywheel of your mind, then you are sacrificing more than you know. Could this stress and tension across the world be why the issues of race and defending your territory are once again on the rise with emotion not reason steering the ship?
Once upon a time there were two men. One lived on a croft in the Highlands of Scotland and the other lived in the centre of the city of Glasgow. The Highlander and his family did not watch television much and had no on-line devices. He and the family just dealt with the day to day of farming, eating and living life. The man in the centre of the city checked his extended world through many portals every day and was constantly connected to people and events.
One day, a big country threatened another big country, and the man in the city knew completely what was going on. He had watched political analysis, predictions of potential outcomes, conspiracy theory (there is always a conspiracy theory) and was terribly worried about what the future might hold for his family and the world. The man in the Highlands heard the news, but without all of the noise that surrounded it, he did feel concern as an emotion and for a while, but in the absence of the stream of information feeding into the mix, his feelings abated as they always do. Both men in the same country, both in the same world, both face the same future, but one has more peace than the other.
Mindfulness would teach you to hear this news, feel the feeling then like the man in the croft, deal with your life. You become comfortable in the knowledge that you don’t need to worry about things that you can’t control. You have the ability to pause your brain and disengage from destructive thought patterns. This does not mean that you don’t care, it just means that you realise that you have no control over events in general, the only control you do have is how you choose to think about them. Pause, meditate and switch the brain environment back to neutral.
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