"Have you ever found yourself lying awake at night, mind racing with worst-case scenarios about a minor work interaction? Or felt your heart pound over an email notification that turned out to be nothing important? I've seen this pattern many times in my practice: intelligent, accomplished people whose lives are disrupted not by actual threats but by their brain's hair-trigger response to shadows. This isn't irrationality. It's an ancient survival system doing exactly what it evolved to do, just in the wrong context."
"Our brains evolved with a fundamental tradeoff between speed and accuracy. When our ancestors faced potential predators, the ability to rapidly respond to shadows or movements (even at the cost of frequent false alarms) provided a massive survival advantage. The rustle in the grass might be wind, but treating it as a predator costs only a small energy expenditure, while the reverse mistake could be fatal."
An ancient survival system prioritizes speed over accuracy, producing rapid threat responses from ambiguous or partial signals. That system operates outside conscious awareness and makes conjectural snap judgments based on incomplete information. Plato linked survival drives to conjecture, describing a lowest, fastest form of knowledge that deals with shadows rather than reality. Anxiety often reflects this threat-detection system operating in contexts where it is no longer adaptive. Trauma can recalibrate the system, increasing sensitivity to specific threat patterns and producing persistent hypervigilance and disruptive false alarms in modern social and work environments.
Read at Psychology Today
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