Stress and Distress: How Evolution Screwed You

If you're like me, stress can have either a positive or a negative effect on your productivity; Either it causes you to buckle down and work harder in order to alleviate that anxious feeling, or it causes you to basically collapse into a jiggling pool of worthless whines and moans, unable to complete basic tasks like 'get up in the morning' or 'stop watching youtube for a damned moment', no matter how pressing other matters are and how badly you need to accomplish a given task.

Over 240,000 views of a cat making weird sounds. 
That's what stressed people spend their time on.  Watching cat videos on repeat.

Now, there's actually a REASON for feeling stress.  I know, crazy to think that evolution isn't completely bonkers and random like creationists claim, but when it comes to things like stress or sadness or anger, evolution didn't come up with these things as some universal punishment for humans standing up and using our brains.  Rather, these emotional issues are here because they are supposed to HELP us in some way, and give us motivation or change our actions.

It's hard to imagine a situation where feeling like "THE WHOLE WORLD IS COLLAPSING AND YOU CANNOT GET THE WORK YOU NEED TO COMPLETED AND YOU'RE GOING TO BE FIRED AND NEVER HAVE FINANCIAL OR PERSONAL SUCCESS" is a good thing, but that's just because you're not thinking like a caveman.  A caveman didn't worry about his salary or the way people at a party were going to think of him if he showed up 15 minutes late: he thought about if he had enough food stored to make it the next few weeks or months, and he needed motivation to leave his cave instead of enjoying his wonderful campfire and plethora of cave-ladies. In a caveman's life, stress can be a good thing.

If Oog-Oog (our newly named caveman friend) didn't feel the need to go out and do something constructive, he would probably never get ahead of the curve, never get sufficient food to last the winter, never find a way to IMPRESS those sexy cave-ladies with his carefully constructed sleeping mat and warm cave-home. He needed motivation, and nature provided by making him feel like a sack of worthless mammoth dung any time he didn't do enough work. It gave him the kick in the pants necessary to leave his cave and explore the world, work hard, and get some hard-earned cave-lady tail.

I choose to believe this is 100% historically accurate

The problem is, the modern world doesn't quite work like it did in Oog-Oog's days. Yes, stress is good if it convinces you to get off facebook and do your job or finish some task you promised to do, but what the heck is stress good for when it's just a constant worry, a constant anxiety plaguing your every thought? As it turns out, pretty much nothing.

First, it turns out that your brain is pretty complicated.  Shocker.  It doesn't have a 'stress switch' that it turns on and off. It's got a whole switchboard that goes off practically at random, with some buttons pushed while others aren't 24/7, 365. You've got the amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and more in your brain sending and receiving signals all the time. You've got adrenal glands, your pituitary gland, even your freakin' spinal cord jumping onto the stress bandwagon, making sure you KNOW just how crappy you supposedly should feel.  You've got steroids and hormones aplenty to cause you the wonderfully exciting feeling of anxiety and terror, with an unhealthy dose of angst, and yet you're not done finding out just what happens yet. Your immune system, regulatory system, digestive system and more all seem to get involved in the stress train, and that basically means you can have symptoms of stress anywhere from a mild feeling of discomfort down to chronic bowel problems and utter panic attacks while being wracked with pain and exhaustion.  Really, nature decided that we didn't just need a bit of motivation, it decided that stress should cause pretty much our whole body to collapse in on itself:  Very tricky mother-nature, you wily minx.

You might be wondering what my POINT is in all this.  What, Brian, is the goal of this post?  What are you trying to say? Well, I'm saying that mother nature, and specifically evolution, screwed you.  Unless you're a zen master or mentally handicapped, you're never going to completely escape from anxiety and stress.  You'll never wake up and have NOTHING you can worry about, because your stupid mind will just start worrying that you're not worrying enough, and that maybe...oh god...is that a sign of a brain disease?  IS APATHY A SYMPTOM? WAIT, NOW THAT YOU'RE SCARED, IS BEING UNNECESSARILY SCARED A SYMPTOM?  SHOULD YOU CHECK WEBMD'S SYMPTOM PROGRAM? SINCE WHEN WAS BEING SCARED A SIGN OF BRAIN CANCER?!??! (Don't actually look anything up on webmd ever...apparently every symptom ever is just a secret hidden sign of cancer, dementia, or freakin' ebola)

Now that we've gotten past the hyperventilation-causing though that stress can cause stress, and that no stress can itself cause stress...let's get back to the meat of the issue. What can you do?

Yes, tell Sigmund Freud what you're thinking, he'll know what to do!

Well, there's a lot of things you can do, but I imagine you've heard them all before:  Positive thinking, working out, effective sleep or nutrition, hard work, distancing yourself from the problem....all of these strategies work, but that doesn't make them particularly useful when you're mid panic-attack.
The truth is, once you realize that your stress isn't a REAL problem, you have to choose consciously to move on.  Really, it's that simple.  Think of stress as an itch you know you shouldn't scratch.  If you focus on it, then you screw yourself.  You'll just be more stressed/itchy, and you'll eventually cave in on yourself and either scratch the itch until you bleed or obsess until you cry. You have to do the difficult thing and move past the stress, however the heck you're able to. You need to find a way to mellow out, stop obsessing, and turn your mind to useful things like cave-ladies, instead of unhelpful things like panic, awkwardness, or fear. You must become one with nature, zen, achieve nirvana or whatever the heck those Asian religions tell you to do.

Become one with the zen.  Follow the teachings of  Marsupial Kangar-uddha

Stress isn't something you can actually get rid of.  Psychologists and self-help books make  outrageous claims and tell you how to be 'stress free', but they're basically just lying.  You're never going to wake up and feel like the world is at peace and you're at peace and everything is good.  That's because, well...you can always be MORE motivated, and MORE active, and MORE effective, and your mind knows that.  If you get a raise, you'll worry about the promotion.  If you get a promotion, you'll worry about the next one.  If you become CEO, you'll worry about corporate espionage, or people finding out that most CEOs barely do any real work.  No matter what you do, there is always something else you hypothetically COULD worry about.

But don't give up yet!  Although you can't ever completely avoid stress, you can find ways to ignore it, or minimize it.  And that's the key.  You just need to find a way to dodge the 100,000+ symptoms of stress and anxiety, and live life as if you were too dumb to realize what's really going on. You need to find a way to move past the worry, and the angst.  If you can do that? Well, then you'll be like Oog-Oog, our friendly neighborhood caveman:  Happy as a clam, surrounded by comfort, and blissfully unaware of the millions of stresses that await around every corner, ready to ambush, like the fact that you're reading a blog instead of doing your job, or cleaning your home, or reading your important e-mails.  Evolution might have screwed you by making literally anything on the planet something you COULD worry about.  The key is realizing that evolution is a jerk, and that maybe, JUST MAYBE, worrying about every tiny problem that might somehow someday go wrong isn't useful.



Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed.  I know this isn't our usual comical fodder, but I was looking for something new to write about, and this seemed as good as anything!
If you liked this more serious, advice filled post, check out similar posts such as "Kid Rules to Improve the World" or "Statements That Make You Sound Like A Jerk"

Again, thanks a bunch for reading!
Brian-The author guy