Anxiety is connected to your
physical health alone
and not your thoughts or emotions.
Sounds wrong doesn't it? Kind of counter-intuitive?
You would think that if you have a concern,
the worry you feel is because of that concern.
Well surprisingly it's not.
You see nature doesn't design creatures to be perfect,
it designs them to function just good enough to survive,
in their given environment.
Things like intelligence, social skills and complex emotions
are very much tacked onto the end of a system
that was built to tackle a very different problem.
Emotions are chemical responses to concerns
but the level of emotion being based on how large a problem is
is very difficult for the system to gauge
when the concern isn't some very physical and practical.
Emotions don't say that there is a problem,
they say how much of a problem there is.
The system they were built on
was built to tackle practical problems
like "Is there a predator?" or "Is there food to eat?",
and so the emotions were built to gauge those concerns
"Is there a predator?"
"You're in good health.
No need to be so concerned, you can handle it."
Anxiety response = Mild.
"Is there a predator?"
"You're in bad health.
You need to be diligent, you would struggle with that."
Anxiety response = Strong.
As the problems became more complex,
the chemicals still kind of worked for other problems.
"Should I act on my love for this potential mate?"
"You're in good health,
You can fend off competition and protect them from danger."
Emotional response = Go for it.
"Should I act on my love for this potential mate?"
"You're in bad health,
You can't fend off competition or protect them from danger."
Emotional response = Don't do it.
And as social dynamics and intelligence evolved,
nature saw no need
to refine a system that worked good enough.
Regardless of whether the problem had any connection
to your physical health
the emotions still encouraged people to solve the problem
which got the problem solved
so the subtle nuance that the level of emotion
was now completely disconnected to the issue itself
wasn't really that big of a problem
as long as the species was still surviving.
Now we have civilisation
and this is indeed very new in terms of evolution
so having to upturn a system
that's worked for millions of years
seems like a massive upheaval
as long as the human population
is not at risk of going extinct from the lack change.
This explains why you might feel worried
when there's literally nothing to be worried about,
or how problems that seem trivial
can feel like an impossible task.
You can simply manage your anxiety
by keeping your body in good health.
You will still have the same problems to face,
but those problems will seem easier to deal with.
Solving your problems
will not reduce your emotional response
to whatever concerns you face next,
keeping in good health will.
And if you're more confident due to the lack of anxiety,
you will be able to deal with the problem that arise.
In nature we are built to prefer confident people for a reason.
If confidence is a consequence of anxiety level,
and anxiety is a product of physical health,
then confident people are more healthy
and therefore more reliable and less of a burden,
within the pack of animals your species is part of.
You hear so many people trying to tackle the problem
by dealing with the symptom.
"You have no confidence? Try confidence building methods."
No, tackle the problem at its source.
Eat healthy, get good sleep, get some exercise, etc.
The rest will follow.
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