Understanding Anxiety: Lessons from the Blueberry Bush and the Lion

            The Blueberry Bush, the Lion, Negative Thinking and the Birth of Anxiety

There are many things that are different between different cultures and races, but there are also things that result from us all having common ancestors. Things that truly make us a human race and not aliens, are things we all have in common. A few examples may help illustrate key things that all humans share.

The Mind Hates Pain

This may seem obvious to most of us. If you fall down a flight of stairs and badly break a leg (think a bone sticking out) how likely is it that you will decide to wait a few weeks to see how things turn out? Unless you are way outside of the normal pain threshold, you will do everything you can do, as quickly as you can do it, to make the pain go away.

But what about psychological pain? Is that as painful as physical pain? Can it be more painful? In fact, your mind doesn’t know the difference between physical and psychological pain. If you have ever had a scary or frightening dream, what was your body doing when you first woke up? Most people would report increased breathing, pounding heart, feelings of fear, and for a few seconds it is hard to separate the dream from reality. Although you were not in any real physical danger in the dream, your body reacted exactly as if it was happening in the real world. In Action and Commitment Therapy, this is referred to as Experiential Avoidance (EA). The real or imagined attempt to avoid painful experiences. Studies have shown that EA is a prominent part of virtually every mental health issue.

Negative Thinking

A number of research studies have pointed to the possibility that virtually all of us share a tendency to think negatively. In research studies, students in a number of different countries were instructed to write down their random thoughts for different periods of times. The thoughts were then recorded and rated as positive, neutral, and negative. The results, depending on the study, yielded anywhere from 50% to 75% negative thoughts. The question left for researchers was “Why would humans tend to think negative thoughts naturally, rather than, neutral, or positive?”.

What is your experience? Do you have to remind yourself to think negative thoughts all the time, or does it seem to come naturally? Do you ever experience telling your brain “Wait, you are having way too many positive thoughts brain, you need to start thinking negatively to balance things out”? If you do, please let us know how you do that! It seems that most people would report that they are always trying to think more positively, and that they rarely if ever, have to remind themselves to think negatively.

The Blueberry Bush

The most compelling theory of the origin of negative thinking may lie in our common ancestors. A short experience may help explain this theory. Imagine that you live thousands of years ago, in a cave with a group of other humans. It is your turn to go to the waterhole, so you take two buckets and start towards the waterhole about a mile away. At first, you can only see the outline of the waterhole, and the bushes around it. You want to be careful, as the last person to go for water, encountered a lion behind the bushes. As you get closer to the bushes, you see that they are actually blueberry bushes with the blueberries newly formed. You carefully approach the waterhole and do not find a lion, so you decide to fill one bucket with water, and the other with blueberries. When you get back to the cave, everyone is happy, as the blueberries are delicious.

The next time that your tribe needs water, they beg you to go. Again, you find blueberries and return with another full bucket. You continue to bring back blueberries and over time you become known as a source of good luck. They write stories of you providing nourishment to the tribe in pictures written on the cave wall in blueberry juice. You become a Blueberry God”.

This is a good story with a positive ending. Maybe we would all think positive naturally if the story always ended here. But unfortunately, there were lions around your cave and eventually, the story had a different ending. It doesn’t matter how many times you returned with blueberries, it only takes one lion in life, to cancel out tons of delicious blueberries.

Which ancestors do you think survived and eventually made up our gene pool? The ones that were always worried about the lion, or the ones that always assumed there would be a positive ending to the story? The likely answer is those people that tended to assume that they would never be jumped by the lion, are no longer in the gene pool. It is just you and me, and the other ancestors that assumed there might be a lion every trip to the waterhole. When they planned the blueberry trip, they anticipated a negative ending as a survival mechanism.

If this theory behind negative thinking is true, it would make perfect sense that we would have a natural tendency to think negative. And for those of us that had experienced being jumped by a real lion (think trauma), we would likely have a natural tendency to think more negatively, than people that were never jumped by the lion. And it would also follow that people that had never been jumped by a lion, or had thankfully recovered naturally, might have a hard time understanding why we continue to see a lion behind every bush.

The Birth of Anxiety

If you were going to survive in the world of our ancestors, what would you have to do? You would have to mentally plan ahead for the lion, and imagine beforehand, how you might evade being eaten. Your mind would have to become efficient at developing a mental picture of what might happen in future trips to the waterhole, and become successful at imagining ways that you could avoid the lion. In other words, our successful ancestors would have to be something of a “future time traveler” in their brain. The best predictors of the future, would be those that were most likely to become survivors.

When you are anxious, what are you usually doing? Are you usually anticipating a future event, and trying mentally to anticipate the outcome? And what does your brain usually imagine, when you time travel into the future? A positive or negative ending? If our endings were always positive, then there would be no need to worry about the future. Does life always deliver positive endings? All anxiety results from taking a future trip into your mind and trying to plan for negative outcomes – trying to avoid Pain.

If it is true that the function of anxiety is to prepare us for a negative future, could it have a positive aspect? If you become more prepared for a future test for example, and those mental preparations yield a positive outcome, then it could be reasonably assumed that anxiety could be a good thing. Anxiety that is focused on events we can control, can be very helpful.

But what if your brain assumes that anxiety is the key to avoiding any future pain (physical or mental), for events that we cannot control? In order for anxiety to be useful, when you take a mental trip into the future, you would have to successfully predict an outcome. If your predictions are mostly wrong, the mental energy you have used would be largely wasted. What about events you have no control over? Is that a productive use of your time and mental energy?

It might be worthwhile to test your prediction success rate, for events you have no control over. The symbol for the Amazon stock is “AMZN”. If your predictive abilities are good, this should be a simple thing. Write in the blank at the end of this sentence, your prediction at the closing bell of the stock exchange 5 days from now, the price of the Amazon stock _________. In 5 days, write the actual closing price here _________.

See any difference?

Summary

1. The mind hates Pain. The mind will do anything to avoid Pain (psychological or physical).

2. Negative thinking is the natural default for most people

2. Negative thinking is part of our ancestor’s survival skills. Being a survival skill, it cannot be deleted like a computer file.

3. Anxiety is negative thinking about future outcomes. It is the brain’s attempt to avoid future Pain (remember the mind hates Pain!).

4. The payoff for all of the energy expended on anxiety focused on uncontrollable events is VERY low. The key to addressing debilitating anxiety is to begin to discern between controllable and uncontrollable events, and develop new ways to address anxiety focused on uncontrollable future events The next article will provide tools for you to use to significantly reduce your unhelpful anxiety.