Why is our stress system more suited for “getting attacked by lions” than modern financial worries?
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The basic thing is that evolution takes a long time. Modern man evolved 200,000ish years ago. Civilization arose maybe around 5,000-6,0000 years ago. And modern financial woes started coming around maybe a century or so ago.
You are scared of lion. You run from lion, you hide from lion. Lion does not eat you, life is good.
You are scared of bills. You run from bills, you hide from bills. Bills still find you, you are now broke.
Stress system can only do run, hide, or fight. It does not know the difference between lion or bills or anything else.
Finance is a social construct which means it is “make believe” in terms of our dna and evolutionary possibilities. Lions attacking humans are very real and as others have pointed out, been attacking humans much longer than the social construct of finance.
Consider this when trying to reconcile it with your question
Because the financial problems aren’t “real.” They don’t directly threaten any of our biological needs (food, water, shelter). Our caveman DNA doesn’t recognize the threat of losing numbers on a screen or pieces of paper with numbers on them. We don’t need those things to survive. We only trade them for the things we need.
I think because modern worries are constant and don’t go away. So cortisol, inflammation and all that constantly is flooding you, giving your body no chance to heal. Whereas being attacked by a lion is a singular adrenaline rushing event. You either survive or die until the next event with ample time to recuperate and sustain your body in between.
In times of stress and panic, our control centers (i.e. reason) degrades and fight or flight kicks in (i.e. instinct) which leads to a lot of shortcuts and actions (when sometimes patience) is the best thing.
Being attacked by a lion is a rapid event, something that can be prepared for, responded to, and survived/died to. This results in acute stress: stress with an obvious onset and defined duration.
Financial stress is what’s call chronic stress: It doesnt have a specific moment it started (usually) and its longlasting and doesnt have an obvious solution/result.
This is in fact something humans didn’t really evolve to deal with. Even things like preparing for winter, technically a chronic stress, had very defined paths to survive.
The closest humanity would have come wouljd have been widespread diseases, famines, things like that which were not easily understood nor overcomeable.
Because predatory cats were eating people long before someone came up with the idea of currency. It’s pretty safe to say humans were sometimes the hunter and sometimes the prey from the start, and with the first homo sapiens appearing about 315 thousand years ago, while the invention of money and something resembling the financial system started around 600 BC, you’ve got quite a lot of lead time for our stress systems to attenuate to dealing with predators than it did for fiscal matters.
It’s not. If you see the prey that is being attacked and escaped has no problem after a few seconds to go out and about and start grazing as if nothing happened. It has to do with our biology and big complex brain.
If you get attacked by a lion now, you will get PTSD or some kind of trauma, which will change your brain every so slightly; add more of those traumatic events and you have a depressed brain; add to that the life span humans have and the different mutations they inherit you have an overactive sympathetic system that can not calm down.
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