Who’s up for a quick review of 3.7 billion years of evolution?
Not quite 4 billion years ago, the first life shows up on Earth. It’s just microbes, teeny tiny little cuties who don’t do a whole lot.
They hang around for about a billion years before our homies the cyanobacteria show up. Cyanobacteria aren’t all that interesting, just more little microscopic, wiggly shapes. But those cyanobacteria can do something the previous microbes couldn’t.
They can turn the sun’s energy into food.
When they do this, they let out little bits of gas as exhaust. They don’t need it, so they carelessly push it out into the air. (Rude.)
Today, we call that gas oxygen. And that oxygen byproduct is what turned Earth into the critter-friendly place it ultimately would become.
That oxygen in the air (and water) allowed for the growth of more microbes, then multicellular creatures, and eventually the first animals — probably sea sponges, around 700 million years ago (give or take a million years).
This is when things really start to get good. Through the process that our boy Darwin named “natural selection,” nature was able to combine the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere with its two other favorite resources: time, and random genetic chance.
When a sea sponge mom has little sea sponge babies (let’s call them spongelets even though that’s definitely not correct), those spongelets come with random genetic mutations they got from the sponge mom and… sponge dad? (I don’t know how sea sponges reproduce, and no, I’m not going to take 20 seconds to look it up.)
Point is, those random genetic differences impact your ability to survive. If they make you bad at staying alive, you’re more likely to die before you can have spongelets of your own. Your genes then die with you.
If those random genetic differences make you a little better at staying alive, well then you get to have spongelets, and those spongelets pass on those staying-alive genes to some of their spongelet babies.
Then, you know, billions of years pass, and this insanely straightforward iteration process leads to all of the beautiful, bonkers life we have here on Earth today. And it works out pretty well for everybody.
Well, until recently. Because just in the last few hundred years or so, one species figured out how to mostly bypass the whole “needing to stay alive” thing. They started wanting to actually enjoy life, the selfish little pricks, which is the kind of thing you can apparently do when you’ve eradicated or minimized most of the things that kill you — disease, starvation, saber-toothed tiger maulings, etc.
But there’s a big problem. That species, which calls itself “humans” — yes, the arrogant SOBs think they have a right to name themselves, along with everything else on Earth, including Earth — haven’t actually evolved from their trying-not-to-die era. They’re the same animals that hid in caves and got trampled by mammoths.
So while we’re doing things like riding buses and going on water slides and looking at screens with words on them, our brains are still looking for saber-toothed tigers.
You know that saying, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail?”
To a naturally-selected brain, where surviving long enough to pass on genes is the only goal, everything looks like a saber-toothed tiger.
And that about brings us up to speed.
So, you take a species that’s the product of 4 billion years of evolution which has been naturally selected to fear physical threats, then you take away most day-to-day physical threats thanks to the comforts of modern life.
So of course, our brains say: “Now I can be happy and at-ease all the time!”
Just kidding!
Our brains just apply that protective fear of physical threats to non-physical threats.
Do you want to know another way of describing non-physical threats?
Not threats.
I spend most of my life anxiously anticipating things that will have no measurable impact on my life.
Let’s look at an example.
A client of mine, or maybe my university teaching supervisor, sends me an email asking to meet. There are no details given about the purpose of the meeting.
Naturally, I begin to wonder about the meeting’s intention.
What if it’s something bad?
What if I did a bad job at something, or someone complained about me?
What if the recent work I submitted was unsatisfactory and will need revisions?
What if there are awkward pauses in the meeting, or they ask me a question I don’t know the answer to?
What if?
What if?
What if?
I suspect that many of us spend a lot of time in the “what if” mindset. Sometimes, that mindset is applied to things where a “what if” is actually relevant.
“What if I don’t get that better-paying job?”
“What if the x-ray comes back and shows something seriously wrong?”
“What if my partner is unhappy with me?”
Those are all anxiety-generating questions, but they carry real stakes. Often, these types of questions are the source of our anxiety.
But recently, I realized that so much of my anxious energy is directed at questions that have no stakes whatsoever.
Take the work example — say a client is unhappy with a draft I send in. I’m not afraid of the “consequences,” because there are none. I’m constantly writing and revising in dozens of different contexts. It’s what I do. I spend around the same amount of time and energy on it week after week. If I’m not revising work for one client, I’m doing it for another.
What I’m really afraid of, it turns out, is the meeting itself. Because I associate “bad” or “negative” with “uncomfortable.” I’m anticipating the meeting, not the consequences of the meeting, because my survival response is kicking in and telling me that a battle is coming.
But it’s not a battle.
It’s a meeting — a meeting with no real measurable impact on my safety, health, time, or future. But my lizard brain thinks that it will. It’s preparing me for battle, when what’s coming is… really, nothing at all.
And so, I’ve adopted the following mantra, an answer to that “what if, what if, what if” constantly on repeat in my head:
Literally nothing will happen.
What if I raise my hand to make a comment and my comment isn’t insightful?
Literally nothing will happen.
What if I email a higher-up at the university about an idea I have, but they don’t think it’s a good idea?
Literally nothing will happen.
What if I try a new exercise at the gym but I don’t know the correct form and people see me doing it wrong?
Literally nothing will happen.
This is my anxiety triage. It won’t help me overcome my longstanding, constantly evolving anxieties about my life. But when those little discomforts pop up, when I’m about to let a single phone call at 3:15pm on a Tuesday derail my entire day in anxious anticipation, I just remember:
Literally nothing will happen.
It’s amazing what a bit of strategic apathy can do.
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It's amazing how long it takes to realize this. If I ever get another tattoo, I am stealing your acronym! LNWH. Makes for a great conversation starter, too, I would imagine.
Yeah, Taylor, that's something I've tried to reprogram in my own brain recently as well. Like half the stuff I worry about are A. not even real yet and B. probably never will be real and C. won't be that big of a deal if they happen anyway, probably.
Keeping years and years of journals has taught me this lesson. I love reading past entries and seeing all the crap I was worrying about years ago that never came to pass.