The year is 57,000 BCE. You’re just a homosapien, wandering the African savanna. You come across some hoof prints, thin, slender. Score! They’re deer prints. You celebrate internally, knowing you will not be going hungry, today. You follow them along a rocky crevasse, and into a water hole, when suddenly you notice a second set of prints. They’re large, kicked up, showing signs of speed. Four paw pads, and claws. Worse yet, they’re fresh. And that’s when it occurs to you, though you were hunting down food, you might have just put yourself on the menu for a hungry tiger. You draw your crudely-sharpened spear, fully aware that it could already be here, already be watching you. It missed the deer, and it’s ready to take out its frustration on you. But your body’s natural evolutionary developments have prepared you for this. Your heart races as cortisol, the stress hormone, runs through your veins. You scan the ridgeside for any movement, anything that may seem threatening. Your pupils dilate, processing the smallest minutia of environmental shifts. The wind reads like distant background noise. You’re listening for a very specific sound, and you’d know when you hear it. Your hands involuntarily clench the crude wooden pike until your knuckles turn white, as you lower yourself to reduce your visibility, and slowly maneuver yourself back the way you came, checking every direction as you go.

When you finally return to your carve-out perched atop a rocky plateau, your body crashes, a desperate hunger forcing you to consume every berry, every mushroom, every grain you found on the way. Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t see you. Your response hormones have depleted, but you need to be prepared – just in case. It could be eyeing your little carve-out as you eat.

The Cursed Apple

There is sound logic behind what we commonly refer to as “survival mode.” Once upon a time, our bodies adapted, evolved to react to threats in a way that allowed us to procreate, and pass on a same genes that protected us down to our children. But over the millennia, we became far too smart for our own good.

In the Garden of Eden, Eve’s life was blissfully free. She never needed to worry about the world – her life was completely without worry. And then, she took the bite from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The result was ruin – a deep and intimate awareness of the dangers which exist in the world.

I may not be a big biblical believer, however, I do appreciate a good story as much as the next guy.

You are now the apex species on this planet – for better or worse. There are no more tigers on the African savanna. They’re at your local zoo. You can throw your popcorn at it in an attempt to coax it into moving while the poor creature just wants to nap. But the instinct we used to scan for footprints in the wild is still in our DNA. We still seek out threats constantly, because evolution never taught us how to relax. We will scan the future, for any threat, with sickening vigilance, because we know more than anything the myriad ways the universe is trying to kill us. It was never deemed prudent for our DNA to program how to turn off our need to scan for danger. So instead of looking in the near future, we scan further. We switched our spears for phones and crystal balls, trying to predict the future, trying to see the inevitable threat – 10 years, 15 years down the line, if we must look so far. We read threats in the form of probabilities, mixed with “what if” scenarios, often times far beyond our control.

We built our castles and now we constantly scan the battlefields even for things that might hurt us, some time, maybe in the next 8 months or so. In this sense, we latch onto these fears, and even still, our bodies run the same evolutionary course. Send the cortisol, prepare for battle, observe our surroundings, get through the day, retreat home, enjoy a meal that is entirely too big. And then you’ll head straight to bed because all that other stuff you went through drained your battery completely.

New World Survivalism

The reason is simple. You entered survival mode. And thanks to the miracle of technology and the advancement of convenience, it has become extremely easy to turn it into a daily cycle.

We now scan for threats using a TV, a newspaper, or social media. The world is on the brink of war, AGAIN. The air is dirty, full of pollutants. Microplastics in your tomatoes. Your boss gave John a raise and not you. Fuck John! You need stimulation to approach this threat, and what better stimulation than coffee? Or a red bull, for some reason? You know this stuff is marketed toward athletes so they can run faster, jump higher, right? What? “What if I need to run faster, jump higher to outrun the air pollutants?” That’s valid.

Now that you’ve consumed 3 bowls of cereal and a toaster strudel (but not before sucking out half the contents of the icing), and 2 and a half cups of coffee, your muscles are so damn stimulated, you can’t stop biting your nails and tapping your feet. In other words, you’re ready for the day – for at least 2 hours, before the heavy dose of cortisol from the sugar and stimulants leaves you a twitchy, jittery, exhausted mess at work. Fortunately, it’s almost break time and you can make more coffee and doomscroll Twitter for 15 minutes. And wouldn’t you know it, in Asia an AI murdered a puppy. That’s gonna ruin your day.

Having survived literal hell, you decide to spoil yourself – maybe a drink, or six, stuff your face with the worst, greasiest meal, for the gratifying warmth it gives your stomach, before you hobble back into bed to sleep before you have to do it again.

Stimulate/fuel> prepare> survive> reward> crash> repeat.

The whole reason you entered this cycle being something valid, the evolutionary mechanisms have become so deeply lost in the nuance, it’s hard to even link them together anymore. So, you guess this is just life now. Maybe a car problem kicked your money stream out of whack and you needed to do some serious money moving to even pay rent on time. Forced to survive on Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese for a week straight, leaning on a series of copes that manage to get you through that tricky situation – before another one rears its head. And the worst part is, all this mental preparation that robs you of joy and turns you into a walking zombie is far more expensive anyway – costly for your body, costly for your mind, and do you really think you can afford to feed yourself three McGriddles and $6 worth of booze each day? Or worse, the cycle comes in many forms. I’m not here to judge your bad decisions. I’m sharing because I’ve been there.

Breaking the cycle

Now that I’ve painted the picture, I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks. But how do we break out? After all, each part of the cycle is reinforced by the others.

The truth is, I can’t wave a magic wand and fix it for you. But perhaps getting a look at it will allow you to strategize. What I can provide is a new insight on the threat assessment. Is it truly immediate? If it’s something that needs to be done, create a plan to get it done. Simple, right? (Of course not). Nevertheless, if it needs to be done, you need to do it. If it is something you’ve been dreading, just imagine how it will feel when you get through it and the world hasn’t ended. It might FEEL apocalyptic, but chances are high, you’ve survived worse. The first order of business is to commit to getting it out of the way so it isn’t consuming your much-needed mental space.

As for that threat that is coming seven months from now, it’s time to put the crystal ball away. That tiger running at you from 1500 miles away is the least of your concerns. After all, it might just have a heart attack on the way. At least for right now, you can relax. The future isn’t set in stone.

The Beast is Dead – now what?

Addressing the reason for your nerves having spiraled into a doom loop is a great start, but that doesn’t mean your job is over. Remember in our scenario, the tiger that could still be lurking? Your nerves are still in hyper mode. It’s time to tackle the cycle directly, and this is where our conversation goes from psychological to technical. Our next order of business is to return to sleep regularity. I cannot speak for every contributing diet choice – or choice of stimulants, but considering the sheer amount of energy drinks every local convenience store offers these days, I’ll focus on that and hope at least some readers might find it useful.

You see, you can’t just flick a switch and calm your racing mind. You need to break it down into steps, with the first focus on stimulants, and with that, let’s talk a little about caffeine.

Caffeine breaks down into adenosine, which is a funny little chemical that looks a lot like melatonin, the sleep molecule. Your brain absorbs the adenosine, and then the melatonin cannot do its job. Here’s the important detail: Adenosine has a half-life of two hours. What that translates to, is that if you drink a can of C4 with 200mg caffeine at 4 o’clock, at 6 o’clock, you will still have 100 mg worth of adenosine in your system, and 50 mg at 8 o’clock. By the time you want to be asleep, the magic number is 35 mg of adenosine still in your system. Any more than that and you will still likely struggle to fall asleep, or get quality sleep if you do. In other words, in order to get to sleep by 10 PM, the last time you should reasonably consume a 200-mg caffeine bomb would be 6 hours prior, at 4 PM. You might feel tired by the end of the day, but isn’t that the point, anyway?

This one step might have the knock-on effect that could allow you to exit your stressed state. When you’re able to sleep again, you still might reach for the cup of coffee, and no one is saying you shouldn’t. I am a coffee fanatic, myself. However, maybe you’re finally awake enough that you don’t need the second or third cup.

If you aren’t so on edge, maybe take a little bit of time away from the phone. Step outside, smell the fresh air. You might not even need to reward yourself the same way – instead of a sugar donut or 3 every day, maybe some ice cream every few days, or every week.

Your work isn’t done (and I can’t stress that enough), but with a little effort on each part of the cycle, the cycle will, little-by-little, have less control over you.

Conclusion (with a dash of insight)

The world is scary. Despite that, you are still here. You’ve been wanting to do something – perhaps note keeping, or a new sport, a vacation. Maybe you have big dreams of doing something that makes you proud. You’ll never do that if you are constantly tired from battle preparation. The tiger won’t be here for a while, and he won’t stay for long. Put down your spear, warrior, and have a good nap.

This is my first blog post! I hope you enjoyed it! If you read to the end, I really appreciate it! If people really like it, more will come!