In the span of a few thousand years, we have gone from hunter-gatherer and then agrarian societies onto industrial and now information societies.
Over the course of this transformation, the demands of life have changed in dramatic and fundamental ways. Yet, the cognitive machinery that we rely on to find our way in the world has remained the same.
Through each revolution and upheaval, our ancestors have had to map new cognitive demands onto the same preexisting cognitive circuitry. It’s a testament to the flexibility of our cognitive structure that we can apply the same machinery as our ancestors to vastly different sets of problems, and do it successfully.
But, as with any physical system, the “old” machinery and the new demands placed upon it don’t quite fit together, perfectly.
In the case of our cognitive systems, as new demands are mapped onto the old circuitry of our brains, we experience physiological responses that are similar to those our ancestors experienced, facing life-and-death situations.
The anxiety we feel being inundated with information, the stress we feel about missing something important in our inbox or to-do lists, is no less real than the stress our ancestors felt facing the unknown behind the overgrown leaves in the forest, or the rustling of the bushes in the plains. The modern stressors, information and otherwise, trigger the same neurological and physiological reactions as the primordial stressors that had nothing to do with emails, to-do lists, college preparation or retirement planning.
An angry email portends a different kind of danger than a snake in the grass; yet, they both trigger similar neurological and physiological processes in our bodies.
This makes sense, because in a real sense, the threat hiding in an overflowing inbox may be just as serious:
– expensive projects hanging by a thread,
– career advancement or even job security hanging in the balance,
– family, children, their health or educational opportunities at risk,
– and so on.
The stakes are high both in the wild and in the modern information world. What is new in the modern world is that there’s no let up to the stressors.
Emails arrive throughout the day and at any hour of the night. Projects continue to demand our attention whether we’re at work or at home. Worries over job security, retirement, health and well-being are ever-present thanks to a constant influx of things to worry about.
It’s all information, and it all seems vital. We can’t afford to let anything fall through the cracks any more.
Our stress-response system evolved in conditions where you’d meet a threat, fight or run, and if you managed to survive the encounter, you were done with it for a while – until the next threat.
In other words, you had time to recover.
Even the physical exertion of fighting or running was figured into the system: the intense physical exertion helped clear the stress hormones out of the blood stream, paving the way for recovery.
But today, stressors arrive all the time, round the clock. Our threat-response circuitry gets pinged repeatedly every day, and with each ping, it goes into full-blown alert. There simply is not enough time between the bouts for stress recovery, nor significant physical exertion in between them to wash out the toxic effects of stress.
What we’re left with is chronic stress, a constant state of alertness waiting for the other shoe to drop, and the accompanying anxiety and exhaustion.
All this stress has unwelcome consequences down the line.
