People come to see me for help with their depression, anxiety, eating disorder, addiction, or any other label that fails to adequately describe why we hurt. These diagnoses take on a life of their own, where we try to treat “the depression” instead of addressing the problem it’s signalling. But what if depression, anxiety, and the mixture of mental health problems we face aren’t the actual problem? What if they are signals to help us see or solve the real problem?
One in two of us will be diagnosed with a mental health condition by the age of 40, with one in five experiencing an active episode each year.[1] It’s hard to view all our mental health challenges as “disordered” if so many of us are experiencing them. Perhaps it’s not that something’s gone wrong in our bodies or minds, but that something’s gone right: Maybe these symptoms are brilliant adaptions to survive a disordered world.
Evolutionary psychologists teach that we’ve evolved to survive, and not to be happy or calm. Low mood, anger, shame, anxiety, guilt, grief—these are all helpful responses to help us meet the challenges of our specific environments. Having sensitive protective functions that sound alarms or short-circuit when we’re threatened isn’t a design flaw. It’s a design success.
“The key view in evolutionary theory is that if we find behaviors that we do not like or cause suffering to self or others, we should not automatically assume that something has gone wrong ‘in the machine,’” says Paul Gilbert, a professor at the University of Derby, who researches evolutionary psychology.[2] Rather, he suggests we ask, “In what social contexts are these behaviors prevalent? What functions are they serving?”
It’s Better to Be Safe Than Sorry
Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, Founding Director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, began his career directing an anxiety disorders clinic. He found began asking himself, why are people having so many panic attacks in situations that are actually quite safe?[3] Then he came across the smoke detector theory. “I started realizing that it’s essential for alarms to go off, even if there’s just a chance of danger. When the threat is uncertain, false alarms are worth it,” Nesse says. It’s better to be safe than sorry. “We want to ensure we get warned about every single fire.”
It all comes down to the economics of harm. When the probability of harm in our environment is greater than the cost of anxiety, it’s helpful to experience anxiety, even if that means having an unnecessary panic attack in the grocery store. “I finally understood that the system is set to have many, many normal false alarms,” says Nesse.
It’s not as simple as each emotional response having a specific function, says Nesse. These responses have functions adapted to meet the challenges of our unique environments, he says. We adapt by changing the sensitivity of our smoke alarms to match the perceived threats around us, or to the lessons learned from the environments of our ancestors. If there’s a lot of danger lurking outside, it’s essential to your survival to have anxiety every time you leave the house, so you can be more hypervigilant and prepared to protect yourself.
Lama Rod Owens, activist and Buddhist Minister, describes how anxiety helps him survive the dangers of living as a Black man in the U.S., writing in Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger[4]:
When Trayvon Martin was murdered, I stopped wearing black hoodies. When Tamir Rice was murdered, I thought about how to give up my hands so I wouldn’t be mistaken for holding on to anything. When Renisha McBride was murdered, I vowed never to knock on any stranger’s door again. When Sandra Bland and Walter Scott were murdered, I became hypervigilant about following every f*cking driving law. When Eric Garner was choked to death, I realized that we all had been choking. After Akai Gurley was killed, I tried to figure out how to always make noise so no one would ever be surprised by me. After Freddie Gray was murdered, I thought there was surely a way not to be Black any longer. After Charles Kinsey was shot, I began questioning why would I help anyone if the cops would simply show up and shoot me anyway.
Anxiety isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s an adaptation to make us stronger to survive a dangerous world. Similarly, being free from anxiety is not a personal triumph; it’s a privilege. It means both you and your ancestors had the luck of living in secure environments, blessed with both physical and emotional safety.
The Gifts of Low Mood
When we’re living in times of the heartbreak and brutality of wars, the collapse of our climate, Covid, systemic inequities and racism — I could go on — it’s no surprise that our moods crash. But what if low mood, too, is a helpful adaptation?
Our body goes into the hibernation mode of low mood when the risk of harm in our environments outweighs the rewards, says Nesse. Imagine you are fishing and catching plenty of trout. We’re designed to feel happy to motivate us to keep going in this highly productive situation. But then, as the fish start to dwindle, we begin to feel unhappy. This is the early sign that the rewards are no longer worth the risk of all the potential lions and tigers and bears that may eat us if we keep fishing, Nesse explains. If we persist, and still no fish, then we begin to feel a further drop in a mood that signals to us to go back to the safety of our caves, binge-watch Netflix, and wait until the fish come back. Low mood is not a personal failure or weakness, it’s a sign that our environment’s rewards don’t outweigh the risks of leaving our beds. It helps us conserve energy during dark times.
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When our low mood signal arises with the pull of hibernation, Nesse suggests asking ourselves: Do we need to change our environment or find a new one that’s more rewarding or safe, whether a new location, way of living, relationship, or job? Or is this a situation we can wait out until the next season brings back the fish, such as during winter, a bout of illness, injury, or wave of Covid restrictions? What kind of systemic change needs to happen for more of us to live in environments where the rewards outweigh the threats? Rather than focusing on simply feeling better, we need to listen to what low mood is signalling to us and use it as fuel for change.
The Power of Shame and Guilt
See my last blog post for a full discussion on the benefits of shame and guilt. But in short, guilt signals that our actions (or silent complicity in the actions of others) caused harm and pushes us to repair the situation. For example, the healthy guilt that arises when acknowledging our privilege moves us to repair the systems we uphold that are benefitting us at the expense of harming others.
Shame warns us that we may be rejected if we were to fully show ourselves to a specific group of people, pushing us to hide the part of ourselves that may be rejected or find a safer community where we can be our authentic selves. Shame has nothing to do with our worthiness; it simply indicates that the people around us are rejecting (or have been in the past). It’s not you that’s the problem; it’s them.
If You’re Not Angry, You’re Not Paying Attention
Anger is a necessary response to fight inequities, violations, and having our needs blocked. It’s our most effective tool to mobilize action against injustice. The biggest obstacle to social change is not heated opposition, but apathy.
When our body and brain pick up subtle cues that our boundaries are being crossed, the resentment alarm shouts out loud and clear before we even have time to reflect on the situation. Resentment yells: ASSERT HEALTHY BOUNDARIES or STAND UP FOR INJUSTICE!
Life Matters/Pexels
In fact, anger and resentment might be our super-power to give us the capacity to extend more compassion towards others. The prerequisite for compassion and empathy is healthy boundaries—defining what’s okay and not okay, says Brené Brown, in Rising Strong. The most compassionate people out there are the ones who have the healthiest boundaries, Brown continues, because resentment will let them know when those boundaries are missing.
We need resentment to help us maintain our boundaries, just as much as we need all the other flavours of anger to fight for a healthy world.
It’s Not You; It’s the World
Out of the mud grows the most beautiful flower, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh teaches of the lotus. Our emotional alarms, like anger, anxiety, low mood, guilt, and shame, are all important signals to help us survive and solve problems.
So before we learn strategies to soothe our mental health symptoms, we need to listen closely to what they’re signalling. Our distress is not the problem. It alerts us to problems, that dear friend who tells us the truths we need to hear, rather than the reassurances we desire. Silencing these alarms doesn’t make the distress go away, it just transforms it into louder signals, like sickness in our bodies or mental health disorders in our minds.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of “creative maladjustment” in his 1956 speech commending the victory of 50,000 appropriately distressed Black Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, who boycotted the racial segregation of buses.
“There are some things in our social system that I’m proud to be maladjusted to, and I call upon you to be maladjusted too,” he says. “The salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.”