Who Does Our Mind Work For?

The vast majority of people assume that our minds are working for us, our conscious selves. Given that we want to be happy we naturally assume that this is the imperative of our minds. When that same mind makes us unhappy (through adverse emotions like anxiety) we reasonably assume that this is indicative of a broken mind. This is an erroneous belief that contributes to our suffering. That’s right. Our minds do not work for us, and anxiety is ubiquitous and not necessarily an indication of malfunction.

So, if our mind does not work for us, then for whom does it work? Our mind has one imperative; to keep us alive and breeding. Our minds work for our genetic material and aims to pass it on to at least two more generations. We all have a successful and unbroken link of ancestry back the first life on earth somewhere between 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago. That is an incredible amount of successive reproductive events. The imperative that has evolved in the mind for survival and reproduction is staggering. My interest is how that plays out in your psyche.

Consider Bill and Bob; two cavemen who lived 100,000 years ago. They both looked out from the cave at shadows on the wall near the entrance. Bob was a bit of a nervous character. He would look at the shadows and say to Bill that he didn’t think today was a good day to go out; the shadows looked like a tiger. Bill was an optimist and generally found Bob’s nervousness to be an inaccurate representation of the world; if not inconvenient, given that Bill loved to go hunting. Bill left Bob behind in the cave with some parting derogatory comments about Bob’s pessimism and went out hunting. And he went hunting the next day too; and the day after that. Eventually Bill, and everyone super-optimistic like him, got eaten by infrequent but fatal encounters with tigers. Bob the pessimist avoided tigers and survived because of his pessimistic caution. We are Bob’s descendants.

Just like our ancestors (a large number of cavemen represented by the generic character Bob) we are generally oversensitive to perceptions of threat. Think about how many times you have had a smoke alarm go off when there was no fire? It makes sense for a smoke alarm to be hypersensitive to the possibility of a fire. That way when there really is a fire it definitely works. An under-sensitive smoke alarm won’t inconvenience us with false alarms; but it might not go off when we truly need it. Like Bob, our anxiety is easily activated in the absence of true need. It makes sense evolutionarily that our ‘anxiety alarm’ is easily tripped off so that when we truly need it, it works.

So, our minds throw anxiety and a bunch of other emotions into our consciousness in order to further its aims of survival and reproduction. We, the conscious selves might very well ask our minds to stop throwing up negative emotion as we find it distressing, unhelpful and unnecessary in the modern world. If our minds could reply they might very well say “Your happiness is not my concern. I just use you for my needs. And I act as if the environment today is the same as it was 100,000 years ago”.

Picture your own pet or an animal you know. It has no sense of tomorrow or yesterday. It responds to the immediate stimulus of emotion generated by its mind. Your dog feels happy and it approaches you. Your cat gets scared by a noise and it avoids you. Even the most sophisticated apes do not carry tools for “later on”. They have no capacity to conceive of potential desire. They just respond to the emotion of the moment, be it hunger, anger, anxiety or lust. We humans walk around feeling as though our conscious selves are in charge because that is the part of us that does our higher-level thinking. This is not the case. Higher level thinking evolved to think about negative events in the past and review them to identify patterns predicting negative events (this leads to depression). And we have the capacity to generate thoughts of the future. We generate thoughts of numerous potential futures so we can plan to deal with them (most of which never happen and this causes anxiety). We generally remain creatures subservient to the emotions thrown at us by our minds.

But there is good news. Nobody teaches us when we are young how to navigate such a complicated and selfish entity as our own minds, but such training exists. Most people recognise that exercise will increase the capacity of our physical bodies. We do and don’t take advantage of this knowledge, yet nobody would deny such training is available or that it will work. Very few people are aware that there are mental skills that can be acquired and exercised to optimise our relationship with our minds. This is relatively new to science and is not yet a widely understood public concept. Psychology as a profession and a body of knowledge continues to grow as does every other health profession.

Each person has their own combination of evolved genetic drives, the randomness with which these are expressed, and the influence of personal history – from childhood events to current circumstance and complications of their lives. It is my privilege to work with people to solve the puzzle of their lives and introduce skills they may never before have considered. I relish getting to the heart of people rather than being caught in the etiquette of small talk. Skirting around the truly important issues of life is not how I wish to spend my human interaction time. People are faulty and do not act perfectly in line with the things they value. There are ways to look at human behaviour which helps people manage being human, and make compassion for self and others the obvious way to live our lives.