Human Instincts

This is the key point to understanding depression and anxiety.

We are all evolved to survive in a given environment.

Lessons learned over millions of years of evolution created our instincts.

Nothing about us is by accident. Every aspect of how we are physically and mentally evolved over hundreds of thousands of years purely for survival.
The process is called evolution. The lessons learned over so many years were best programmed into us via instincts. This way the most important skills were born into us, hard coded and ready to act upon.

Instincts control so much of our behaviour.

Instincts to eat, fight, reproduce, like, dislike, run, hide, love, cry, smile, frown, scratch, cough and so much more. Instincts range from the subtle to the obvious.
If our personalities have different levels of consciousness then instincts are at the very foundation.

They cannot be easily reasoned with or changed. They have the final word, the highest priority and are there to make the difference between life and death.

This was the case  until changes in our environment moved faster than our instincts could evolve.

Human instincts and evolution  ran hand in hand for by far the longest part of our evolution.

Society and way of life was slow to change in the days when we were hunting and gathering. Evolution is a slow process but could keep up when we lived in more or less the same way for such a long time.

Our instincts are suited to how we lived for the longest part of our evolution. Diet, exercise, social life, sex are things that we adapted to do best when we were tribal living hunter gatherers.

Each person in the tribe new their role. Each member depended on the other for survival. We stuck together and had each others backs. Men and women had different roles so evolved in slightly different directions. This is how we survived, worked as a team and evolved into whom we are today.

Life was harder but there was almost no mental illness, no depression. We lived how we were evolved to live. Every single part of who and how we were fitted into how we lived, what we ate, how we exercised etc.

There was no social isolation, wise elders would council the younger, we needed each other to make it through to the next day. Your brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins and extended family members all lived and loved together.
Then the world we lived changed faster and our instincts could not keep up anymore. We became displaced. Modern society did not allow for us to react in the ways our instincts demanded.

In modern society we are taught to hide or be ashamed of many of our instincts. To suppress and quash our natural emotions. Males could no longer hunt and fight. Many look to sports to satiate our instinctive hunting drive.

Often we do not understand why we don’t always feel whole, content and satisfied.

Our style of living now is far removed from the ways we are evolved to live. The caveman inside us all is trapped and lives without full expression. To understand this is a great help and the start of the road to expression and contentment.