8 Ways We're Hardwired to Turn Minor Stress into Catastrophe

The result? Perfectly healthy, well-fed, indoor, and entirely unmaimed monkeys screeching about how stressed they are. Stress is a terrible high-pitched scream that can only be heard in the stomach, a horrible tightness in the chest where it feels like your heart is holding its breath and you realize "Holy shit, my resting state is now simulating heart attacks." Stress is designed for saber-toothed tigers and routinely deployed against spreadsheets, and, just like we can do with anything, humans can make it way better and worse ...

It's an agriculture of panic. Worse, the undone job undercuts your enjoyment of everything you tried to enjoy instead of getting it over with in the first place. Wrapping up a task feels good, amplifying all our endorphins when we relax. Delaying something we can easily complete leaves a little knot of nagging neurons, and instead of working away on the job in the background, all they're doing is building up the biggest "I TOLD YOU SO!" possible when you find yourself scrambling at the last minute.

The deep dark circuits of your apey brain don't understand tax filings or carburetor maintenance, but that only makes their worry about those things all the worse. A survival animal's only level of worry is "If I don't do what I'm meant to, I will die." If an ape didn't do its daily work, it got starved, frozen, and eaten, and it's bringing that level of stress to incomplete RJ-17 forms.

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You could let the ape deal with them directly, because smearing them with shit and throwing them at your boss will ensure you don't have to fill out any more.

The same stress situation gave rise to the idea of "shitting yourself," as your body dumped all unnecessary weight in an effort to outrun apex predators (and presumably to make you less appetizing to eat). But we don't shit ourselves anymore, and shitting over other people doesn't help either. Important but voluntary stresses like exams and airplane departure times simply don't justify prickery. No matter how screwed the situation, every desk worker preserves some small ability to make things better or worse for you. Screaming is a shortcut to the latter.

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"I'm sorry, sir, it seems your appointment was scheduled for the next bank holiday after the heat death of the universe."

Maintaining our environment -- you know, the one and only ability elevating us above every other life form on the planet, the one we're so much better at that the word "predator" doesn't even apply to us anymore -- is utterly ignored.

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"Yeah, I'm thinking I'll just start it all again from scratch. Life, I mean. From unicellular. Right here."

The result is entropy acceleration. You decay as your body tries to rebuild itself out of garbage, which would at least camouflage it in your increasingly stinking filth chamber. Add the way stress depresses your immune system, and you've got a body breaking down in a disease cultivation lab. The flesh can't defend itself against sickness, and the rapidly depressing brain no longer even wants to. Which segues nicely into ...

Wishing you were sick is the brain doing the exact opposite of what it was built for. Again. The worst part is the awful failure of attitude indicated by wishing you were truly sick instead of screaming "SCREW IT" and simulating the symptoms with a bottle of scotch. Either live properly or screw up properly. When someone's self-belief is so low that they're seeking permission from virus particles to do what they want, they're overestimating how much the species would miss them if they didn't turn up.

When someone spends half an hour complaining to you about a problem instead of fixing it, he's demonstrating that he doesn't think his life is very important, and flat-out telling you that he thinks yours is even less important.

Luckily there's a simple procedure to defuse this self-winding psychological self-destruct. When you find yourself second guessing a decision after you've made it, check your garage for a DeLorean. Get in and activate the flux capacitor. If you can't do either of those things, stop thinking about the past and get on with fixing your future decisions.

The lesser version of this avoidance strategy is firing off fast requests for extra information, or external confirmation, or anything else that lets us generate an excuse instead of the result. Because it's "somebody else's turn" to get things done.

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"Also I have a note from my mom asking that I be excused from meetings today."

Of course, we can't take advice from small furry ancestors because evolutionary psychology is bullshit. Anyone trying to explain people in terms of simpler, stupider, earlier non-people is trying to convince themselves they can win by reducing everyone else on the planet to a lower difficulty level. It's mostly used by wannabe alpha assholes who don't realize that they're just pissing off the women they meet instead of pissing on them like their cave-dwelling ancestors. I'm using animalogies here to reveal how ridiculous the behavior is, not to recommend it.

None of which stops us from using Netflix as another escape hatch. TV has always been a window into another world, but now it's an outright door. Of the TARDIS. You can find a new favorite show and spend literal days there while your real world decays and your machines go "Crash, we didn't need a whole Matrix, new seasons of Doctor Who were more than enough."

The result? The fun advice? The traditional searing insight at the end of the article? You already know it -- close this article and finish whatever you were meant to be doing. Then come back when you're finished and read 20 more.

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