Is There a Good Reason for Anxiety?

Anxiety, one of the elements of the trait neuroticism, might be evolutionarily adaptive

Photo by Bhargava Srivari on Unsplash

Usually, when I’m awake at 3 a.m., I’m cursing the fact that I can’t sleep through the night like normal people. But sometimes, I get contemplative. I wonder if my tendency toward insomnia is a feature, not a bug. If I lived thousands of years ago on the savanna,* wouldn’t it be useful to have someone waking up in the dead of night, tending the fire and keeping an eye out for lions?

I often tell my boyfriend, who has no anxiety, “I’m anxious so you don’t have to be,” but sometimes I wonder if that’s literally true. I wonder if my ancestors were anxious so that their fellow hunter-gatherers could sleep soundly through the night.

According to Randolph Nesse, an evolutionary psychiatrist and author of Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, that’s basically right.

Nesse has what he calls the “smoke detector” principle of anxiety, meaning that anxiety is “programmed” to be so sensitive that it sometimes goes off even when there is no real threat. You’d rather your anxiety smoke detector go off for a burnt chicken than stay mute for a grease fire. Our bodies would rather be too careful than not careful enough.

He writes that many panic attacks are just false alarms left over from an era when our human ancestors really did face threats from predators who could cause bodily harm. Our hunter-gatherer predecessors didn’t know whether a rustle in the bushes was a lion or a monkey, so they would sprint away at the sound of either. “This means that 999 times out of 1,000 you will flee unnecessarily,” Nesse writes. “However, one time out of 1,000, fleeing will save your life.” This hair-trigger jumpiness did not make for a very chill caveman. But then again, the chill caveman didn’t live to pass on his DNA.

Oddly, research on modern hunter-gatherer tribes suggests that now, their lifestyle is less stressful than ours. They have less of a “future orientation” than that of the Western office worker—and thus less anxiety. Hunter-gatherers trust their environments to provide for their basic needs, so much so that they rarely store food or plan ahead. They don’t spend time thinking about how life could be different months from now. Non-industrial societies aren’t visited by those horsemen of anxiety—mortgages, college admissions, performance reviews—that loom down the road. Meanwhile, the future is pretty much all I, and other anxious people, think about.

The best way I can square these opposing realities—that ancient life as hunter-gatherers sometimes required anxiety, but now, hunter-gatherers don’t experience much anxiety—is that modern Westerners experience a different type of anxiety than our ancestors did. We don’t have an intense period of running from a potential foe, followed by a period of rest. We don’t just gather food until we have enough, then hang out in the drum circle for the rest of the day. We have to work 40 hours a week, every week. We have another daycare virus, another weird email, another client who bailed—sometimes all in the same week. And we don’t have a tribe of people constantly surrounding us, protecting us. For the most part, we’re facing all of our modern-day lions alone. Modern life has made it so that this smoke detector virtually never stops beeping.

So what to do with this smoke detector principle? I admit that it’s not an immediately actionable thing to know that your nervous system is set to occasionally go off for no reason. We have an actual, physical smoke detector in our house that’s way too sensitive—it goes off the second I start cooking—and I rarely think, “gee, this is good because this means it’ll definitely catch a fire if there ever is one.” I think about how we need to get that thing replaced.

But, even if you wanted to, you probably couldn’t completely replace your nervous system with one that never goes off. You can reduce your levels of the trait neuroticism—that’s what my book is about!—but a life completely without neuroticism is not only unlikely, it’s ill-advised. People with no anxiety make bad choices. They do dumb and dangerous things. You don’t want off-the-charts anxiety, but you want a little anxiety, just in case you need to outrun those lions.

Sometimes, it’s helpful just to know that anxiety evolved for a reason. Your body isn’t trying to undermine you by keeping you up at night. It thinks that’s what you need. Nesse writes that when he tells his patients that “anxiety is a useful response that often goes overboard,” many report feeling “normalized and empowered.”

In an interview, Nesse told me he sometimes tells his socially anxious patients, “you know, it's awful that you have to suffer these bad feelings, but there's something worse, and that is if you didn't care. And you were the kind of person who just wasn't bothered by what other people thought about you. And that's helpful for a lot of patients to realize, that there are advantages, despite all the suffering, that comes with being a neurotic person.”

There are ways to become less neurotic, but it’s not by beating yourself up for being neurotic. Sometimes it helps just to remember that there’s a reason for your personality traits—even for those you don’t like.

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*I’m from Texas and never learned about evolution. We learned that “God snapped his fingers and that was the Big Bang.” So if something here related to humanity’s origins is not quite right, don’t @ me, @ the George W. Bush administration.