Evolution and anxiety Flashcards
anxiety
a feeling of being really worried or nervous without any real reason.
anxiety may be a result of natural selection. Natural selection, the principle behind evolution. The idea that life on this planet has developed as a result of random changes in biology over many many years.
why have anxiety, that seems like a negative rather than a positive thing to develop?
natural selection
a principle of evolution when random changes in an organism’s biology may lead it to being more successful in its environment.
anxiety is a result of natural selection. This is the principle of evolution whereby random changes in the biology of a living thing can make it more likely to survive in a particular environment.
to shape
to have an important impact on the way something develops. ( sth jumps out)
Natural selection has shaped all organisms to have special states to cope with certain kinds of circumstances.
to cope with
to manage a difficult situation.
Natural selection has shaped all organisms to have special states to cope with certain kinds of circumstances. I treated patients with anxiety disorders for 40 years at the University of Michigan. It was only half way through that I started realising that anxiety is there for a good reason.
life-threatening
possibly causing death.
Well, it’s your body reacting to danger, like an emergency response, a warning. In really dangerous situations, which could harm you or even kill you, which Dr Nesse describes as life-threatening situations, it’s a useful response to warn you to take action or to prepare for action.
to go off (talking about an alarm)
starts making its warning noise.
What you’re having is a normal kind of emergency response which is great in life-threatening situations but for you it’s a false alarm like a smoke detector going off when you burn the toast. And after that many of my patients said – ‘Oh, that makes perfect sense, I think I won’t need your help after all, doctor’.
