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The Evolution of Pressure Posting Date: Aug 6 2007 12:21AM Run or you’re lunch. Now that’s pressure. When you’re the only gimpy impala on the savannah and the local cheetah gets hungry, you need a little extra boost to help you live to graze another day. That’s why evolution invented the fight-or-flight reflex. Over countless millennia, the impalas (and other creatures) with the best adrenaline rush have outpaced their predators while the more laid-back herbivores of the world have been culled mercilessly by the process of natural selection. As a result, every living creature alive in the Twenty-First Century should have a seriously well-developed accelerator pedal.
And this would be great if human society hadn’t decided to evolve in a completely different direction.
Back when we were monkeys whose lives depended on climbing trees faster than monkey-eating lizards, adrenaline was our friend. Every crisis we faced, every moment of peak performance pressure demanded an all-out, monkey-balls-to-the-wall physical response – our highest jump, our fastest sprint, our hardest fight. Now, we have evolved into a bunch of e-mail using, cubicle dwelling, presentation making, casual dating hairless primates. Our giant brains have created a new context of physical safety and replaced the risk of being eaten with the risk of failure, embarrassment, demotion, rejection, ridicule and apathy.
The problem is that our bodies are still in the world of the gimpy impala. In fact, we are the victims of a self-imposed form of reverse evolution. In the hands of nature, evolution rewards the strong, the resourceful and the innovative. In human hands, evolution forces us to attempt to excel at tasks we are ill-equipped to complete. Unless you are a professional football player, a firefighter, a super spy or a lumberjack who lifts fallen trees off his buddies, you probably don’t want adrenaline coursing through your body at your own personal moment of truth.
Who needs the strength of ten men when you’re trying to write your calculus exam? Who wants the energy of a dynamo when you’re trying to make a six-foot putt to win five bucks from your friends at the country club? Who wants their skin crawling with electricity when you’re trying to present the third-quarter profit statements to your boss’s boss?
Over time, evolution has rewarded those creatures who are most alert and responsive to danger and at the end of the evolutionary timeline stands us, human kind, the creatures who have built a society in which those hard-earned abilities are almost entirely useless. In fact, we now have to invent drugs, therapies and Rolaids to help us manage the consequences of that particular line of evolution. There is a critical conflict between the tasks that are the most common determinates of our success in life and the biological tools we have been given to accomplish them.
When we should be focusing on the task at hand, absorbed in the execution of our moment of crowning glory, we are rabbits in the woods, obsessed by danger and awash in the physiological results of our sensitivity to danger.
The end result of this process is that we all need to adopt strategies that help us relax in the face of ten million years of evolutionary progress. The people who do this best dominate our society. The golfer with the steadiest nerves wins the Masters. The accountant who works best under pressure gets all his clients’ tax returns done by the end of April. The politician who doesn’t melt under the TV lights gets elected.
We are now witnessing the undoing of evolution in record time. The principles of natural selection no longer favour the wary, the fast and the strong. Now, they favour those who own the most scented candles and patchouli oil. They favour those who stretch in the morning and wear loose-fitting underwear. They favour those who have outlets, therapists, social drinking habits and fulfilling sex lives. But mostly, the New Evolution clearly favours those who read the magazines you get in supermarket check-out lines. Ten million years from now, when evolution finally catches up with the culture we make, somewhere it will be Oprah, not Charles Darwin, who is smiling. |
