Current Health Hunters Newsletter:

When I tell people I teach mindfulness for a living, the first thing they often share with me is the anxiety in their lives. Anxiety is a form of stress that appears to have an overarching presence in today’s society.

To give you a little background, research suggests that the amygdala, which is located in the center of our brain, developed the anxiety response to external stimuli as a means of survival. Prehistoric cavemen developed an entire region in their brains dedicated to keeping them alive in the midst of daily life-threatening scenarios. It worked. A little too well, it seems.

Flash forward to present times, while our brain is still wired to run away from dinosaurs, it often interprets signals (such as our phones beeping, emails coming in at a pace we can’t keep up with, or a hostile Facebook post in our feed) as life-threatening stressors. So while a new text message may seem benign, or even something to get excited about, it’s just one more thing in our daily environment that can add to our modern anxieties.