If you are an evolutionist, you know that we lived for millions of years as hunter-gatherers. We had physically demanding lives with very few food sources. Our minds and bodies evolved for that environment, not an environment where you can get more salt, fat, and sugar in a single happy meal than you could in the jungle for a month.
Our brains are designed with balance in mind. We have two neurological systems; the sympathetic or "fight or flight" system and the parasympathetic or "rest and digest" system. Our brains, our minds, are designed to narrow and focus when a threat appears and to broaden and build when we sit around the fire pit and tell stories.
Today's threats are not tigers or snakes that we can easily perceive and understand; they are more like deadlines, evaluations, and traffic. We process threats that are generalized and hard to identify. Physiologically we react to them as we would react to a tiger in the jungle, which causes stress and anxiety levels to increase. Our brains are negatively biased because the most important thing, the essential instinct we have, is to survive.
Today's world provides us with a constant barrage of messages that activate our right prefrontal cortex, which is associated with negative feelings. Neurons that fire together wire together, so the electrical activity and the capacity for electrical activity rise in the right side of our brain. If we do not balance that by intentionally increasing our left prefrontal cortex activity, we will be led down the rabbit hole of being "stressed out" or "overwhelmed."
Meditation is one way to increase the activity on our left side. It is one path to balance.
