Anxiety often comes from treating ourselves as thinking creatures trying to control emotions. We are emotional beings who learned to think — understanding the two separate brain systems helps quiet OCD-style overthinking and find more calm.
Emotional Creatures Who Learned to Think
Originally, we were instinctive animals. We just habitually responded to life non-verbally via a pre-programmed reptilian mind. We then evolved to generate a limbic emotional mind that had the logic of a seven or eight-year-old. However, we were still animals.
Our brain unconsciously makes decisions for us, and then informs us of those decisions through agitating our organs, which we call our yes/no emotions. And then, more recently, we developed our prefrontal cortex and our neocortex, the part of the brain that adds language, logic, reason, rules, fairness, kindness, love, and all those aptitudes that make us a human rather than an animal.
Put another way, evolutionarily speaking, we are emotional creatures who have recently learned how to think.
Conscious, logical, language-based thinking was the last capability that was evolved within us. It was an add-on to an already very successful childlike emotional animal creature, and it was what moved us from animals to humans.
Now, here’s the takeaway that metaphorically I need you to recognise: the conscious part and the subconscious part of the brain are on two distinctly separate systems.
One is who you feel you are, and the other is who you think you are — the animal and the human, the feeler and the thinker, instinctual and logical, selfish and kind — and neither part truly knows what the other one is doing. Yet we assume that they understand each other, but they don’t. They’re on two separate systems running within us, and we need to manage them both in different ways if finding calmness is our goal.
A person experiencing anxiety is primarily operating like a thinking creature who’s trying to control their emotions. But that’s just not how we’re wired up, and it makes everything worse.
Let me repeat this: We are emotional creatures who learn to think.
Your unconscious mind hardly understands what you consciously think, as it operates mainly by automatic responses and automatic programs. Your unconscious mind, which controls your emotions, is hardly listening to what you say. It’s listening to how you say it.
It’s responding to your tonality, your speed of thought, and what your body language is doing. And this is why we talk softly and slowly to a baby. “Oh, there, there, yes. Okay, it’ll be fine.” It suits their subconscious mind, which subsequently soothes their body.