Staff Day

[osprey_archer]

I'm listening to a "mental health awareness" Youtube for virtual staff day and the presenter is giving the "sabretooth tiger theory of stress": in ye olden days, we were stressed out by things like sabretooth tigers, and we could react to that stress by fighting or fleeing the threat, which would dissipate the adrenaline/cortisol so our stress levels quickly returned to normal. Nowadays we are chronically stressed out by things like "meetings with our boss" and "the healthcare system," which we can neither fight nor flee, so we're just sitting there! Stewing in stress! For which we are not designed!

I've read this description before, but today it occurred to me for the first time that... actually... didn't hunter-gatherers have a lot of chronic stress, too? True, hunter-gatherers didn't have to worry about being bankrupted by the healthcare system, because there was no healthcare system, but... there was no healthcare system! If you got a bad infection, you were gonna kick it. Open fracture? Death. Pneumonia? Adios! Diabetes? Deadly! If they really sat down to think about it, surely they could get just as stressed out about it as any modern person contemplating medical bankruptcy.

(Also, although I, like the sabretooth tiger people, am using the past tense, there are still hunter-gatherers today. "Do hunter-gatherers suffer chronic stress?" is definitely something we could study empirically.)

And true, hunter-gatherers don't have a boss in the same sense that we moderns have bosses, but generally there's a group leader, and surely there were long-term "my group leader and I don't get along" stresses. (I haven't read much about hunter-gatherer social dynamics, but I have read about primate & wolf dynamics, and being low-status in the group is a source of severe ongoing stress for the animals at the bottom of the heap. Like being the class outcast in high school.)

Also, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is feast or famine: sometimes the berries are ripe and the salmon are running, but sometimes supplies run low and you are at real risk of starving to death, possibly for months on end. Isn't that chronic stress?

Of course it's entirely possible that hunter-gatherers manage their long-term "we are out of food and nothing will be growing for months" stress differently than we manage our sources of stress. But "hunter-gatherers have no long-term stress so humans are just not built to deal with it!" seems at odds with actual hunter-gatherer life.

Comments

[missroserose]

This is precisely why I have a reflexive "nope" response to just about anything with a whiff of "evolutionary psychology" about it. I'm sure there are people in the field who're doing legitimate research, but popularly I only ever see it used to provide pat explanations to behaviors with complex psychosocial roots, often in order to reinforce gender and racial stereotypes. This despite most of their arguments falling apart if you think about them longer than a few minutes.

[kore]

BINGO

I have seen many dudebros use it to "justify" the worst sexism, ugh.

[asakiyume]

Yup yup yup yup

[ancientreader]

Same about evolutionary psychology -- 90 percent of it is what real scientists call Just So stories. I think there's something to the stuff about chronic stress, though. As I understand it, the difference isn't that people back then didn't experience daily stress, but that our emergency-response system (the HPA axis in our brains, the sabre-tooth tiger alert feature) is constantly being activated so we spend more time on high key, with concomitant changes in our neurophysiology. (I used to work with behaviorally troubled dogs, so I did a certain amount of research on the effects of maternal stress and chronic anxiety. The effects are horrible -- there's solid research on the health damage from being Black in a racist society, e.g.)

Oh, and I see that gaudior makes a related, better case below. Cosigned.

Unpaid ad coming: I listen to a podcast called Ologies, which is hosted by a progressive woman who makes it her business to interview women scientists and scientists of color. IT'S SO GREAT.

[osprey_archer]

The speculative nature of so much evolutionary psychology stuff - we don't REALLY know what our ancestors the vole people were like 65 million years ago, after all - seems to lend itself to wishful thinking in whichever direction the evolutionary psychologist wishes to be wishful.

And this particularly analogy has escaped into the wild: I've definitely seen it outside of ev psych contexts, including this particular presentation.

Hi from a fairly random mostly-lurker, you said an interesting thing and I have time today. :)

[gaudior]

That is a very good point, which I hadn't seen before!

I think that it makes sense to change the hunter-gatherer explanation to say that hunter-gatherers have both chronic stress and emergency-level-panic, and much more likely to have emergency-level panic than people who have spent thousands of years trying to make sure we can live a daily life without running into a tiger unless it's in a cage.

But the more important argument is: adrenaline-fueled panic-level-fight-or-flight can save your life in an emergency, and then you pass on your genes. Chronic stress can make you miserable, but not significantly likely to be taken instantaneously out of the gene pool. You are more likely to get ill if you're chronically stressed, but you can still pass on your genes. Evolution doesn't actually care what's good for you, just what keeps you from dying before you reproduce.

And I think you make a good point about the level of pain in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and that much of it is about long-term things you're talking about. But there is in our high-tech lives a level of stress from decision fatigue-- there are a zillion things each of us could be doing, every second of the day, and most of them will turn out fine, but it's almost impossible to really know which is the best, and that is really quite exhausting. That's stress-- the chronic-anxiety inducing kind, the kind that comes from being frustrated and upset and feeling not-exactly-helpless-because-you-probably-could-do-more-but-have-no-promise-it-will-help. The thing about getting a bad fracture and knowing you're just going to die is that it is sad and scary, but if you don't have options, then you just feel the pain and are upset, not worried.

IMO. Thank you, this is definitely a more nuanced look at it for the next time I use that analogy!

Re: Hi from a fairly random mostly-lurker, you said an interesting thing and I have time today. :)

[ancientreader]

And the epigenetic effects of stress. E.g., it's been demonstrated over and over in nonhuman animals that chronic maternal stress --> long exposure of fetuses to stress hormones --> increased reactivity and, IIRC, aggression in the offspring. I haven't looked into it lately to find out whether there's research on the effects of paternal stress, but it wouldn't surprise me, even if those effects are more attenuated because Dad doesn't bathe the kiddos in his hormones the way Mom does.

Re: Hi from a fairly random mostly-lurker, you said an interesting thing and I have time today. :)

[osprey_archer]

It also occurs to me that humans (or some humans, anyway) often rather enjoy emergency-level panic, at least when it turns out well: it's exhilarating when it happens and it makes a good story afterward. People might buy you a beer to hear about the time you walked away from a high-speed car crash, but no one wants to hear about months of low-key anxiety about paying for minor but necessary car repairs.

[kore]

Yeah, this is my exact problem with evolutionary psychology, which mostly seems like a lot of dressed-up guessing with confirmation bias.

[osprey_archer]

This analogy seems to have gotten out into the wild, so to speak; the presenter wasn't specifically talking about evolutionary psychology, just How Stress Works.

[slashmarks]

This is no more scientific than that explanation, but my experience has been that the adrenaline response *is* helpful for chronic stress when it's severe enough because randomly panic spiralling motivates you, at least in theory, to do something, anything, about the situation, whether it's applying to jobs because of your horrible relationship with your manager or looking for alternate food sources.

But a lot of that style of CBT therapy starts from the premise that your brain is your biggest problem and any life issues are secondary, so I'm not surprised that possibility tends to be overlooked.

[osprey_archer]

This is pure anecdata, but that is in fact why I got out of my dead-end Starbucks job: I got so stressed out about a particularly horrible customer that I decided it was time to find a new job somewhere else, ANYWHERE else. (And then my boss was so upset that I was leaving that he had a talk with the customer, who was so upset that she couldn't abuse the employees with impunity any longer that she stopped coming to our store. Happy ending for everyone! Except the baristas whichever coffee shop she went to next, I guess.)

I do think "What if you changed the life situation that is causing this stress?" is often an underutilized solution. Obviously it's not always possible, but if it IS possible it's worth looking into.

[asakiyume]

I'm nodding in complete agreement with what you've written here.

Everything we know about human cultures tells us that the people in them have equally complex feelings, and anthropologists are strenuous in telling us that societies that aren't as full of material accoutrements as ours often still have very complex rules of social interaction, etc. etc. We're--theoretically!--in an age when we don't make hierarchies of cultures in which we rank some as advanced and others as primitive, but some of the attitudes that went along with making those rankings seem to have survived in the hunter-gatherer stress situation: a sense that hunter-gatherers were somehow collectively simpler, and that their lives were simpler.

... some people--and, collectively, some peoples, seem to brood more on some things than others do, but that doesn't mean that there no brooders in the groups that by and large seem not to brood much--just that those people aren't the ones creating the cultural record.

Anyway. Yeah. I agree with you. Well said.

[osprey_archer]

There seems to be a powerful wish-fulfillment appeal to the idea that somewhere! at some time in human history! there has been a simple culture where people have lived simple, happy lives. (And, crucially, the person imagining this culture would fit right in and be happy there, too.)

I suspect that no one would actually SAY that they are pro-brooding, but I think that in progressive online circles there's often a value placed on introspection ("Have you thought about WHY you like stories about simple, happy societies?" - generally with the assumption that once you've thought about WHY, you'd better darn well not like it anymore) that often seems to lead to endless brooding.

[staranise]

I mean, a more accurate take would be something like, "It was very important to our continued survival as a species that we be able to successfully respond to immediate physical peril. We are very well-adapted to deal with those threats. It was significantly less important that we be able to deal with ongoing stress in an effective and healthy manner, because even while miserable, we were often able to survive and propagate our species. Therefore, our capacity for dealing with immediate stress in a healthy manner is much greater than our capacity for dealing with and fending off chronic low-level toxic stress."

[missroserose]

I find this a far more convincing argument.

[rachelmanija]

IMO the sabre toothed tiger theory is great for explaining why the flight/fight/freeze response exists. It's not great for explaining why things were better in Ye Olden Dayes (they weren't) or why animals don't get PTSD (they do).

[osprey_archer]

I was going to complain "Why do people like to believe that things were better in Ye Olden Days?", but actually, I get it, who would not like to believe that humans had once cracked the code for How to Be Happy and all we had to do was figure out how they did it?

Instead we're stuck bushwhacking our way forward, chirping, "Well it's not clear if we CAN create a happy society, no one has ever actually done it, but... maybe if we go thataway...? That direction doesn't look like it's infested with crocodiles."