You ever think about how atoms just float around without worrying at all? They don’t stress, they don’t overthink – atoms just chill and do their thing based on the laws of physics. Must be nice! Meanwhile, we humans are walking around with these big complex brains capable of crazy cognition…but also kind of cursed in a way. See, our minds evolved to anticipate dangers and plan meticulously back in the stone age when that stuff was mission critical for survival. Great for not getting eaten by a lion. Not as helpful for dealing with annoying co-workers or traffic jams. Our ancestral brains can’t tell the difference – any potential issue gets the threat level cranked to 11! Once we get anxious, even automatic stuff like breathing gets over-managed in our minds. When you catch yourself mentally counting each inhale, that’s when you know your thinking brain needs to take five and let your body do its thing. Our primal wiring still thinks the concrete jungle is the actual jungle, so it’s hypervigilant over each little hassle. Can’t compute that work emails aren’t exactly a mortal danger even if it feels that way sometimes! I appreciate our human thinking skills – way better than an amoeba’s. But it’s clear our evolutionarily programmed minds come glitchy in the modern world. The good news? Meditation helps us catch those useless mental tangents and chill back into the now. We’ll probably never think as effortlessly as a floating atom. But by understanding where our ancestral programming trips up, we can optimize our mental operating system for today’s environment. Just gotta debug a few lines of code from the hypervigilant caveperson era. Once we stop taking every minor hassle as a tiger attack, our powerful minds will really start working for us and not against us. What a trip!