Outsmart Stone Age Instincts That Make You Unhappy
Your brain runs programs designed for conditions that no longer exist.
Posted May 8, 2026 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
I was at Baghdad International Airport, March 2007. The call came as I waited in the departure lounge to fly back to DC from my last trip to Iraq as an intelligence officer. The caller, a friend who was close to the man the President had just nominated to be my new boss, said, "The news isn't great, Eric. He's just finished a project with CIA, who told him your bureaucratic meddling severely damaged the agency." As the words sank in, my gut knotted, my heart pounded, and my breath came shallow and fast. I don't remember how the call ended, just that I felt that the bottom had just fallen out of my life.
The days that followed were interspersed with crippling anxiety and a sense of otherworldly detachment, a condition my therapist called depersonalization/derealization disorder. And no wonder. A career -oriented workaholic , I'd just learned my life of government service was probably over, because once a reputation is tarnished, it's nearly impossible to repair. Indeed, one of the first things my new boss did upon taking office was to demote me and encourage me to resign. Which I did, feeling embarrassed, humiliated, depressed, and anxious.
My dominant feeling during that period was fear : Fear that my life was essentially over. Looking back on it all now, I realize my life was not over, but my brain kept screaming that the colossal hit to my reputation and status meant that it most certainly was.
Why my brain lied to me
Evolutionary psychologists such as Tooby and Cosmides [1,2] argue that, due to the slow pace of evolution relative to the advance of civilization, the brains of modern humans are out of sync with modern realities, optimized for an Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA) that is hundreds of thousands to millions years old.
In that EEA, life was short, dangerous, and brutal, wiring "Darwinian scripts" deep into our unconscious that make us vigilant and exquisitely attuned to threats of all kinds [3]. As members of a social species whose survival depended upon belonging to a group, one of the threats to which the brains of our ancestors were especially vigilant was threats to their reputation, which could lead to exclusion from the group, which likely meant death [3].
Thus, when my 'clan', the US intelligence community, effectively expelled me, my stone age brain shouted: "You're going to die!". And my body heard the shout loud and clear, activating the famous fight or flight response, flooding my bloodstream and nervous system with stress hormones and generally making me miserable.
It took me months, if not years, to convince my anachronistic brain that I was in no danger of perishing, and thus to regain my equilibrium.
Thankfully, now that you are aware that your brain--like mine-- is apt to lie to you should you ever experience a threat to your reputation or status, you can recover much faster than I did. Here's how:
To be forewarned is to be forearmed
The first step in preparing yourself for a massive ego hit, as I suffered, is to be aware of the core problem: your brain runs antiquated programs that create numerous mismatches between ancient imperatives and modern life. Examples are:
This last ancient/modern brain mismatch, called negativity bias [4], played a prominent role in my lengthy struggle with anxiety by activating an inner voice of doom.
Fortunately, if that cognitive distortion from a bygone age makes your brain yell at you the way mine did, there are effective ways of coping with negative inner voices, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Although CBT and ACT primarily aim to lessen anxiety and depression sparked by learned negative messages (acquired from others or ourselves) [5.6], those therapeutic techniques can also lessen emotional suffering from unlearned negative voices that evolution hard-wired into our brains.
A CBT approach, as with learned self-talk, would start with making the unconscious voice of fear conscious. If I had known that in 2007, instead of panicking, I might have run through a chain of thoughts like this:
Knowing me, that last bit of self-talk wouldn’t have eliminated all of my anxiety, which is why I might have fared better with a more nuanced ACT approach that didn’t seek so much to change my self-talk, as to help me live with it without experiencing crippling anxiety and depression. The ACT approach might go something like this:
Both CBT and ACT approaches to coping with stone-age thinking represent a kind of brain judo that does not directly oppose the thrust of ancient brain scripts but deftly redirects them in less damaging directions. And, given that evolution spent millions, if not billions of years, hard-wiring survival scripts deep into our psyches, we are more likely to outsmart those ancient scripts than we are to outfight them!
1 Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology , 11 (4-5), 375–424.
2 Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin , 117 (3), 497–529. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016230959090017Z
3 Kerr, N. L., & Levine, J. M. (2008). The detection of social exclusion: Evolution and beyond. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations , 11 (2), 155–177., https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-02314-005
4 Vaish, A., Grossmann, T., & Woodward, A. (2008). Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development. Psychological Bulletin , 134 (3), 383–403. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-04614-002
5 Beck, J. S. (2011). Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-22098-000
6 Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment therapy: An experiential approach to behavior change . Guilford Press. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-04037-000
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Eric Haseltine, Ph.D ., is a neuroscientist and the author of Long Fuse, Big Bang.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.