Are we the night watchers?

[Tikirob]

I was trying to figure out what the deal with anxiety is. They say it’s genetic. So in boredom I thought really hard “Who was the first anxious person?” and I came up with theory. Please tell me what you think of it! Even if you think it’s stupid.

So what I think is that thousands of years most people lived in tribes. And when the tribes went to bed at night they always had a designated night watcher to keep the sleepers safe. This would be a person that listened extra hard for intruders, was on edge to see if there were things lurking in the dark, and stayed up all night thinking to themselves about the stars, the quiet and overall felt quite lonely in the night. When the day came the night watcher would get to sleep but the sleep would not be as good. Yet he or she would only feel comfortable with the noises of people around. Overtime in the tribe this vocation of nightwatcher would be passed down from generation to generation. Nightwatchers would marry their own and over time in human nature these specific traits would be passed on in genetics to future generations of people who lived in a modetn society where the sesnsitivity to sounds, the heightened sense of fear of intruders, inflective thinking, does not serve them or their community well. So my theory is that we are the descendants of nightwatchers and our minds are over focused on sounding an alarm to keep threats at bay.

[Hidden]

I like it! It gives us all an origin story of sorts, our legacies passed down to help humanity survive. A different perspective. Go us! Woot!! <3

[teemo1]

That's as good a theory as any other I've heard or can think of!

[Agora1]

Tikirob, at last, an answer that makes some sense. Thanks for

sharing that thought.

[Tikirob]

Haha stuck with the crap undeed!

[trapis2]

I love what you wrote ! Did you just come up with that theory yourself ? Very talented. Those dang early relitives !!! Thank's a lot for passing it down !

[Tikirob in reply to trapis2]

I thought of it myself while obsessing over OCD one night, haha.

[CaptainCrunch]

No discount to your theory because it is do it validation but unfortunately I think or believe there is some tie between pain and the gift of a creative mind. My OCD brain can out run my wife's brain 100x with reasons to fear plus how I think about pain and am capable to describe it and reflect on it is something that boggles her mind. My wife has empathy but not to the Degree,"I Suffer." So those heightenedly intuitive enough to recognize danger survived better. Which I guess is basically what you are saying. Ugh! But I am getting sharper and redirecting those infinite fears and thoughts.

[Tikirob in reply to CaptainCrunch]

It’s all good, I am sure there are many applicable theories...I have read that the ancient Greeks believed that OCD was repressed creativity and I agree with you on that. It’s hard for us to focus in an outward way, most of the focus is on what’s going on inside and trying control it which is at odds of true expression. We also get pretty creative with our self diagnosing minds like you mentioned. I remember telling my therapist about one of my main fears and later on she laughed because she told me that her or no other therapist she consulted with ever had a patient with that fear. She laughed in reassuring me that I was better off living without that fear.

[CaptainCrunch in reply to Tikirob]

Easy for her to say

[Tikirob in reply to CaptainCrunch]

True!