The Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Do we ever wonder how it all started? How did we ever get to the point where we're so often and so much anxiety and stress in life?

Where did it all begin? And that's what we're going to look at in today's episode. Where

does this anxiety, this worry, this suffering come from? And then how do we change it today?

Well, we're going to go way back in history, really to the dawn of

humankind, and let's look at together what the environment was like of those early

humanoids that lived so long ago. What did they have to face?

Because we've evolved from them and in that evolutionary process they have passed on genetic

predispositions for us, which cause us to suffer. Let me explain. Well, thousands

of years ago, we didn't have buildings and armies and police officers that protected us, we lived out in the wild.

If we had any form of protection, it was probably a cave.

So every time we went out, there was a potential to look for food,

but there also was a potential to become food. We wake up in the

morning, hungry, needing to go look for food, and as we were looking for food, we had to be very

careful that we didn't become food. And the best way

we did that was by being very circumspect, making sure that behind every bush, every

hill, every place that we looked, that we were looking out for danger, not just looking for food,

but looking out that we didn't become food.

And those who were more mellow, more relaxed, more at peace, they probably didn't survive.

Because what Charles Darwin discovered over a century ago that those who survived were usually

the fittest, and back then you survived if you were very cautious very anxious

very nervous about what was behind the bush that might eat you I mean think

about nowadays think about if you live in a place where there's that and just kind of kicking and eating grass, that bunny is going to become a meal for some of the predator.

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