Ancient software, modern hardware

Your nervous system was not designed for Slack notifications.

Our nervous systems evolved on the savannah. In a world where the rustle in the grass might be a predator, where being cast out from the group meant death, and where status in the hierarchy determined access to food and protection.

Stephen Porges, who developed Polyvagal Theory, has shown that our autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning the environment for cues of safety and danger, a process he calls neuroception. This scanning happens below conscious awareness. We don’t decide to feel threatened in a meeting. Our body decides for us, and then our conscious mind scrambles to make sense of why our heart is racing.

As Porges writes in The Polyvagal Theory:

The detection of a person as safe or dangerous triggers neurobiologically determined pro-social or defensive behaviours. Even though we may not always be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes that would facilitate adaptive defence behaviours such as fight, flight, or freeze.

This is the machinery running beneath every email, every performance review, every team meeting. We think we’re responding to the content of the conversation. But our nervous systems are responding to something much older:

Is this person safe?

Is this group going to keep me?

Am I about to lose something I can’t afford to lose?

We are running ancient software on modern hardware. And we wonder why it keeps crashing.