Introduction

Homework Review

Last week’s task was to track automatic thoughts and come up with alternate thoughts. When people complete this exercise, they often notice that the automatic thoughts, more often than not, are incorrect. But why is this? There are a couple of reasons. 

First, humans tend to be fairly critical of themselves. At the end of a day, we’re more likely to remember a time we were wrong, than a time we were right. Remember again the driving example from last week; some automatic thoughts are so mundane, like knowing to stop at a red light, that we don’t recall them unless prompted (and even then recall can be a bit sketchy – a topic for another day). 

Second, the automatic thoughts that we feel the most passionately about are the ones that are the fastest. Anger and fear are some of our more primitive emotions, so when those are involved (even a little), the response can be more immediate, leading to more incorrect appraisals

Whatever you wrote on your sheet, pat yourself on the back for completing what we consider the most important part in improving mental well-being, taking just a little time every day to work on it. 

Survival of the Most Adaptive

As a quick refresher, the phrase “Survival of the Fittest” is a term first introduced by Charles Darwin in his description of why evolution happens. “Fitness” in this sense is not physical fitness, it refers to a measure of an individual’s likelihood to produce many viable offspring, that go on to produce their own offspring. 

So, no matter how strong or fast you are, a rabbit is objectively more fit than you (sorry!). 

Here’s a Natural Geographic documentary that shows some other examples of survival of the fittest. It’s only a little related to the topic for this week, but an interesting watch if you have the time. 

 

The “animal kingdom” is what our nervous systems are adapted for. Fear is a good thing when there are predators around, because it keeps you alert. Needing to be accepted by a group of other people is a good thing, because there is safety in numbers. Even our soft spots for high-fat, high-sugar food can be traced back to our ancestral priorities; these foods (and food in general) were not as abundant as they are now, so consuming as much as a person could meant more energy for later, when food was scarce again. 

However, many of these survival needs have been met by technologies and the way of life we’ve adopted in the last 2,000 years of human development. This is simply not enough time for our bodies to change to be adapted to this new reality. So, it follows that sometimes these nervous systems we carry around will miss the mark in what is useful in modern life. 

In classic evolution, adaptive means much the same as fitness, if a trait is adaptive, it leads to the organism being able to produce more viable offspring. If a trait is maladaptive, the organism will produce less. 

For the purpose of our approach to CBT, we’re going use the following definitions of these words: 

  • Adaptive Behaviour or Adaptive Cognition: Something that gets you closer to where you want to be, or something you want to accomplish. 
  • Maladaptive Behaviour or Maladaptive Cognition: Something that gets you further from where you want to be, or something you want to accomplish. 
Say someone has the goal of losing weight. With these definitions, we would consider waking up early to go for a run, and eating more vegetables as adaptive, and we would consider being sedentary and eating a high-fat, high-sugar diet as maladaptive. Note that adaptive versus maladaptive in this case depends on where the person wants to go; if this person needed to gain weight, the adaptive and maladaptive behaviours would be reversed. 

This is what we’ll be exploring further this week.