I recently read "The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love."

Here are some excerpts from the book that I found interesting and thoughtful:

• For most of the five thousand years that marriage has existed, deciding whether you were in love with a partner did not matter, because until the eighteenth century marriage was primarily an economic agreement between families.

• The traits a partner possesses during the first couple years of dating are indicative of how the partner will behave as your roommate, your financial partner, your friend, and a parent.  The stability of traits can be good news or bad news depending on what kind of traits you chose in the first place.

• Partners consistently engage in "strategic self-presentation" by putting their best traits on display while concealing their negative traits... our partners are on their best behavior during the first few months of a relationship.  This makes positive traits the easiest to see.

• Potential partners likely know just how costly displays of emotional instability are when trying to attract a mate, which makes it more likely that they will do their best to conceal this trait.

• People's reactions under stress can be telling. Pay extra close attention to what happens in stressful situations and how a partner reacts to intense situations.

• There is no reliable association between physical attractiveness and relationship satisfaction.  If you are physically attractive, you are no more satisfied in your relationship than someone who is less attractive and if your partner is physically attractive, you are no more satisfied in your relationship than someone partnered with someone who is less attractive.  There is also no evidence to suggest that attractiveness increases relationship stability.

• The lingering tendency to choose a partner based on physical attractiveness is understandable, because 99 percent of human history, when survival and reproductive success were far from guaranteed, the advantages signaled by physical attractiveness yielded many benefits.

• Humans came to value two traits when basic needs and longevity were far from guaranteed: partners with access to resources and partners who looked healthy.  These traits were valued for thousands of years, across hundreds of generations... All species, including humans, tend to retain mechanisms of survival long after those mechanisms have lost their usefulness.  The preference for mates who are physically attractive and who have resources can be thought of in this way, because privileging these two characteristics made sense for most of human history.

• It is easy to miss good people because unlike visual traits such as physical attractiveness, desirable psychological traits are not well advertised. They are discerned when we are carefully observant of individuals' subtle and thoughtful behaviors.

• Having a lot of money is not a great predictor of relationship outcomes.

• Partners usually don't possess uniformly good or bad traits.  People often possess some good traits, such as being smart and funny, and these are often mixed with undesirable traits, such as emotional instability and low self-confidence.

• There is a continuity between the attachment style individuals form in childhood and the attachment style they display in adulthood.  There may be some fluctuations over time, but overall, the attachment style people have as children is usually the attachment style they have as adults.

• In the end, there are few things in life so worthwhile of careful study and judicious decision making as whom to love.  For there are few things in life so demoralizing as the disappointment accompanying a broken heart, and conversely, there are few things so elevating as finding love that endures.

Theories about anxiety

Really fascinating idea on why anxiety seems to be so common these days.

Consider the evolutionary context that anxiety involved in: it created a fight or flight response to deal with short-term emergencies that almost always had obvious solutions. For nearly our entire ancestral past, we’ve had problems that had clear solutions. Did that nearby bush slightly move? Anxiety and stress created a sense of urgency and alertness and caused you to investigate this short term problem. Is there a wild animal nearby? Anxiety can save the day for this black and white problem as well. The stress response causes tunnel vision and intense concentration for the duration of the danger. You get the idea. These “ancestral” examples are practically endless.

Now consider modern problems and how potentially long-term and uncertain they are. We are practically flooded with such issues as we age.  

"Mental pain is elusive. Financial woes, an uncommunicative spouse, existential angst—none of these stressors necessarily yields to a single simple solution. Neither fight nor flight is satisfactory. While stress arousal is a fitting mode to meet emergency, as an ongoing state it is a disaster."

We have a coping mechanism that was created to deal with problems that no longer exist (outside of very rare situations)...

“Far more common is psychological pain—affront to one’s self esteem, apprehension, loss. We meet these pains with an alarm system tuned by millions of years of more primal threats.”

Quotes from  Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception

Outdated Evolutionary Responses

Evolutionary psychologists consistently emphasize a central theme; the human mind evolved and was shaped during a time period that contained environmental pressures that are no longer relevant today, and as a result, our responses to many modern problems are often times wrong. There are numerous ways that this phenomena manifests itself. Many times, the outcomes of our behavior are detrimental. For instance, the lack of any meaningful human action for addressing global warming and environmental degradation in general is one major context where this issue is strongly prevalent. Another context is how people respond to verbal confrontation and handle themselves during arguments. For instance:

arguing stirs up our fight-or-flight response. Once biological arousal takes over we start to feel the effects of nature's mechanism that prepares us for aggressive action. To understand our patterns of arguing, we need to learn about fight-or-flight arousal. Once we recognize the signs that we are in an aroused state, such as pounding heart and increased muscle tone, we may realize how often even trivial arguments are triggering full-blown biological responses. An argument about a TV clicker can seem to our mammalian brain as threatening as a lion leaping towards our throat.

It's clear why such needlessly intense responses to verbal confrontations are problematic; the nature of the problem (a simple verbal confrontation) does not warrant the intensity and seriousness  of the response. We do not need our bodies to go into fight-or-flight mode to deal with situations that  don't even pose a remote threat to our safety. We do not need our stress hormones flaring up. The fight-or-flight response has evolved to deal with emergencies and it's mistakenly being used to deal with relatively trivial everyday matters. Such a response can "protect us from threat, by physically preparing us to fight for our life or run for it. It can come in handy when there’s, say, a bus hurtling towards us and we need to get out of the way. It’s not so handy when the issue is that of Oreos, or more specifically, that someone has taken the last one."

Once our emotions and rational thinking are "hijacked" via the flight-or-flight mechanism, our rational and more restrained side "gets sidelined in favor of the more primitive, automatic, unthinking part. As a result, there’s likely to be yelling, personal sledging and aggression. Nobody listens and nobody is heard."

Additionally,

in situations of high stress, fear or distrust, the hormone and neurotransmitter cortisol floods the brain. Executive functions that help us with advanced thought processes like strategy, trust building, and compassion shut down. And the amygdala, our instinctive brain, takes over. The body makes a chemical choice about how best to protect itself...we default to one of four responses: fight (keep arguing the point), flight (revert to, and hide behind, group consensus), freeze (disengage from the argument by shutting up) or appease (make nice with your adversary by simply agreeing with him)

None of the responses offered by the fight-or-flight mechanism make sense in most professional, interpersonal, and social situations. The severity and inappropriateness of the response often times leads to misunderstanding, unnecessary arguing, lack of cooperation, and hurt feelings. What makes the situation even more problematic is that our brains actually reward us for giving into these irrational responses because "when [we] argue and win, [our] brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes [us] feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a the feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right."

Ultimately, once a discussion turns into an argument or any sort of verbal confrontation, "It's no longer an exercise in logic and reasoning. It's just a fight. And being in a fight brings its own frame of mind, a whole set of attitudes, expectations, and conditioned reactions that go along with arguing. As soon as that happens, no one cares who is right and who is wrong. All that matters is who is friend and who is foe."

Given this information on how we seem to be "wired" to respond to even the slightest hint of verbal aggression, our goal should be to hijack the hijacker and cut off our automatic aggressive response before it has a chance to do damage. Consider the implications in professional settings where we need to work with strangers. If we are interacting with someone whose cooperation we need, what should our response be when we sense aggression from them in the form of a condescending or disrespectful tone? Should we match their tone and be aggressive in return? Given the information previously discussed, this would be a very poor course of action to take. Such a response will give the person in front of us a reason or the opportunity to allow the more "primal" parts of their brain to take over and sabotage their reasoning. Once this happens, we have lost the person and they are very unlikely to play along and comply with our requests. For all practical purposes, both their body and mind are now responding to us as if we are the "enemy" and we are literally putting their physical safety at risk. During such a state of emotional and physiological arousal, the last thing on the person's mind is to cooperate with the "foe" in front of them; an emergency mode has been activated and cooperation has been thrown out the window.

The proper response to the above situation is to do our absolute best to keep our calm and not allow the person to detect even the most minute evidence of aggressive behavior or tone. If we do not give their body and mind the opportunity to go into a "self defense" mode then they are much more likely to cooperate with us and treat us as a potential friend instead of an enemy. Maintaining emotional restraint under emotionally charged circumstances is easier said than done but the rewards greatly outweigh the immediate costs.



Sources cited:

http://www.mental-health-survival-guide.com/arguing.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/karen-young/brain-during-an-argument_b_7540148.html

https://hbr.org/2013/02/break-your-addiction-to-being/

http://theweek.com/articles/454234/how-win-every-argument