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Decoding Our Ancestors: How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Fear, Phobias, and Irrational Behavior
00:00:25 Hello listeners
00:05:59 Phobias
00:12:04 Anxiety and Fear
00:20:38 Does Free Will Exist?
00:25:30 Takeaways
00:00:25 Hello listeners
00:05:59 Phobias
00:12:04 Anxiety and Fear
00:20:38 Does Free Will Exist?
00:25:30 Takeaways
Psychological Triggers: Human Nature, Irrationality, and Why We Do What We Do. The Hidden Influences Behind Our Actions, Thoughts, and Behaviors. (Understand Your Brain Better)
By: Peter Hollins
Hear it Here - https://bit.ly/psychologicaltriggershollins
Understand, avoid, and defeat the subconscious causes of your irrational and self-defeating behaviors. It’s only human nature.
A psychological trigger is something that causes us to act out of urgency - not correctness or even happiness. It’s a switch that is flipped outside of our consciousness. This is fertile ground for some of the worst decisions of our lives.
Seize control and of your impulses and make better decisions.
Psychological Triggers is an introduction to yourself - your impulses, your desires, and everything in your subconscious that drives you to action. It answers the question, “Why did I just make a terrible choice when I know I shouldn’t have?”
We are all slaves to our triggers, and this book seeks to identify them to better battle them. We might think we are making our decisions independently and out of free will, but you’ll discover that to be far from reality.
Master your psychology, master your life.
Peter Hollins has studied psychology and peak human performance for over a dozen years and is a bestselling author. He has worked with a multitude of individuals to unlock their potential and path towards success. His writing draws on his academic, coaching, and research experience.
Think clearly and triumph over your human nature.
•The triggering effects of social pressure and conformity.
•How everyday emotions are behind some of the most powerful triggers.
•Natural, biological, evolutionary human drives - can you regulate them?
•Simple thinking traps we all fall victim to.
•The notion of free will and whether it truly exists.
Beat psychological triggers, reclaim your free will, and irrationality.
Is purely rational thinking, devoid of emotion and human drives, a reality? Probably not. But you can certainly live free from your worst impulses and irrational hunches, which are what psychological triggers create more often than not. See yourself thrive from consistently making beneficial decisions and defeating your primal psychology.
Understand, avoid, and defeat the subconscious causes of your irrational and self-defeating behaviors. It’s only human nature.
A psychological trigger is something that causes us to act out of urgency - not correctness or even happiness. It’s a switch that is flipped outside of our consciousness. This is fertile ground for some of the worst decisions of our lives.
Seize control and of your impulses and make better decisions.
Psychological Triggers is an introduction to yourself - your impulses, your desires, and everything in your subconscious that drives you to action. It answers the question, “Why did I just make a terrible choice when I know I shouldn’t have?”
We are all slaves to our triggers, and this book seeks to identify them to better battle them. We might think we are making our decisions independently and out of free will, but you’ll discover that to be far from reality.
Master your psychology, master your life.
Peter Hollins has studied psychology and peak human performance for over a dozen years and is a bestselling author. He has worked with a multitude of individuals to unlock their potential and path towards success. His writing draws on his academic, coaching, and research experience.
Think clearly and triumph over your human nature.
• The triggering effects of social pressure and conformity.
• How everyday emotions are behind some of the most powerful triggers.
• Natural, biological, evolutionary human drives - can you regulate them?
• Simple thinking traps we all fall victim to.
• The notion of free will and whether it truly exists.
Beat psychological triggers, reclaim your free will, and irrationality.
Is purely rational thinking, devoid of emotion and human drives, a reality? Probably not. But you can certainly live free from your worst impulses and irrational hunches, which are what psychological triggers create more often than not. See yourself thrive from consistently making beneficial decisions and defeating your primal psychology. .
Transcript
You ever feel like your actions are controlled by invisible forces, like something inside you pushes you to react in certain ways, even when you know better?
Speaker:Hello listeners, welcome back to The Science of Self, where you improve your life from the inside out.
Speaker:Today is March 26th, 2026.
Speaker:Peter Holland's book Psychological Triggers is our featured book today.
Speaker:This book explores the subconscious forces behind irrational behavior, revealing how these hidden impulses drive our actions and lead to self-defeating choices.
Speaker:We're continuing chapter one from a previous podcast, looking at risk detection, phobias, anxiety and fear.
Speaker:And then when we consider all that together, we come to the question, does free will exist?
Speaker:In a way, psychological triggers are simply part of evolution.
Speaker:The core of evolutional thought is the concept of “survival of the fittest”: the types of beings that were best able to adapt and endure changes in their environments were the ones who survived.
Speaker:A major element of a species’ survival is its ability to assess potential threats or hazards—what we call risk detection.
Speaker:Nowadays we can analyze risk far in advance, but we haven’t always had that luxury.
Speaker:Risks presented themselves more suddenly in eras before our own.
Speaker:Dealing with them required instant, on-the-spot judgment and decision made with little or no information.
Speaker:Many of these quick decisions were matters of life and death, and there was no back data to consult or historical models to emulate.
Speaker:Over time, these reflexes became instinctual to us and were beneficial more often than not.
Speaker:The best thing about these impulses is also the worst thing about them: they are knee-jerk, instant and require no higher cognitive power.
Speaker:We have, for better and worse, retained that reflex to the present day.
Speaker:Our biological makeup is trained for thinking and acting on our feet, relying on our instincts for survival.
Speaker:That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, and sometimes it even works.
Speaker:But it’s designed to be fast rather than accurate.
Speaker:Certainly, it’s worked for our benefit in terms of evolution.
Speaker:We’re more able to react quickly to modern complications because of how we’ve been conditioned in earlier, different environments.
Speaker:But more often than not, we don’t have every bit of information we need to make a truly logical, 100 percent sound decision.
Speaker:Evolution has favored quick, good-enough responses over slower, better-quality ones.
Speaker:It’s not to say that this is always a bad trade to make; spending too long on deliberation also has its costs and risks.
Speaker:There’s the other extreme of wasting excessive time considering the nuts and bolts of a decision to the point that we overthink so much that we don’t act.
Speaker:We commonly call this “analysis paralysis.” For instance, an office worker could spend so much time deciding on a document format that they miss a deadline.
Speaker:Thankfully, now we don’t always have to go into jungle survival mode.
Speaker:Humans of the present have more time to analyze whether our initial “gut” feelings are right or wrong, especially when we have hard data and past results to advise us.
Speaker:But it’s not possible to do that with every situation we encounter.
Speaker:The “gut” doesn’t compute the math or run scenarios for sudden events—and it’s subject to our cognitive biases, those errors in judgment we make from our personal preferences or beliefs.
Speaker:Despite having greater access to information and more time to consider it, we still tend to make stupid decisions.
Speaker:Humans in their modern form have only been around for about 200,000 years.
Speaker:Before that, our ancestors lived in various forms with less developed brains yet more developed survival instincts.
Speaker:Civilization, in which we’ve finally tried to establish some kind of order and write down some rules, has only been here for 6,000 to 10,000 years—depending on who you ask.
Speaker:The math says, and evolutionists will confirm, that for the huge majority of human existence we’ve lived off our instincts.
Speaker:It’s noteworthy that this technique has worked for as long as it has, and has largely made us who we are today.
Speaker:The families of our distant ancestors were fairly small because of the inherent risks of growing larger.
Speaker:We may not be as savage anymore (not all of us, anyway), but our brains still have that intuitive drive, even if we’re swilling lattés instead of spearing woolly mammoths.
Speaker:Parents’ intuition kicks in when they’re walking with their children and they see a person they perceive as sketchy approaching them; they hustle their kids off to one side just in case.
Speaker:Or if we’re feeling extra hungry in the drive-thru lane at a fast-food joint, we could get impatient if the cars in front of us are taking too long.
Speaker:We might even honk.
Speaker:Whether through quick learning or careful planning, risk detection has implanted more than cautionary approaches in our psyches—it’s also helped form psychological triggers that can go off even without external prompting.
Speaker:Instincts that formerly helped us immensely now seize control at inopportune moments and influence us in negative ways.
Speaker:Free will isn’t always as available as we think.
Speaker:Phobias
Speaker:Humans also cede control to phobias, which, strictly defined, are irrational fears of (or aversion to) certain things or conditions.
Speaker:Phobias are the ultimate psychological triggers.
Speaker:They’re often, though not always, based on illogical or groundless anxieties and, as such, result in the destruction of our rational and analytical thought processes.
Speaker:These are the extreme versions of risk detection dictating our actions and behaviors.
Speaker:We’re familiar with the most common phobias: acrophobia is fear of heights, claustrophobia is fear of tight spaces, aviophobia is fear of flight.
Speaker:But even though many phobias are irrational, they don’t all spring from manufactured threats or false alarms.
Speaker:Again, they have roots in our evolutionary development.
Speaker:For example, take two of our favorite phobias: arachnophobia and ophidiophobia—the fears of spiders and snakes, respectively.
Speaker:Our ancestors contended with their own fears of these creatures and had to develop solutions to avoid them to keep themselves alive.
Speaker:In fact, those old distant phobias from ages ago still keep us from completely adapting to contemporary life.
Speaker:Certain conditions still bring out irrational fears that haven’t yet developed beyond our caveman years.
Speaker:Phobias take us outside of rational thought and rob us of free will.
Speaker:Many of us recoil in terror when we see a spider in the attic or even a harmless garter snake in the grass.
Speaker:The sight of both of those creatures produces acute dread, even if they’re perfectly safe to be around.
Speaker:Nobody has such a frightened reaction, though, when they see a parked car.
Speaker:Most of us see cars every day and don’t feel a single shred of panic.
Speaker:In fact, there isn’t even a name for the phobia of cars in general (only the fear of riding in a car has a name, which for the record is amaxophobia).
Speaker:But in 2016, almost 37,500 people were killed in US car accidents.
Speaker:Meanwhile, an average of 11.6 Americans die from spider and snake bites each year—combined.
Speaker:The math is hilarious: using those figures for calculation, 3,232 times more people die in car wrecks than bites from creepy things.
Speaker:Between cars, spiders, and snakes, there’s no contest as to which ones are the real killing machines: the ones with four wheels.
Speaker:So why are we so deathly afraid at the sight of spiders and snakes but not cars?
Speaker:The only answer that makes any sense is the evolutionary one.
Speaker:Spiders and snakes were legitimate menaces to society at one time, maybe even for most of the era of human existence.
Speaker:They have become ingrained in our psyches as enormous risks to avoid at all costs.
Speaker:Car wreck fatalities have only been around since the invention of motorized vehicles—roughly the 1890s, which is practically yesterday in terms of human consciousness.
Speaker:In the meantime, medical advances have reduced the chance of getting killed by a spider or snake to almost zero.
Speaker:But spiders and snakes still get the bad rap from our brains, which haven’t gotten over our prehistoric phobias.
Speaker:Our fear of those critters is so enmeshed in our biological chemistry that it may be many more millennia before evolution processes it out, if it ever does.
Speaker:Importantly, it doesn’t really matter what your free will or determination tells you to do—you may know on an intellectual level that a snake or spider is not actually venomous or dangerous in any way, and still feel panic on seeing it.
Speaker:Such is the power of evolutionarily programmed phobias and instincts.
Speaker:American psychologist Martin Seligman composed a paper called “Phobias and Preparedness” in 1971, and it’s had a major impact on the psychological community ever since.
Speaker:Seligman noted that we almost never fear modern-world things like guns, electricity outlets, or hammers, even though such items can and do cause immediate and fatal injury.
Speaker:But our fears of fire, water, insects, and heights endure, even if they’re innocuous or easy to avoid.
Speaker:This is because, Seligman argues, those things did pose a clear and present danger to ancient humans.
Speaker:Even as our species evolved and we found ways to control those old threats—with firehoses, boats, bug spray, and safety restraints—many people still fear them.
Speaker:And once again, this eliminates our ability to think rationally: we don’t fear what is truly dangerous.
Speaker:This is remarkable because it’s another way we have been programmed to think irrationally—and yet this irrationality doesn’t extend far enough in some cases!
Speaker:It fails us by making us overreact at harmless situations, but completely underestimate truly dangerous ones.
Speaker:Seligman hinted that our phobias are inflated modifications of real dangers that existed eons ago.
Speaker:Evolution hasn’t yet processed those fears out of our bloodline.
Speaker:They’re still hard-wired into our systems, and we humans are almost organically inclined to develop those phobias.
Speaker:They’re a set of psychological triggers you get for absolutely free upon your arrival on Earth.
Speaker:Thanks, Darwin!
Speaker:Seligman’s work also hints at an idea we’ll be returning to again and again in this book: just because instincts, gut feelings, knee-jerk reactions, biases and unconscious urges are there for some reason or other (i.e.
Speaker:they’re “natural”), this doesn’t mean they’re always good for us, and can’t be questioned, challenged or upgraded.
Speaker:Anxiety and Fear
Speaker:As we’ve seen, our ancestors used fear as a sort of internal defense mechanism—it protected them and helped them survive.
Speaker:They were grateful that their brains blacked out when risks were present and made them act quickly.
Speaker:It still helps.
Speaker:Indeed, one study found that 77 percent of mothers whose children feared water said their children were scared the first time they ever saw larger bodies of water, like pools or lakes.
Speaker:This was especially true the farther away the families lived from the ocean.
Speaker:Another study, one which took many years to complete, found that kids who were scared of heights were much less likely to suffer from falls when they were older.
Speaker:These children were guarded by their fears—their anxieties were natural, practically inborn qualities that kept them from danger into adulthood.
Speaker:Ancient humans may have paid the price with occasional irrational decisions, but fear tended to be their best friend in most cases.
Speaker:Fear is one of the most powerful psychological triggers in the same way that punishments create motivation, and Machiavelli’s book on ruthless governance, The Prince, became so infamous.
Speaker:Fear is truly one of the strongest psychological triggers because it completely overrides our brains and sends us into action.
Speaker:Fear is what causes us to drop absolutely everything in the interest of self-preservation in one way or another.
Speaker:It sharpens our senses and tells us to sit up and pay attention, or act to protect ourselves.
Speaker:Unfortunately for us, most causes of modern fears are rather misleading and unimportant.
Speaker:We could listen completely to our fears and never question them, letting them guide our every decision and the course of our lives… or we could become curious about the mechanism of fear itself and intelligently decide whether it’s working in our best interests.
Speaker:For many, for example, feelings of hunger will cause us to grow irrational and angry.
Speaker:This stems from the fear our primitive ancestors had about starving to death.
Speaker:This negative association with hunger used to keep us alive in whatever way possible.
Speaker:Before they learned to hunt, our ancestors were scavengers.
Speaker:Instead of going to the dirty business of killing prey, they’d let an apex do it.
Speaker:The scavengers patiently watched the tiger dine on its kill until the beast finally got full and walked away.
Speaker:At that point, the scavengers ran over to the carcass and consumed as much of the leftovers as they possibly could before another wild creature came around and they had to run off.
Speaker:It wasn’t ice cream, frosted cupcakes, or cheese puffs, but it was still binge-eating.
Speaker:And now, we simply binge-eat to the brink of obesity due to subconscious associations with hunger.
Speaker:Our psyche tells us we have to get as much as we can until the next apex predator (or, more likely, roommate or spouse) comes around.
Speaker:It’s also why our eating binges tend to feature high-calorie, high-carb, or high-sugar foods—health ramifications aside, that stuff satisfies us and fills us up.
Speaker:It also explains the inclination some people have to hoard food: our ancestors had to store quite a bit away for seasons when predators didn’t hunt so much.
Speaker:It doesn’t matter if you’re seriously overweight and your feelings of “hunger” are not true physiological hunger at all.
Speaker:The inherited impulse to behave as your ancestors did can override any rational decision, i.e.
Speaker:“I only ate an hour ago, I’m not really hungry, I’m just bored.
Speaker:I can wait till dinner, and I’m not going to die if I do…”
Speaker:The big takeaway from this discussion is that anxieties and fears create a frame of mind in which we feel we have to act immediately to gain pleasure and avoid punishment.
Speaker:We enter into a heightened state of emergency in which we believe we must take action now.
Speaker:It’s not about the correct action, the moral action, or the pleasurable action.
Speaker:It’s about the most immediate action.
Speaker:It’s in that vulnerable state that psychological triggers are most powerful—and most dangerous.
Speaker:In the beginning of the chapter we asked, why do people act against their best interests?
Speaker:Why do we make plans and then go against them later?
Speaker:The answer is here: in the heat of the moment, your psychological triggers overwhelmed your higher critical thinking skills.
Speaker:You can put the blame squarely on your limbic system and amygdala, as they deal with fear and anxiety.
Speaker:They’re the controllers of our automatic and subconscious responses, and they’re a little too engaged for our own good.
Speaker:The limbic system administers the aspects of our emotional responses connected with memory and stimulation.
Speaker:A few parts of the limbic system have important roles in the development of psychological triggers, like the hypothalamus and the hippocampus.
Speaker:But it’s the amygdala that really goes overboard with the drama.
Speaker:Every time the amygdala gets info about an imminent threat, it goes into overdrive.
Speaker:And—this is very important—it does so whether it’s an actual threat or a perceived threat.
Speaker:Your amygdala snaps into action whether there’s a real truck headed straight toward you or if it merely thinks so (but it’s just a stiff wind).
Speaker:That’s why lab animals get nearly violent whenever a research assistant stimulates their amygdala.
Speaker:The upshot is that the amygdala has a very short window of opportunity to wreak havoc—about twelve seconds, to be more exact.
Speaker:That’s the approximate length of time of the “occipital spike,” sort of a rush of awareness that stirs the amygdala’s decision-making.
Speaker:It’s the amygdala’s warning siren, and it’s the source of our psychological triggers that set off emotional outbursts.
Speaker:When your brain is alerted by a new impulse or stimulus—like a car backfiring or a balloon popping—the occipital spike surges.
Speaker:The amygdala then dutifully surveys the landscape to see what’s going on.
Speaker:This spike lasts twelve seconds and then, given that the stimulus doesn’t repeat itself, turns off until the next emergency.
Speaker:The amygdala goes back to whatever it was doing before the spike.
Speaker:These twelve seconds dictate our external reactions to whatever the amygdala is fussing about.
Speaker:And it’s possible to control more extreme responses by recognizing when the spike happens and taking countermeasures to decompress the response, if indeed it was a “false alarm.” This is especially helpful with people who get angry and are easily provoked by minor, almost irrelevant actions (remember, the amygdala goes nuts over perceived threats as well).
Speaker:If one can restrain the occipital spike through some calming action—counting deep breaths, reciting the alphabet backward, saying a mantra, or even silently repeating a tongue-twister—then they can divert the amygdala until the spike fades.
Speaker:Remember, it only lasts twelve seconds or so.
Speaker:Others may form a mental picture of the spike and visualize it going back down.
Speaker:Whatever the effort, the key is to keep the thinking part of the brain occupied for as long as the amygdala needs until it goes back to its nap.
Speaker:Psychological triggers are therefore tightly bound to our biology, and our brain chemistry provides those triggers with plenty of willing accomplices that let them build, persist, and go off.
Speaker:The fact that psychological triggers are part of our organic makeup can be irritating, but it should be of at least some consolation that they’re a result of our natural descent from our forebears.
Speaker:There is nothing wrong with this part of our biology, and indeed, it’s the very thing that has allowed us to survive and thrive as the species we are today.
Speaker:Nevertheless, if we’re not careful, we can let our fears control us completely—think social anxiety to the highest degree and every decision predicated on staying safe and secure.
Speaker:Being dictated by triggers to say the least!
Speaker:Does Free Will Exist?
Speaker:So with all these psychological triggers having so much power and authority over our brains and our reactions, is there even such a thing as free will?
Speaker:Why should we consider our actions anything other than pre-coded responses to external impulses?
Speaker:When I choose to do something drastic, am I actually choosing it, or am I being pushed and pulled into it by something I don’t even realize?
Speaker:As you might expect, philosophers have wrangled with the question of free will for ages.
Speaker:It’s arguably their biggest moneymaker.
Speaker:In the days before brain research and science became widespread, free will was seen as the conduit for our moral code: we chose certain courses of action because they resounded with what we were taught society had to be.
Speaker:Therefore, if we wanted to perceive ourself as good people, we would choose positively; if we were corrupt in moral character, we would choose negatively.
Speaker:Furthermore, we chose marital partners because they met our standards; we formed communities to live among those who shared our values.
Speaker:On an uglier note, we sometimes tried to force our will upon others in wars and invasions.
Speaker:Whatever the case, we believed we were doing the “right thing” voluntarily and deciding all on our own.
Speaker:That argument was complicated when desire, perceived as involuntary, was identified as a motivator beyond human control.
Speaker:Now brain science—and its findings and resultant products, like this book—has muddied up the waters even more by suggesting our biological makeup could be the result of evolutionary forces we can’t affect.
Speaker:How can we have free will when the amygdala makes us lose control and merely react for twelve frantic seconds?
Speaker:Psychologists—who aren’t and can’t be philosophers—haven’t been able to form a consensus on this question: do we have free will or not?
Speaker:Why do we do what we do, especially when so much of it is self-defeating and even pointless?
Speaker:Are we just rats continually pressing a lever that causes us to be shocked?
Speaker:Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis (and also the originator of the concepts of the ego, id, and superego), and B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviorism, didn’t necessarily have a lot of beliefs in common (Skinner, in fact, was downright resentful of Freud).
Speaker:But they shared the view that human behavior is highly subject to various experiences and conditions.
Speaker:Freud focused primarily on unconscious influences on behavior (dreams, childhood, sexual impulses), whereas Skinner concentrated on direct environmental impact on behavior (rewards, social conditioning, education).
Speaker:So both had the conviction that humans don’t have a real choice, but they conceived of it in quite different ways.
Speaker:Free will was, to them, an illusion that some used to congratulate themselves for not slapping other people indiscriminately.
Speaker:Perhaps there are areas where we do have to make certain choices based on intellectual analysis and how our actions correspond to our beliefs.
Speaker:We can choose certain religions, political parties, associations, or movements (even if we’re born into one, we can make the decision to join another one).
Speaker:There’s a point where we come to a moral, intellectual understanding of issues, and we make choices that reflect that effort to understand.
Speaker:But this doesn’t apply to everything—or even most things.
Speaker:In fact, let’s call intellectually independent choices made out of free will the exception rather than the rule.
Speaker:With all our respect and pondering of free will, there are still elements of our being that we can’t control to the smallest detail.
Speaker:They’re the instincts that our ancestors had to develop the hard way by burning their fingers in the fire, and they’ve commuted themselves into our present biology.
Speaker:They might be simple fear, our subconscious, or the environment, but none of these are things we consciously perceive and acknowledge in our decisions.
Speaker:We are triggered day in and day out, and it’s only when we can accept this that we can work against those triggers.
Speaker:Controlling deep-rooted psychological triggers outright isn’t possible, but being aware and remembering them can make them a lot more bearable and manageable.
Speaker:In this book, we’ll take a deeper look at how these triggers get formed—starting with what’s going on in our immediate surroundings.
Speaker:Takeaways:
Speaker:• What are psychological triggers?
Speaker:Put simply, they are what drive our behavior far more than we would care to admit or even think about.
Speaker:We are slaves to our impulses—and for most of us, this manifests in horribly negative ways.
Speaker:• Triggers stem from evolutionary risk detection, which means that we have evolved to avoid pain and seek pleasure.
Speaker:We may not even realize what we are doing and may be unable to point out what pain and pleasure we are orienting ourselves around.
Speaker:Our impulses kept us alive in prior days but are wholly unsuited for the modern age.
Speaker:• The best example of this phenomenon is phobias, which are irrational fears of benign harms—for instance, being afraid of heights, spiders, or deep water.
Speaker:Objectively, they are not directly harmful to you, but there’s something primal, deep inside of us, that makes us react.
Speaker:What powers all of these triggers thus far?
Speaker:Fear and anxiety—possibly the most universal and predictable psychological trigger in the world.
Speaker:Where fear exists, you can count on irrational behavior, because fear makes us want to act quickly, not intelligently or effectively.
Speaker:• If psychological triggers are so commonplace and frequent, to what degree are we actually acting out of free will?
Speaker:Are we choosing our own lives, or are we just a complex set of impulses and influences?
Speaker:When you take into account fear, along with Freud’s concept of the subconscious, with a dash of Skinner’s reliance on the environment, it becomes clear that acting out of free will is the exception rather than the rule.
Speaker:By becoming aware of our triggers, we can start to make conscious decisions, break free from harmful patterns, and ultimately shape our lives with greater intentionality.
Speaker:Nelson Mandela once said, it always seems impossible until it's done, so let's keep learning, keep growing, and keep striving for that freedom, the freedom to choose who we want to be, not just react to what's around us.
