We’ve used the analogy of a mental wildlife resort quite often over the last couple of weeks. Like any natural habitat, it’s critical to keep this ecosystem in balance. 

This means that we must ensure that the ecosystem is not overrun by the Big Five primitive emotions.

But we don’t want to wipe them out either.

Indeed, all of them can have a positive impact – they’re just totally out of balance in today’s world. 

Let’s take a bit of a closer look:

Craving

We all need a certain level of material consumption life a long and healthy life. If we had no cravings whatsoever and had to get everything we need through sheer willpower, it would be exhausting. Most people would probably end up consuming too little for a healthy and productive life. 

Of course, very few of us have the problem of too weak cravings. But it is helpful to acknowledge the purpose of this primitive emotional drive. 

Our job is simply to bring Craving into better balance so that it instinctively guides us to consume just the right amount. 

Ego

We still need other people, so Ego’s deep desire to be accepted by the tribe is fundamentally good. If we didn’t care one little bit what others think of us, we’d probably end up with a pretty sad and lonely life.  

We need to care enough about the tribe to function well as part of teams that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Ego should just not become so strong that we become inhibited by a debilitating fear of rejection or addition to approval.

Sloth

In the modern world, sloth still has an important function to protect us from burnout. Pushing ourselves over the breaking point is very unhealthy and also quite inefficient. 

Sloth’s problem in the modern world is largely one of timing. It’s too strong when we are not under pressure, leading us to procrastinate far too much. Then, when the deadline gets too close, it gets overwhelmed by other emotions like Ego and Worry and fails to protect us from burnout. 

We simply need to teach our Sloths to get this timing right: It should be tuned down during quieter times and tuned up during hectic times.

Frustration

Life won’t be much fun if you just allow everyone and everything to walk all over you. That’s where Frustration still has an important role to motivate us to take action to fix things that are bad for us. 

Frustration’s problem is largely one of scope. If it could only focus on the issues within our control and get real about large and complex problems, it can be a genuine asset. 

Keeping this in mind is very useful when training your caveman not to chase after every perceived inconvenience with it’s primitive club. 

Worry

I’ve already labelled worry as the most evolved of the Big Five primitive emotions because of its longer-term perspective. Without Worry, we’d get ourselves into very serious trouble on a regular basis. 

But most people simply keep too many Worries, most of which focus on futures they have no influence over. This type of Worry is useless and draining. 

Worry should be seen only as a messenger. It reports on plenty of potential threats, but it’s up to us to assess whether we want to heed this message.

Is it within our influence? It is accurate? Doing this critical evaluation many times over eventually trains Worry to stop bringing useless messages. 

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So, there you have it. We shouldn’t hate our primitive emotions. They’re just trying to protect us the same way they’ve done for thousands of generations. 

But now that our world has totally changed, we need to patiently retrain them. Doing this becomes much easier if we recognize their intrinsic value. 

Tomorrow, we’ll be doing something similar with the Great Five positive emotions. See you then!