Beneath your personal beliefs, cultural constructs, and things you hold dear, is the human body you were born into, a biologically adaptive organism, hardwired to survive in an unpredictable environment.

This hardwired aspect deals only in real data it gathers from your interaction with your environment, things like body temperature, breathing rate, pulse, metabolic rate, muscular strain, and hormone flow.

Using this data stream your body and brain are always trying to ‘guess’ what may be about to occur, based on the last thing that just did occur. It does this by making adjustments to your physical self in case what had occurred will occur again.  It adapts, and over time , evolves.

But it makes the adaptations in a specific manner only, and only in relation to the demand you and the environment placed on it.

Run up one flight of stairs and your body will respond by elevating your heart rate and increasing your respiration rate, anticipating another flight while recovering from the past one.

Run up 25 flights of stairs, daily, and your body will increase your metabolic rate, shuffle nutrients into the muscles involved in the effort, increase the pumping volume of the left ventricle of your heart, and produce more endorphins, a group of hormones that interact with the opiate receptors in your  brain to reduce your perception of pain and stress.

Your body will not adapt by increasing the size of your stomach, sharpen your eyesight, strengthen your shoulder muscles, or develop calluses on your hands. It only makes specific adaptations to the specific inputs you cause or allow.

You body is doing this all the time, awake and asleep, at work, at play, and especially at rest. It is one of the fundamental physical processes that is always occurring inside you, without your permission or control.

It is the S.A.I.D. Principle.

Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand

We Came from Here

Our bodies have been created by evolution at an analog pace, by environmental factors that ebbed and flowed on our planet slowly through years, through eons. Consequently, our species has a nervous system specifically developed from interaction with our planet’s history, one that has helped us flee from predators, hunt as predators ourselves, and deliver bursts of energy during times of stress.

This energy producing aspect of our nervous system has been wired alongside a quieter part, one that functions as the conductor of our body’s processes during periods of rest, digest, and recovery from stress. Both sides evolved together as a whole, complementarily interacting with a slowly evolving world, seeking and maintaining balance behind the curtain of our day-to-day activities.

As a species we now find ourselves here, in our modern, no-longer-analog world, where the rest periods that used to be set by the years and seasons, and re-enforced by constraints of time, distance and traditions, are now shortened, the pauses devalued and almost entirely submerged under a tidal wave of cultural ‘multi-tasking’.

As our outside world has digitalized, it has moved beyond the old boundaries that were set by work hours, home life, landline telephones, and time zones. Things used to take ‘more time’…think of a relationship by snail mail, when one would receive a letter, compose a reply, send a return letter, and wait. In this process there was a whole lot of space and time, thinking time, feeling time, time alone in the middle of your life.

Modern technology has changed all that, has compressed the time, shrunk the space, and the quickened the tempo by which most people live their lives. Any debate about whether the change is for better or worse must respect the main point, that the world has moved on, and there is no going back.

It is a stimulating time to be alive, and quite possibly for our nervous systems, over stimulating. The physical wait times that still exist in our more populated world, time spent in traffic, or lines of people, can now be used as an opportunity to connect to the flow of information that is delivered directly to your psyche through your own personal communications device.

The ‘down’ time that used to be composed of sitting, sleeping, breathing, and just resting, disconnected from external stressors, is gone, and with it that old way of ‘naturally’ regulating our nervous systems. Gone, but in a physical sense, not forgotten.