Question

Most people experience brief intrusive thoughts, impulses, and images on a regular basis. Could the ability to experience such thoughts be adaptive, from an evolutionary perspective? When does the pattern cross the line to become maladaptive?

Answer 1

According to evolutionary perspective such intrusive thoughts and images could be adaptive because during long time span people learn to deal with different things. For example :- In order to deal with stress, people will follow stress coping habits by avoiding the issue or maintaining repetitive behavior. In ancient time too, people used to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, and they didn't used to opt for some treatment, despite that they used to find other ways to deal with that disorder(problem). Like they used to do exercise or pranayama(yoga) to reduce the stress level. Many people used to ignore these problems and avoid it.

However, after evolution of new technology and equipments, now there are different treatment available for post traumatic stress disorder :- like cognitive therapy or anti depressants etc. With the help of these treatment, we can claim that they can fully cured with the available treatment whereas, during earlier time no guarantee was there to be cure, that was temporary treatment.

This pattern of new evolution cross the line in order to become maladaptive. As the pranayama could not be done by everyone that time and there were chances it could be back. Ignoring this serious is not solution to the disorder instead it is better to consult a doctor for treatment.