Rethinking Relaxation

Hi Brendan! I’ve just been watching your latest video about overcoming barriers to relaxation, and you say that if we can train our automatic mind to respond to stress by relaxing instead of whatever the normal reaction is, it will be much more powerful. I assume that the normal reaction is the result of thousands of years of natural selection, where individuals that reacted the wrong way were filtered out, and what we have now is what natural selection worked out was most effective. So my question is, why would a different reaction be better?

The answer I can come up with is that natural selection has different goals; if I start relaxing it will give me some positive results, but not a better chance to have offspring (which is what natural selection selects for). What are your thoughts about this?

Best regards,
Vlad