Why Anxiety Is Like a Smoke Detector — with Randolph Nesse

What if anxiety is not simply a broken system, but a useful alarm going off at the wrong time? And what if low mood sometimes appears when we keep pursuing something important that is no longer working?

Randolph Nesse approaches mental health through evolutionary psychiatry. Rather than asking only what has gone wrong in a person’s brain or psychology, he asks why humans have capacities for anxiety, low mood, guilt and love in the first place and why those systems can become so painful or disabling.

We discuss anxiety as an oversensitive smoke detector, the difference between fear and anxiety, what happens when people have too little anxiety, and how to tell a useful warning from a malfunction. Randolph also explores stuck goals, the limits of “never give up”, why people care so much about what others think, and his evolutionary perspectives on love, addiction and eating disorders.

Randolph is a psychiatrist whose work applies evolutionary biology to medicine and mental health.

This conversation offers a different way to understand difficult feelings: not as proof that someone is defective, but as systems with a history, a function and real limits.