Our early ancestors led relatively simple lives that revolved around hunting and gathering food, relaxing and socialising. With easy access to a wide variety of food, a small group of hunter-gatherers could easily meet the basic needs of its members. So much so, that the early hunter-gatherers have been called the first affluent society. Ironically, it was when people began cultivating crops and farming animals around ten thousand years ago that life became really hard work. In the last three hundred years, we discovered science and mastered the material world, which led to the industrial and technological eras that we now inhabit. Although some commentators say that we’re an affluent society today, many of us lead complex and stressful lives that are often out of balance.
Apart from leisure and socialising, for most of us, our daily routine revolves around carrying out tasks of one form or another, either at work or at home. Even though we may now be working virtually, in a typical office environment, we plug into technology, attend calls and meetings, and one task blurs into another.
One challenge is that all the mental, and emotional noise and activity is not always released at the end of each task, so it accumulates in the background over the day. So, in the unnoticed background, we may have a head full of busy, swirling thoughts, unacknowledged emotions, and accumulated stress and tension in our bodies.
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