No matter how sophisticated and intelligent a person may be, he technically still has a primitive mind. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not calling anyone a caveman or anything like that. It’s just that every human being has access to a wealth of primitive instinctual tendencies.

These tendencies have been developed and passed down by our ancestors because they simply work in terms of helping a person stay alive. Survival is still a person’s biggest concern – it’s just that things have become more complicated in our era compared to the days when man led a simpler life that we don’t think about it as often.

But if we trace the real reasons behind our desires, aspirations and anxieties, I bet you’ll find survival at the very at the very root of all of those things.

Since man is secretly preoccupied with surviving, here are some things that you must always keep in mind when you are trying to influence someone:

1.) The human mind is wired to think pessimistically. This fact is often surprising to people since people were taught at a very early age that life is generally easier if you were a positive thinker.

I’m not trying to debate cultural norms here – I’m just trying to point out a scientific fact: our species survived this long because our ancestors were pessimists. Pessimists focused on the bad things that could happen, which actually helped family units survive in hostile environments.

Thousands of years ago, positive thinkers might have felt happier and calmer right before they slept, but that doesn’t mean that they have an edge over pessimists who were more alert to strange sounds and even the smallest changes in the environment.

To our ancestors, change is a cause for worrying and anxiety – and negative thinking helped our ancestors survive while other hominid species simply disappeared from the evolutionary map.

2.) To the primitive mind (as represented by the Reptilian Complex), there is no middle classification for a situation or object. If something is in front of you that can only mean that it’s either bad or good. There is no middle ground at all.

If something is not entirely good, then it’s probably bad and people should probably avoid it. That’s how people really perceive their own realities.

A person might justify how he doesn’t like another person on the account that he doesn’t ‘look like he can be trusted’ but in the end, the justification exists because of the primitive mind’s insistence on a fixed good/bad classification of things in general.

3.) When a person is under any kind of stress (and that includes being in the presence of a rather undesirable person), the sympathetic nervous system triggers the fight or flight response. This is still part of the instinctual package that our ancient ancestors have passed down to our current generation of homo sapiens.