FIGHT or FLIGHT - The Anatomy of Stress

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INTRODUCTION

“We’re all afraid of something, sweetheart. It’s up to us whether we stay and fight that fear... or whether we run and hide from it.”
— Samantha Young (Fight or Flight)

One thing we can say with certainty about the average person in today's world is that he or she is stressed- stressed because of work, the house, traffic, people and relationships, and so many other causes. And if for some reason we don’t feel stressed by our immediate circumstances, all we have to do is check up on the news; the media will happily provide plenty of worrisome images and events to stress us out.
We all know that being stressed is bad for us, and yet it seems we cannot help it. Something happens to throw us off, something that triggers it. We react. Most of the time, the reaction is to try to cope in ways that end up only worsening the problem or creating new ones. We complain and blame, or start drinking or overeating.
Every time we put our body under stress, it is designed to behave in a certain way, putting our health at risk. But that stress response wasn’t originally meant to hurt you; on the contrary, the changes that your body goes through were meant to help you face a difficult situation and keep you alive.

 

The tiger behind the bush

Imagine walking across the savanna. Suddenly, while you are enjoying the panorama, a tiger jumps out of a nearby bush, determined to make you its next meal. Now you really have something to be stressed about! Your attention is locked on the danger. Whatever other thoughts you were having vanish instantly. You have to deal with this now. You feel your muscles tensing and the adrenaline rushing through your body.
Working through your nervous system, the body is unconsciously activating your FIGHT or FLIGHT (or FREEZE) mechanisms. You get ready to either confront the challenge or escape from it. To prepare you for action, the body is redirecting extra energy to the bigger muscle groups making you stronger and more resistant than you would normally be. Together with other changes, your body is trying to give you the best chance to survive the unfortunate encounter and live another day. Of course, this “extra” energy must come from somewhere, and we pay a price for it.
Luckily for us, today we rarely find ourselves in this kind of situation, yet we react the same way to the smallest thing that happens in our day. Remember that time your boss was yelling at you or the time you missed the deadline? Our ancient instinctive reaction often ends up escalating the problem. We yell back and say things we didn’t mean, or worse, we get physical. Our stressors today are mostly psychological and are not always avoidable. Understanding how the body works under stress can help us recognize it in ourselves and make the best of a difficult situation. To start the journey, we need to look at the brain and the nervous system.

 

THE SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM

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“Everything about our animalistic brains tries to compress the space between impression and perception. Think, perceive, act-with milliseconds between them. A deer’s brain tells it to run because things are bad. It runs. Sometimes, right into traffic.”
— Ryan Holiday (The obstacle is the way)

For a stressor to activate your body, a message has to be sent from the brain through your nervous system to the receiving organs and muscles. When we have a thought or we perceive something, that thought or perception is transformed by the brain into an emotion. That emotion or feeling sends a signal through the spinal cord out to the muscles and organs in need and transforms it into actions. To have a better grasp of this system at work we need to dissect it and take a closer look. The nervous system can be divided into two main categories: the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). The CNS is constituted of the brain and the spinal cord. When information (or an event or experience) is presented to the brain, it is processed on three different levels. First, the neocortex collects the sensory input. The neocortex is the center of our higher level functions, such as language, perception, and decision-making. It is the newest part of the brain, in terms of evolution. Second, the limbic system transforms those thoughts or perceptions into emotions. The limbic brain is linked to our emotional self, our memory, and learning. Third, the stimulus is processed in the brain stem. The brain stem is home to our most basic needs. It is the most ancient part of our brain, responsible for managing our heart, respiration, sleep, hunger, and for keeping us alive.
The brain stem is where the fight or flight response activates the body. Staying alive is our most basic need, so when our brain detects danger, it sends a signal through the spinal cord to the autonomic nervous system that will then alert the targeted organs and muscles to take appropriate action.

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The autonomic nervous system (as the name implies) is directly connected and responsible for taking care of all the vital activities that keep our body going without our having to intervene. This mainly includes the beating of the heart, breathing, the contraction/expansion of the pupil and digestion.
This system has two ways of functioning that are opposite and compensatory to each other.

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FIGHT or FLIGHT / REST and DIGEST

“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
— George Orwell

Ultimately, the Autonomic Nervous System can be separated into two parts: the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS).
Through the sympathetic nervous system we experience the fight or flight response, the adrenaline rush. It is responsible for “activating” the body and putting it in emergency mode. In order to confront a threat, more oxygen and blood is needed and sent to our larger muscle groups, towards our arms and the upper body in case of a fight (think of the clenching of a fist when you’re angry), or towards the legs and lower part of the body in case of flight (think of the twitchy leg when you’re restless). To meet the demands of the muscles for energy and blood supply, the heart starts beating faster and breathing speeds up. Pupils dilate to let in more light, while at the same time your vision narrows to focus on what is in front of you. We lose our peripheral vision and sometimes part of our hearing. But all of this extra energy, as anticipated, must come from somewhere.
During moments of crisis, all non-essential services are reduced or suspended. Your digestive tract is put on hold (digesting food can be resumed when you’re safe), and the same is true for your immune system. You prioritize facing the danger above the possibility of getting sick. Likewise, in the brain more blood is directed to the brain stem, meaning that less is going to the neocortex, making it harder for us to think straight.

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The problem here is that this stress reaction evolved to be a quick fix for a temporary problem; it is not sustainable. When we maintain stress in our lives over long periods of time, the body will eventually enter a stage of exhaustion when our internal resources become depleted. We cannot live in overdrive for too long. If we do, without giving ourselves the proper recovery, health issues and illnesses will inevitably become our companions.
In order to recover from stress and reconstitute the balance (called homeostasis), our body has a built-in compensatory Parasympathetic Nervous System. Also known as Rest and Digest, the PNS redirects blood and energy back to the digestive tract, regulates the size of the pupils to protect the retina from intense light, and regulates the immune system's proper functioning, keeping your body healthy and on track.
This is the cycle the body goes through when we feel stressed in our lives, and then, ideally, the stress subsides. But if today most of us don’t have to face serious physical threats, why do we feel as if we do? How is it possible that a small obstacle on the road can feel like a life or death scenario?

 

PHANTOM THREATS

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“We’ve in fact conditioned ourselves to believe all sorts of things that aren’t necessarily true — and many of these things are having a negative impact on our health and happiness.”
— Dr. Joe Dispenza

Stressors act on the body through the brain. We can say that the job of the brain is to receive sensory input and make sense of the pieces of information it gathers. In other words, it is responsible for our perception of the world. The thing is, the brain cannot always tell the difference between our imagination and reality. If we focus our attention on a vision that we have in our mind, the brain will believe that image to be real. So, if the brain ultimately creates our reality and at the same time has the duty to activate the stress response in our body, is it possible for us to have a stress reaction without any real danger, just by our thinking alone? Absolutely.

In modern life, stress often is of a psychological nature more than a physical one. Being stressed has less to do with what happens to us and more to do with the story we tell ourselves about that event. We can potentially be (or not be) stressed about anything: being late to an appointment and not find a parking slot, meeting or missing a deadline, even talking to another person, if we perceive that conversation as being important.
All these scenarios are far from being a life or death situation, but for most of us, it certainly feels that way. If the brain interprets a situation as dangerous, it will prepare the body to react in the way it knows how: fight or flight. To take it a step forward, just ruminating and pondering on our problems, even when they have not yet occurred, can initiate the same cascade. We think about an unpleasant experience we had in the past (we relive a trauma), or we worry about something that might happen in the near future (we get anxious). Those thoughts will then create an emotional response, and those emotions will affect the body accordingly. This means that every time we think about an event and we start feeling the emotions relative to that event, our body is physically reacting to the same experience. We are training the body to react in the same way it did previously. If we consider the health issues that stress can create, we can finally see that worries and stress are not only making us unhappy, they are making us physically sick.
Here is the sobering truth: we live in a vast universe that is indifferent to us and our small problems. Most things that happen in the world and to us we have little or no control over; we can’t control our boss's temperament; we can’t control delays on trains; we can’t control the weather. But there is good news: we are always in control of how we interpret and respond to the events taking place around us. Even when stress is already occurring, we have various options that we can use to regain control of our body and relieve some of the tension, physical exercises like yoga, or breathing exercises or meditation are the most common ones.
Believe it or not, stress isn’t always harmful. It can also be quite healthy and productive. Any organism that is trying to grow and develop encounters some sort of resistance; we can view that resistance as stress. If we decide to see that resistance as something good, as a challenge or an opportunity instead of a threat, our body can help by giving us the energy needed to overcome the difficulties we face, leaving us stronger and more capable than before. Hard times can help us grow and develop ourselves and can deepen our relationships. Although we may not see it, trying to avoid stress isn’t always the right solution; there are hidden costs in always playing it safe and small.

 

SURVIVAL AND CREATION

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“If we lack emotional intelligence, whenever stress rises the human brain switches to autopilot and has an inherent tendency to do more of the same, only harder. Which, more often than not, is precisely the wrong approach in today’s world.”
— Robert K. Cooper, Ph.D.

When we are living with stress, we are continuously in survival mode. In survival mode, we tend to give in to the more animal part of our nature; we react to the environment. When we feel like our life is threatened, this is certainly not a good time to take chances or risks, to try different pathways or get creative. When we are focusing on survival, all our attention is locked onto what is directly in front of us that is causing the distress. We want to get this thing right, we don’t want to fail or simply feel like we don’t have the option of failure, so we become blind to new options or routes that might be riskier but also more rewarding. In the same way, it’s hard to approach the obstacle from a different angle or with an open mind.
We want, first and foremost, to find safety and comfort, and what is safe is usually what is known and familiar, so we tend to do it the way we always have. We are inclined to retreat into our routines, the coping habits we have learned that have become unconscious and automatic, not always because they are effective or we like them, but because they are familiar, and what is familiar we know to be safe.
The comfort we find in the familiar comes at the expense of our development and growth. We can think of it in terms of SURVIVAL versus CREATION, or PAST versus FUTURE.
Survival is connected to the past, our habits and routines, the sense of safety and familiarity that is built of our past experiences. If we react from our past experience and habits, taking the familiar action based on what we did before, we are likely to repeat just more of the same resulting in the same outcome.
On the other hand, living in a state of creation is living in the future. New outcomes and experiences cannot be created from the past—they can only come from the unknown future where new possibilities exist. Creativity is by nature unorthodox and explorative; it is created from the unknown, but the unknown can also be a scary place for most of us. It’s scary because it is unpredictable; it is unsafe, and this makes it uncomfortable. We might make mistakes and fail or embarrass ourselves. It might hurt. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of what we really mean when we say that to grow we need to push beyond our comfort zone, and why it is so hard to do that.
Finally, we can unmask stress for what it really is: fear—fear of not being good enough, fear of being hurt, fear of what other people might think, and so on. The fear we feel is a signal from the body that is trying to keep us safe, but it doesn’t always know best. If we listen to that feeling as truth, we will talk ourselves out of taking the risk: “Let's start tomorrow;” “I'm too busy;” “This is for others, not me.” The way we move past that fear is by having courage. Courage is not a lack of fear, that would be recklessness. Courage and fear are not opposites, we need fear to create courage. Courage is developed when we have a vision of something in our future that is outside our comfort zone and that we care about enough to force us beyond our normal boundaries.
Our daily lives depend on the choices we make for the outcome we want to achieve. It becomes crucial to ask ourselves if the choices we make today are moving us toward our success, or if they are trying to protect us from failure. We must trust that if we do our work, everything else will fall into place.

 
 

QUOTES

“It woos us, inviting us to move forward into the unknown where anything is possible, including making mistakes… so we hold back. The belief is that mistakes are a bad thing. The fact is that a person who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”
— Dennis Merritt Jones
“Warning: when feelings become the means of thinking, or if we cannot think greater than how we feel, we can never change. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to act greater than the familiar feelings of the memorized self.”
— Dr. Joe Dispenza
“A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances. A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.”
— James Allen (As a Man Thinketh)
“The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.”
— Norbert Wiener
“Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.”
— Ryan Holiday
 
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Bibliography and references

Allen, James. As a Man Thinketh. Published: 1903.
Cannon, Walter Bradford. Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage. Published: 1915.
Dispenza, Joe. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. Published: 2012.
Dispenza, Joe. Evolve your Brain. Published: 2007.
Dispenza, Joe. You are the Placebo. Published: 2014.
Ghysen, Alain. The origin and evolution of the nervous system. Published: 2003.
G.S. Everly and J.M. Lating. A Clinical Guide to the Treatment of the Human Stress Response. Published: 1989.
Holiday, Ryan. The Obstacle is the Way. Published: 2014.
Jacobs, Gregg D. The Physiology of Mind-Body Interactions: The Stress Response and the Relaxation Response. Published: 2001.
Jones, Dennis Merritt. The Art of Uncertainty. Published: 2011.
McCorry, Laurie Kelly. Physiology of the Autonomic Nervous System. Published: 2007.
McGonigal, Kelly. The Upside of Stress. Published: 2015.
Nesse, Randolph M. Young, Elizabeth A. Evolutionary Origins and Functions of the Stress Response. Published: 2000.
Young Diggers. The Fight of Flight response: Our body’s response to stress. http://www.youngdiggers.com.au/fight-or-flight
Center for Integrated Healthcare. The Stress Response and How it Can Affect You.
https://www.mirecc.va.gov/cih-visn2/Documents/Patient_Education_Handouts/Stress_Response_and_How_It_Can_Affect_You_Version_3.pdf
AnxietyBC. What is Anxiety? https://www.anxietycanada.com/sites/default/files/What_is_Anxiety.pdf

 
Psychology, AnatomyMatteo RovattiAnatomyComment