Emotional
Stress and your nervous system
A long read
Your body has a built-in alarm
Picture a deer in a field. A twig snaps. In a flash, its body gets ready to run. You have that same fast alarm inside you. It switches on when something feels like a threat.
fight-or-flight
Your body's fast alarm. It gets you ready to fight a threat or run from it.
A scientist named Walter Cannon first named this alarm. He called it the fight-or-flight response. The alarm has not changed for thousands of years.
Sources
- Healthline, "Fight, Flight, or Freeze"
- Roelofs, "Freeze for action," PMC5332864
- Cleveland Clinic, 'HPA Axis: The Stress Response System'
- Bruce McEwen, "Allostasis and Allostatic Load," Nature
- The Conversation
- Herbert Benson, The Relaxation Response (1975)
- ReachLink, summarizing McEwen