As a low sensation-seeker, I would have been so over-
whelmed – flooded by the sensations and deafened by my own
screams of terror – that I hardly would have noticed the ground
racing toward me faster than it should have. And that’s when my
fight or flight response would have kicked in.
The fight or flight response is a biological reaction, shared
by all animals. It governs how we respond to dangerous or stressful
situations. If you’ve ever watched a nature documentary, you know
what the fight or flight response is. That antelope being chased by
a lion out on the savannah – that’s the fight or flight response in
action.
When your brain identifies stress it prepares your body for
vigorous activity so it can handle that stress. Some people call it the
fight or flight response because two of the most obvious reactions
to immediate dangers are to fight them or to run from them. But
that doesn’t always work. Sometimes there’s no one to fight, and no
place to run (or flee). In many cases people just freeze. Because of
this, some people now call it the fight, flee, or freeze response. I bet
you’ve experienced this yourself, perhaps during a traffic accident,
taking an exam, falling out of a tree and breaking your arm as a kid,
or BASE jumping. In all of these situations and more, the fight or
flight response is activated.
When your stress response gears up, it activates certain
physiological actions in your body to get you ready to fight the
dangerous activity, flee from it, or freeze to avoid detection. It’s
designed to mobilize our body as much as possible to help us to
survive. The stress response involves a family of chemicals called
catecholamines. Our most abundant catecholamine is dopamine,
which is commonly linked to positive emotions, and norepinephr-
ine and epinephrine (also known as adrenaline), which are linked
to energy and arousal. Catecholamines prepare you physically and
emotionally, heightening your awareness and focusing your atten-
tion with a surge of energy.
The body’s stress response also releases corticosteroids,
which help organize systems in your body to handle stress. These
chemicals are produced in the adrenal cortex, which sits on the
kidneys like a beret. Cortisol, the famous stress hormone, is an
A-list corticosteroid. When cortisol is dumped into the blood
stream, it’s transported all around the body, and acts in varied
ways on different cells and organs as it prepares the body to fight,
flee, or freeze. It slows down some systems that aren’t critical30 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:20:40, subject to the Cambridge