coyotes, it utilizes that energy to flee. If it is nimble enough to get away
unharmed, then perhaps after 15 to 20 minutes when the threat is no longer
present, the animal resumes grazing, its internal balance restored.
We humans have the same system in place. When we perceive danger,
our sympathetic nervous system is turned on, energy is mobilized, and so
on, in much the same way as the deer. During early human history, this
wonderfully adaptive response helped us confront threats from predators
and other risks to our survival. Those animal qualities served us well for our
evolution as a species.
Thought Alone Can Trigger the Human Stress Response—
and Keep It Going
Unfortunately, there are several differences between Homo sapiens and
our planetary cohabitants in the animal kingdom that don’t serve us as well.
Every time we knock the body out of chemical balance, that’s called
“stress.” The stress response is how the body innately responds when it’s
knocked out of balance, and what it does to return back to equilibrium.
Whether we see a lion in the Serengeti, bump into our not-so-friendly ex at
the grocery store, or freak out in freeway traffic because we’re late for a
meeting, we turn on the stress response because we are reacting to our
external environment.
Unlike animals, we have the ability to turn on the fight-or-flight response
by thought alone. And that thought doesn’t have to be about anything in our
present circumstances. We can turn on that response in anticipation of some
future event. Even more disadvantageous, we can produce the same stress
response by revisiting an unhappy memory that is stitched in the fabric of
our gray matter.
So either we anticipate stress-response-producing experiences or we
recollect them; our bodies are either existing in the future or in the past. To
our detriment, we turn short-term stressful situations into long-term ones.
On the other hand, as far as we can tell, animals don’t have the ability (or
should I say disability) to turn on the stress response so frequently and so
easily that they can’t turn it off. That deer, back to happily grazing, isn’t
consumed with thoughts about what just happened a few minutes ago, let