biochemical response (fight or flight) has become a highly maladaptive and
harmful set of circumstances.
For instance, when a lion was chasing your ancestors, the stress response
was doing what it was designed to do—protect them from their outer
environment. That’s adaptive. But if, for days on end, you fret about your
promotion, overfocus on your presentation to upper management, or worry
about your mother being in the hospital, these situations create the same
chemicals as though you were being chased by a lion.
Now, that’s maladaptive. You’re staying too long in emergency mode.
Fight-or-flight is using up the energy your internal environment needs. Your
body is stealing this vital energy from your immune, digestive, and
endocrine systems, among others, and directing it to the muscles that you’d
use to fight a predator or run from danger. But in your situation, that’s only
working against you.
From a psychological perspective, overproduction of stress hormones
creates the human emotions of anger, fear, envy, and hatred; incites feelings
of aggression, frustration, anxiety, and insecurity; and causes us to
experience pain, suffering, sadness, hopelessness, and depression. Most
people spend the majority of their time preoccupied with negative thoughts
and feelings. Is it likely that most of the things that are happening in our
present circumstances are negative? Obviously not. Negativity runs so high
because we are either living in anticipation of stress or re-experiencing it
through a memory, so most of our thoughts and feelings are driven by those
strong hormones of stress and survival.
When our stress response is triggered, we focus on three things, and they
are of highest importance:
The body. (It must be taken care of.)
The environment. (Where can I go to escape this threat?)
Time. (How much of it do I have to use in order to evade this
threat?)Living in survival is the reason why we humans are so dominated by the
Big Three. The stress response and the hormones that it triggers force us to
focus on (and obsess about) the body, the environment, and time. As a
result, we begin to define our “self” within the confines of the physical