Psychologists nowadays differentiate between four systems and define them as fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Next to fight or flight, there are other options our bodies and brains consider when we are faced with a threat or danger to our lives. They found that besides fighting or running, there are other triggered responses too. After discussing this flight-or-fight response, other people (mainly psychologists and physiologists) further researched how our body reacts. The body needs to defend or preserve itself. This is such a fast mechanism, we are hardly aware as it is activated automatically and subconsciously. Hormones are released like epinephrine and adrenaline, preparing ourselves to either attack the thing that is a danger to us or to run away from it. Our senses and brain perceive a threat to our life and trigger our sympathetic nervous system immediately. How it works inside our body is very interesting. Your life is at stake, so you have to react quickly. Imagine that suddenly a lion is standing in front of you. Way back then, we faced dangerous situations when we were hunting for food. It stems from our history as hunter-gatherers. At first, he saw this as our acute reaction to intense stress. Walter Cannon, an American physiologist first mentioned the flight-or-fight response in 1915 in his book ‘Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage’. It is a natural and physiological feedback system, and it is a survival instinct that has existed for a long time. If we are faced with immediate danger then our body and brain quickly calculate how we need to act. One of these instinctive reactions you might have heard about is the flight-or-fight response. Fascinating, right? And there are more mechanisms inside of us that can be triggered in certain situations. Sure, we can become aware of how our heart pumps, we can listen to it or feel it. We do not have to deliberately manage it every second of every day. But, just like any other species we also have our automatic processes in our body we do not consciously control. The fascinating part of being human is that we can contemplate our existence, we are aware of our thoughts and can think about the future and past.
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