What is fight or flight response?

For most of our evolution we often had a choice of either running away from something that threatened us or of standing up to it and fighting it. The subconscious acts as a protective device whose purpose is to keep us safe. Moment to moment it is processing millions of bits of information received from our senses and filtering them with the purpose of determining what in our environment is likely to bring us pain or pleasure. Without our ever realising it we will find ourselves motivated to move towards things (people, activities, behaviour) which our subconscious believes are good for us (on the basis of past experience), and avoid things it believes bring us harm.

The problem is that for 99% of the time the human race has existed we lived a Stone Age existence where 'harm' was obvious and physical. Our nervous system (mediated by the subconscious) is geared to protect us from sabre-toothed tigers, not modern stresses.

If any aspect of modern life is viewed by the subconscious as stressful it treats it like a threat (the tiger) and the fight or flight response is triggered to get you away from it. So, for example, going to pieces in an interview is actually the struggle between your subconscious trying to get you away from that situation and your conscious fighting to stay put.

When the fight or flight response is triggered your body is flooded with hormones that perform certain functions, like increasing respiration, body temperature and moving blood to the muscles from any area of the body that isn't involved in fighting for survival. That accounts for the butterflies in the stomach. It also takes blood from the brain because you don't need to think to fight or run away. So you can basically think or feel, but not both at the same time. The moment the feeling of anxiety or nervousness reaches a certain level you become physically less able to think - that is why your mind goes blank and you struggle to put together a sentence. But boy could you run from a tiger!
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