Fight or flight?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Fight or flight?

He says in most cases, a victim is better off to give the suspect money or property.

“It’s fight or flight syndrome. When someone is put in that situation, everyone is going to react differently. Some fight, some flight,” Young said.

- Fight or flight decision different for everyone, NBC-2.com, October 16, 2007.

2. The “fight-or-flight response” is one of those ideas self-help authors have wrenched with gusto out of its scientific context, with predictably messy results. The worst example of this happened to quantum physics (visit quantumjumping.com for exciting tips on how to use the theory of multiple universes “to pick up new skills… like painting [or] photography”). By contrast, and however much it’s been distorted, fight-or-flight remains a useful way of seeing our tendency to react like startled animals when faced by stress. Speaking broadly, the prefrontal cortex – the reflective part of the brain – shuts down and the amygdala, the lizard brain, which is responsible for our animal instincts, takes over. Steeled for combat or readying for escape, we switch into “survival mode” – useful for running away from predators, but a misery-inducing approach to the manifold minor stresses of modern life.

There’s an element of fight-or-flight involved, arguably, not only in angry encounters, but whenever we find ourselves doing things we “know” we shouldn’t. Impulse buying, procrastination and compulsive eating can all be seen as ways to escape some feeling we’d rather not experience. The problem with self-help’s usual antidotes, though, is precisely that survival mode is unreflective: in its grip, you can’t possibly recall that 15-step plan for building better habits, or that clever technique from that book on neurolinguistic programming. Which is why I love the aggressive simplicity of what Tony Schwartz, writing on the Harvard Business Review’s website, calls The Golden Rule of Triggers: “Whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t.” Instead, he says, take a deep breath, and “feel your feet” – a distraction to pull yourself out of your head.