What’s the Fight or Flight Response?
Imagine for just a minute that if you were taking two steps forward, you were moving towards health, growth, healing, and repair. Now imagine that if you were taking two steps backward, you were moving towards illness and disease.
Whether you realize it or not, that is exactly what you are doing every second of every day. You are either moving towards growth and repair or you or moving towards disease and illness. But you cannot do both at the same time. You cannot move forward and backward at the same time.
How Your Body Prepares You For Threats:
The Sympathetic Nervous System is designed to prepare you for a threat and this is commonly referred to as the “Fight or Flight Response” or the “Stress Response.” If you are under immediate threat, such as someone pointing a gun at you or a car speeding towards you or a bear or lion coming towards you ready to shoot you, hit you or attack you, then you can see how this would be a very adaptive function, helping you to react quickly so that you can keep yourself alive.
When the Problem Comes In …..
According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, the problem comes in when we begin to use this same system and apply it to something else that is not an immediate threat to your life. He uses the example of your mother-in-law. If you 
associate your mother-in-law with something that happened in your past that was unpleasant, and you see your mother-in-law walk into the room, you are associating her with that past event.
At that point, you are trying to predict your future based on something that happened in the past, so you select the worst case scenario to better prepare you for survival. In other words, you begin to prepare yourself for another event that is threatening to you in some way, even though that may or may not be the case.
How We Take This Even One Step Further …..
But as Dr. Dispenza also elaborates, we maladaptively take this even one step further by being able to enact the stress response just by thinking about something or someone stressful. We can think about our mother-in-law or co-worker or ex-husband or ex-wife or bills that need to be paid or whatever else that may be a potential “threat” in our lives. When we do this, we activate that same response.
So What Is Going On In Our Bodies, Exactly?
The Short Term Effect:
When we perceive a threat (real or imagined), the neocortex of our brains associates the image of whatever it is seeing in the external environment with images or associations that it is familiar with that are already imprinted on the brain. At that point, the neocortex sends a signal to the limbic brain (which stimulates emotions.)
The limbic brain then sends an electrical chemical down the spinal cord which turns on the adrenal glands, located in the small of your lower back. Dr. Dispenza calls this the “Fast Track” or adrenal axis mechanism because it happens very quickly.
The Long Term Effect:
The adrenal glands then shoot out adrenaline which is released into the body and he calls this the long term effect, or the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which releases cortisol into the body and it can last for hours or days.
The Effect Adrenaline Has On Our Bodies:
Adrenaline causes all kinds of physiological changes. The pupils begin to dilate, salivation slows down, the heart and digestion systems speed up and blood is rushed to your extremities (arms and legs.) This burst of energy prepares you to either start fighting with someone or run away.
What Is Cortisol?
Cortisol is the anti-inflammatory and anti-pain chemical that you get when you are being chased by a lion or a 
group of angry tribesmen. This helps you to reduce the amount of pain in your body so that you can keep fighting or running for extended periods of time.
As mentioned earlier, if there is an actual threat in the environment such as a gun, a car or a bear, this is very adaptive. But if instead, the perceived “threat” is your mother-in-law, what is happening is that you are viewing her as a predator in your environment. The result of this is that you are knocking your body out of balance due to a reaction of something based on your past. In the long term, it is breaking down your immune system.
When the Adaptive Becomes Maladaptive:
All of a sudden, what was designed as a highly adaptive feature of the body has now become very maladaptive. You are preparing yourself for a “stressful event.” In other words, you are preparing yourself just in case something goes wrong.
Dr. Dispenza reminds us that if we get this “perceived stressful prediction” right, then we think we are smart. But if we get it wrong, the result is anxiety, OCD, insomnia, neurosis, depression, etc. The reason for this is because we have knocked our bodies out of balance.
Do You Dwell On The Past or the Future?
If you are in the habit of dwelling on the past and allowing it to keep you depressed or dwelling on a “worst case scenario” that might happen in the future, you are auto-suggesting yourself into a state of “Fight or Flight.” You are turning the stress response on by “thought alone.”
The Parts of the Brain That Are Activated:
You are activating a part of your brain called the amygdala, which is sending signals to the hypothalamus, which is putting together a blend of neuropeptides, which is signaling your pituitary gland. This is giving you a rush of energy, but there is no escape because you are not fighting with anyone or running away.
The Long Term Effect of the Stress Response:
If you keep turning this stress response on over and over again, you eventually reach the point where you are unable to turn it back off and when that happens, your body becomes addicted to the stress hormones which are adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine. The reason you become addicted is that they carry a very powerful and strong, highly-charged emotional quotient.
At that point, says Dr. Joe Dispenza, “that imbalance becomes the new balance and now that person is headed for a disease.” What happens, he says, is that those chemicals are pushing the genetic buttons that create disease and our thoughts are literally making us sick.
The Growth Phase (What Is Supposed To Happen):
So you can see how the Fight or Flight prepares us for the short term but we are designed to “calm down” for the long term and go back into “growth and repair.” When this happens, we are entering into the Parasympathetic Nervous System and this is when we relax, our pupils constrict, our digestion and salivation turns back on and blood flow is sent away from the heart and extremities and into the other internal organs.
Why We Cannot Be In The Short Term and the Long Term at the Same Time:
But we cannot do both at the same time. We cannot fight a lion and relax on the couch at the same time. We cannot run forward and backward at the same time. Our blood flow cannot be in our extremities and our internal organs at the same time. We cannot use our energy for a threat and for repair at the same time. We cannot be in the short-term and the long-term at the same time.
I hope this article was helpful or interesting to you in some way! If you would like to learn more, please click on this link and find out about his life-changing workshops that have helped people all over the world.
Do you have any stories about growth and repair, fight or flight, or your mother-in-law that you would like to share? 🙂
If so, please comment below. All comments are greatly appreciated!
