The Ultimate Source for Self Understanding

Threats and the fight or flight response

Normally when human being face threat a self defense mechanism called the fight or flight response is activated to help him to either run from that situation or fight what's threatening him. However, in our modern world most of the threats that we face cannot be solved by neither of these two choices. Like for example the threat of anger from your boss when arriving late or the threat of losing your job due to a mistake you did.

The problem with triggering the fight or flight response

The problem with false triggering of this fight and flight response is that your body wasn't built to operate most of the time under that emergency state. This is because many changes take place during the fight or flight response in your body and operating most of the time under this state is damaging and may lead to countless number of diseases including cancer, heart attacks, strokes and even suicidal behavior!!.

The different types of stress

There are different types of stress that a person may experience through his life, these types are:

• Episodic Acute Stress: Where you get stressed because you are always in a rush with many things to do and short on time. Usually type A personality people suffer from this type of stress.
• Chronic stress: Where a person is stressed as a result of a problem that doesn't have a solution at the time being or at least in the near future. Like living in poverty or living with someone that you don't love or even living in a country with economic problems like unemployment or inflation. The problem with chronic stress is that sometimes people under this type of stress get used to it to an extent that they becomes totally unaware of its presence while still being completely affected by its consequences.
• Acute stress: is the normal stress you experience when facing a threat. Your fight and flight response is activated, and is deactivated when the threatening situation ends.

What can cause stress?

Stress can be caused by either internal factors, external factors or both. Examples of external factors are:

• Noise (If the television beside you is open, you can simply turn it off)
• Bad lighting (Bad lighting may increase your stress because it makes concentration harder)
• Someone asking you something while you are working and stressed
• Interruption by any means
• Being in an untidy place and finding things could be hard, and so this increases stress

All the previous were external factors but the real causes of the stress are internal. After all, if you weren’t stressed in the first place, hearing some noise outside alone is very unlikely to make you stressed. Below are some of the reasons that could initiate stress:

• You are a type A personality
• You are loaded with work but limited in time
• You are being pressured or pushed to complete your work
• You have to choose between alternatives and time is short
• Your decisions are have big impacts and so must have minimal possibility of error.
• You have some problems with no possible solutions to your problem(s) (chronic stress)

Some people think that smoking can help them reduce their stress and consequently start to smoke whenever they’re under a stressful condition and although this may help them on the short term (or at least they think it would), the long term effect is really harmful.

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2knowmysef is not a complicated medical website nor a boring online encyclopedia but rather a place where you will find simple, to the point and effective information that is backed by psychology and presented in a simple way that you can understand and apply. If you think that this is some kind of marketing hype then see what other visitors say about 2knowmyself.

Did that help?

Ok, I already knew that I was stressed, what do I do now?!

Yes, but I want to know more information about the fight or flight response

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What is a Type A personality?

I have a smoking problem, what do I do?