It's about midnight and you are still wandering in the woods with a torch, trying to find your way back to the camp where your friends are. A lot of silly things crept into your mind...What if there's a ghost? What if there's a monster or some weird creature? Perhaps a UFO? A wild beast? Or anything terrifying that you've seen in the movies...then suddenly, a giant python pops out, you became so frightened that you piss your pants. In this situation you will do one of two things; throw the torch right at the python to shoo it away or you'd run away as fast as you can without caring where the hell you might end up, even farther than your destination, or you even do both; throw the torch and run away as fast as you can and who knows you might actually climb a tree faster than a monkey. The response you will be doing is what we called the "fight or flight".
Fight or flight response was first described by a Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon. A theory that states that animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system, an automatic response of our body for protection or survival when being attacked by stress, threat or any harm which then prepares our body to either fighting or running.
In our case today, our fight or flight response is being activated not because of the physical danger but more on psychological one. When a human heart is being attacked with too much pressure, stress, pain or whatever that our mind and body considered as a threat, we tend to act on fighting to win the battle over, to be relieved, to end our suffering. When we don't feel strong enough, we simply walk away from anything that's stealing our inner peace. Fight or flight may act as an alarm inside our body that we are facing a threat and we need to act upon it to protect ourselves from danger caused by different kinds of stress or pressure. This is most likely based on our impulse which can lead to wrong decisions or actions that we will later on realize once the threat inside us subside. There are times that a fight response may be manifested because of pride, an intense emotion that may lead one to his or her own victory or downfall. While the flight response is a calm way to act upon a stress, thinking something better is gonna happen and there is something to look forward to despite of all the pain or stress that you're facing; you believed that walking away makes you stronger than fighting for something that may even caused you more suffering. A fight response is more common to a man which is normally to be aggressive, while a flight response is common to a woman which handles stress in silence or in a calm manner. Even our love life is caught up in a fight or flight decision sometimes; when it's causing too much pain we may try to fix it or just simply end it.
Sometimes when we became too stressed out and unhappy in our jobs we thought of quitting or to stand out and strive for the best; come what may, who knows what might happen. Sometimes even the people around us are the ones causing us greater pressure, we try to ignore it, let each day pass by but still keeping our guards up but on the back of our minds we thought of disappearing, moving from one place to another, to escape; to pause for a moment; to have a break; to find peace; to find refuge.
So we ask which is better to fight or to flight? I believed most of us try both and see what works for us. When we seem to have a glimpse of hope into winning, we tend to fight until we can fight no more and after we had given our all, we walk away, to flee from all those stress, pain or whatever we may call that deeply trouble us. Is it something that we can control? I say it is...this automatic response is still due on how we feed our minds. We may surround ourselves with family, friends, loved ones and even ask them what we should do when we seem helpless in our situation but in the end what we think and how we feel would still be the strongest or should I say, the only influence in every response or decision we make. My advice for you is never let your emotions get you or simply control your thoughts because this might lead to paranoia. Seriously, there are times when we are not really facing a threat but since our mind convinced us that we are, our body activated its panic button again that may lead us into an unhealthy behavior. Relax and take control. Fix your thoughts before taking action, and never let your emotions do the talking, try to be logical. Whatever you are facing right now, I leave you with a question...Are you gonna fight or flight?
Just a thought,