As part of the human body’s acute stress system, the “fight-or-flight” response works by stimulating the heart rate, dilating air passages, and contracting blood vessels—all of which increase blood flow and oxygen to the muscles, so we can be ready to run away from something life-threatening: a wild mammal, a fast car, a dangerous person. As physiological responses go, it’s pretty important. Only, sometimes, we short-circuit a bit.
Charles Darwin, who for years was reported to have suffered from crippling panic disorder that often left him housebound, argued that, to a degree, it is highly evolved to be “on alert” most of the time. But the fight-or-flight response, as explained by Mark Williams and Danny Penman in Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, “isn’t conscious—it’s controlled by one of the most ‘primeval’ parts of the brain, which means it’s often a bit simplistic in the way it interprets danger. In fact, it makes no distinction between an external threat, such as a tiger, and an internal one, such as a troubling memory or a future worry. It treats both as threats that either need to be fought off or run away from.” As the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Scott Stossel, researched in his brilliant and harrowing memoir, My Age of Anxiety, “Species that 'fear rightly’ increase their chances of survival. We anxious people are less likely to remove ourselves from the gene pool by, say, frolicking on the edge of cliffs or becoming fighter pilots.”
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