Yet that same fight or flight alarm system still exists in the modern human being. Which poses a serious problem. Any human who’s halfway normal endures a massive amount of stimuli on a daily basis. From emails to voicemails to pop-up ads to 2 minute You Tube videos, our brain is always “on” and processing information, colors, facts, sounds. With limited down time to relax, a human being finds her fight or flight system triggered as easily as a fire alarm next to a barbeque. As a result, so many humans live in a constant state of fear…as if we are always being chased by the hunter from primitive times. Can you relate? Do you feel a chronic nervousness, a constant irritation, a need to always keep up yet you’re just another step behind?
Following are three symptoms that arise from “fight or flight” in overdrive, and what we can do to turn "fight or flight" off and live a better life:
1. EVERYTHING FEELS SMALL, CONFINING, LIMITING
The constant stimuli of modern life triggers the left brain which is the part of the brain responsible for thinking, ration, analysis. When 100 emails are flooding your inbox, your left brain goes on overdrive, you get nervous, anxious…and the fight or flight system kicks into gear. In her book My Stroke of Insight, Jill Taylor describes the feeling she experienced during her stroke. Her left brain began to slowly die. She could no longer break moments into consecutive instances. It was impossible to process information, data, thought. Taylor recalls suddenly feeling expansive and enormous, a pure state of being.
Something to consider. If we could break away from all the stimulation, not only could we turn down the volume on fight or flight, we’d begin to experience more space in our offices, homes, minds and bodies.
2. WE MAKE BAD DECISIONS
Jill Taylor writes about how, when her left brain was shutting down, she started processing emotions rather than her thoughts. When overstimulated, our thinking mind dominates and overwhelms our emotion, intuition, and gut instincts. It’s like the aggressive military office in the president’s cabinet who always opts to fight, bomb, and initiate trouble. Without weighing our emotions, we’ll feel overly aggressive if not totally lost in life, unable to navigate through tough times. Arnold Bennett said, “There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.”
Something to consider: Get back in touch with your emotions. Take time to ask how something or someone makes you feel. Intuition is like GPS for the soul.
3. WE LACK HARMONY AND FLOW
All too often, I’m pounding through emails, status updates, and tweets… and it’s not long before the tiniest mishap triggers my fight or flight. Then I’ll get anxiety, short of breath, a sense of being overwhelmed… to which my girlfriend always responds, “slow down, get back in the flow.” When Jill Taylor was having her stroke, she recalls without a functioning left brain, she could no longer perceive herself as a single, solid entity with boundaries. She understood what the yogis have taught for thousands of years. At the most elementary level, we are fluid. The deepest and most beautiful part of any human being relishes this eternal flow.
Something to consider: take time everyday to relax deeply, to sense the thrum of life, to hear the wind rustling trees, rain clapping, birds yapping. Gandhi said, “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”
by David Romanelli (www.yeahdave.com)
For more advice on overcoming fear and living in the moment, I invite you to check out my book Yeah Dave's Guide to Livin' the Moment.
