Dr. Ashley Lucas explains what happens in your brain and body in one second when you encounter a bear. Your adrenal glands flood your system with cortisol and other neurotransmitters, triggering your stress response.
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How do the adrenal glands specifically integrate with cortisol? What is the correlation between them? So they release cortisol in that moment. So when you see that bear, you release cortisol, you release epinephrine and norepinephrine, which are those kind of like that high you get when you jump out of a plane or even if you were in a car accident. You go into autopilot cortisol, and those neurotransmitters are released, and those then have a feedback system on the rest of the body. It goes to the brain. The brain says danger releases the cortisol. Cortisol now stimulates through, through our sympathetic nervous system to turn off or down regulate our parasympathetic nervous system.